Advantage+ Audiences and Other Targeting Recommendations | 167
Ready to harness the power of AI to supercharge your Facebook ads? Today, I'm peeling back the curtain on Facebook's Advantage+ features, the game-changing tools that are reshaping advertising as we know it. We're digging into how AI can optimize everything from audience selection to budget allocation, ensuring your ads not only reach the right eyes but also resonate on a deeper level. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just dipping your toes into the digital ad pool, get ready for a treasure trove of strategies that promise to elevate your campaigns to new heights of efficiency and effectiveness.
As we unpack the intricacies of Advantage+ audiences and beyond, I'll share the ins and outs of my adventures with these advanced targeting methods. We'll compare the new offerings to traditional audience settings, exploring the nuances of age range options and exclusions, and when it might be best to let AI take the wheel—or when a hands-on approach is preferred. From refining your warm audience campaigns to extending your reach with lookalikes, this session is teeming with insider tips and firsthand experiences that could very well be the ace up your marketing sleeve.
In this episode, we cover:
✨ Introduction to Advantage+ AI [00:06]
✨ Implementing Advantage+ Audiences [03:42]
✨ Evaluating Performance: Advantage+ vs. Original Audiences [06:20]
✨ Best Practices and Final Thoughts [10:43]
Episode Transcript:
Hello. Let's talk about AI artificial intelligence. Specifically. Specifically today, we're going to be talking about Advantage+ audiences. And other targeting options. The AI is the Advantage+. So anything within the ads platform that maybe not anything. Many of their AI features are referred to as Advantage+.
So there's Advantage+ audiences, Advantage+ budget, Advantage+ placement and Advantage+ creatives. Advantage+ budget is when it used to be campaign budget optimization, the CBO that's where you place the budget at the very top level at the campaign level. And then it's the AI, the Advantage+ AI that distributes the budget fairly and equally, not fairly. D divvies out the budget based on. Which variations, which audiences are performing best. Advantage+ placements.
I think that was actually the first Advantage+ thing that came in and not is where the ads are being placed in a newsfeed on Facebook or Instagram, the marketplace, in reels or stories like where exactly the ads are showing up. So that's advantage placement. And then advantage creative. Is, it works with dynamic creative, but it also works not with dynamic creative. And it is optimizing the ads for each person.
So if they know you respond better to a video than they might be Advantage+ AI will turn the image into a video. They also have some pretty cool like editing things. They'll highlight. Like brighten the colors, highlight, add music, do minor touch ups to the images that are less blurry or whatever it might be. And so that's the Advantage+ creative. It's really just taking your creative to the next level, making sure that it looks really professional, really polished.
And if for some reason you wanted it to be blurry or not, you can always turn that off. And then the last one, and this is the one we're really going to dive into is the Advantage+ audiences. This is new. I think this might be the newest one. And I really love them. You can still revert back to the old audiences and I also use those.
But I have had a lot of success with Advantage+ audiences. So. The biggest difference that I've noticed is when you're using the old audiences. You can have an age limit and Advantage+ audiences, you can put a lower limit. Like you don't want the ads going out to someone who's under 21 for say, But you cannot have an upper limit.
It has to be the 65 plus option. So that's a big difference that I've noticed.
So the main thing that you were going to put controls in for when you're using the Advantage+ audiences is location, that age minimum. And then you can exclude custom audiences. You cannot include audiences the same way. When I am creating a warm audience or a group of lookalike audiences, I always revert back to the original audiences. Initially. And with warm audiences, I don't even create the Advantage+ audiences because I don't want it expanding out beyond our warm audience.
I really do want it to be just the warm audiences. The AI technology, the Advantage+ technology is going to find your audience based on these suggestions. Whereas before the original audiences, they are more like boundaries. So with the warm audience, I want it to be a boundary. I want those ads to go out to our email list. People who have engaged with us on Instagram and Facebook. I want it to go out to people visited our website or TPT store. I want those boundaries in place. Whereas. With Advantage+ is more of a suggestion.
So we're going to kind of start there and then we'll reach out if we feel like it's better, but that's not what I want for warm audiences. So I do always revert back to the original audiences. And I don't use Advantage+ when I'm doing warm audiences for lookalikes, I do both. I do revert to the original audiences and I drop all of the lookalikes into one ad set, combine them all together and then I will duplicate that ad set and switch to Advantage+ audiences. So that it has all of the exact same settings that I would use all the same locations. The same age limits. Any gender pieces that I would add on, like, if I was only targeting men or women.
And then of course, because of. Advantage+ says restriction on not having an age cap. I would go in and remove that with the Advantage+ ones. And that's the only difference between my original lookalike audience and the Advantage+ look like audience. I do like to compare them and see how they kind of compete against one another. And I would say nine times out of 10, the Advantage+ audience performs better.
Then I do the same thing for detailed targeting audiences and these are what would be referred to as like the cold of all cold audiences. These are the ones where you put in the demographics and the interests that you're looking for. So you're putting in teacher or science or business owner, mom, like whatever those interests are that you are trying to target. You put that in and then I do the exact same thing. I revert to the original audiences. I put all of the information. I create that audience that I want. Once I'm happy with it I duplicate it. Change the age limit. On the upper end and then I have the two audiences to compare. And I would say that this is probably more like 70, 30 split where it's 70% of the time the Advantage+ audiences do better.
And then 30% of the time the original audiences do better. So still pretty significant the Advantage+ audiences do frequently outperform the original format audiences. I don't, I'm not comfortable enough with it yet to not do the tests between the two. And as part of my testing protocol, if I have the budget for five audiences, I like to test 10. And so duplicating and having the original format of audiences and the audience like Advantage+. Gives me. Some of the, that like, 10 audiences that I'm looking for to, to test that I can weed out the lowest performing ones and just keep the best performing ones turned on.
One of the ways that the Advantage+ audiences work is what I kind of said already, where they take the information that you're putting in there as a suggestion. And so if I put in, we, WeAreTeacher, TeachersPayTeachers and Scholastic teachers. I often use those three as like when I'm targeting teachers and then I will create like a Venn diagram by clicking on define further.
So I'll put in teachers pay teachers, we are teachers, Scholastic teachers, and then I will define further and I will add in like, Science and all of the different science terms that I can, and it creates a Venn diagram where the one circle is teachers. The second one is people who are interested in science and then the ad goes out to only the people in that middle group that are teachers and also interested in science. Highly recommend that you do that. The first circle I always recommend is what people would describe themselves as like moms, business owners, teachers.
And then the second circle would be one of those attributes that specific to your audience. So it could be a grade level. It could be a subject matter. It could be like, if you're targeting moms, it could be interest based like play, sensory, sleep, nutrition. Right? So that you are getting the type of people you want with the interests that you want. And then Advantage+ is going to take that as a suggestion.
Again, not a boundary, the original audiences it was more of a boundary. And then with Advantage+ it said gestion so they want gigantic audiences. I find that the best audiences work when they are an estimated size of 50 million to a hundred million, like it is insane how big these audiences are. When I first started running Facebook ads, it was like one to 5 million. And then at 5 million, like, oh, it's getting a little bit big.
Right and now my recommendation is make it bigger. Make it bigger. Advantage+ really wants all of those people. As many people have for that audience to be as big as possible so that the, the technology can really zone in and find the right people for your campaign.
I kind of think that this probably goes without me saying, but the next point in my notes is do I like them or not?
And I do. I really like it. It's another way that I feel like I can rely on the technology on the AI. And one last thing for me to think about when the ad, when the audiences are more likely to be successful, there's less likely that there's going to be a problem and. I will need to tweak and fidget with the campaign so I do really like that aspect a lot.
I'm not a hundred percent sure that I love giving over the control, but based on the success that I've seen with these audiences, I am very confident in saying that the numbers don't lie. And. I again, I still test both the original audiences and the Advantage+ audiences. But I. Like. If, if you just wanted to lean on Advantage+ audiences, I would totally totally understand because they're so much more successful so frequently. It's worth it in my opinion to use them.
If you have the budget to test them out, what I typically will do. Let's just say the budget again is that 50 is $50 a day, which I like to have one audience per $10. So we have $50 that's five audiences. So for the first one to two days, I will run 10 audiences. And then at the end of the second day, I'll start pruning off some of the, the the poorer performing audiences and cut back until I only have those five audiences.
And if I can't cut back then I, if it's my own campaign, then I'll make the decision. If I'm going to increase my budget or not, if I really need to prune them off, if it's a campaign that I'm running for a client. And then of course, I'd reach out to the client and be like, Hey. We're having lots of success.
I have these really great audiences. There's seven of them instead of five. How do you feel about increasing your budget by $20 a day? Which is a pretty significant increase, obviously. But yeah, that's kind of the approach that I'm going to take and that approach running the, both of them for the two days helps me to feel confident when I am pruning it off that I've taking, gotten rid of the lowest performing.
And that doesn't mean I'm always picking either the original audience or the Advantage+ sometimes I'll have to get rid of both of them. Like neither one of the audiences is doing well. Sometimes it is all of the original audience. I get rid of them. Sometimes it's a mix of the original audiences and the Advantage+
I don't think I've ever had to turn off all of the Advantage+, and I've only left original campaigns on. But if you have the extra budget for a day or two highly recommend that you use ad set budget and you run. The two ad sets one to the original audience, one to the Advantage+ audience, so that you can feel confident that the one that you are running is the better performer.
I always create one adset make sure everything's done the images are in the ad. Copies in everything looks great. It's exactly what I want. And then I duplicate it and change the audience so that it's a really fair test. You want it to be a fair test? Right? So this is a bit of a shorter episode.
Thank you so much for sticking with it. I hope that you learned something new about Advantage + audiences. Let me know, send me a DM. If you try them, if you had success with them, I would love to hear what other people's experiences are with them. I think in some of my ads manager circles and Facebook groups, I've seen others also have success, but I would love to hear in the teaching world, people are running ads what kind of success that you are seeing with. Advantage+ audiences. As always, thank you so much for being here. I hope that you have a wonderful week and I'll be back in your ear next Saturday with a brand new Saturday strategy session.
So there's Advantage+ audiences, Advantage+ budget, Advantage+ placement and Advantage+ creatives. Advantage+ budget is when it used to be campaign budget optimization, the CBO that's where you place the budget at the very top level at the campaign level. And then it's the AI, the Advantage+ AI that distributes the budget fairly and equally, not fairly. D divvies out the budget based on. Which variations, which audiences are performing best. Advantage+ placements.
I think that was actually the first Advantage+ thing that came in and not is where the ads are being placed in a newsfeed on Facebook or Instagram, the marketplace, in reels or stories like where exactly the ads are showing up. So that's advantage placement. And then advantage creative. Is, it works with dynamic creative, but it also works not with dynamic creative. And it is optimizing the ads for each person.
So if they know you respond better to a video than they might be Advantage+ AI will turn the image into a video. They also have some pretty cool like editing things. They'll highlight. Like brighten the colors, highlight, add music, do minor touch ups to the images that are less blurry or whatever it might be. And so that's the Advantage+ creative. It's really just taking your creative to the next level, making sure that it looks really professional, really polished.
And if for some reason you wanted it to be blurry or not, you can always turn that off. And then the last one, and this is the one we're really going to dive into is the Advantage+ audiences. This is new. I think this might be the newest one. And I really love them. You can still revert back to the old audiences and I also use those.
But I have had a lot of success with Advantage+ audiences. So. The biggest difference that I've noticed is when you're using the old audiences. You can have an age limit and Advantage+ audiences, you can put a lower limit. Like you don't want the ads going out to someone who's under 21 for say, But you cannot have an upper limit.
It has to be the 65 plus option. So that's a big difference that I've noticed.
So the main thing that you were going to put controls in for when you're using the Advantage+ audiences is location, that age minimum. And then you can exclude custom audiences. You cannot include audiences the same way. When I am creating a warm audience or a group of lookalike audiences, I always revert back to the original audiences. Initially. And with warm audiences, I don't even create the Advantage+ audiences because I don't want it expanding out beyond our warm audience.
I really do want it to be just the warm audiences. The AI technology, the Advantage+ technology is going to find your audience based on these suggestions. Whereas before the original audiences, they are more like boundaries. So with the warm audience, I want it to be a boundary. I want those ads to go out to our email list. People who have engaged with us on Instagram and Facebook. I want it to go out to people visited our website or TPT store. I want those boundaries in place. Whereas. With Advantage+ is more of a suggestion.
So we're going to kind of start there and then we'll reach out if we feel like it's better, but that's not what I want for warm audiences. So I do always revert back to the original audiences. And I don't use Advantage+ when I'm doing warm audiences for lookalikes, I do both. I do revert to the original audiences and I drop all of the lookalikes into one ad set, combine them all together and then I will duplicate that ad set and switch to Advantage+ audiences. So that it has all of the exact same settings that I would use all the same locations. The same age limits. Any gender pieces that I would add on, like, if I was only targeting men or women.
And then of course, because of. Advantage+ says restriction on not having an age cap. I would go in and remove that with the Advantage+ ones. And that's the only difference between my original lookalike audience and the Advantage+ look like audience. I do like to compare them and see how they kind of compete against one another. And I would say nine times out of 10, the Advantage+ audience performs better.
Then I do the same thing for detailed targeting audiences and these are what would be referred to as like the cold of all cold audiences. These are the ones where you put in the demographics and the interests that you're looking for. So you're putting in teacher or science or business owner, mom, like whatever those interests are that you are trying to target. You put that in and then I do the exact same thing. I revert to the original audiences. I put all of the information. I create that audience that I want. Once I'm happy with it I duplicate it. Change the age limit. On the upper end and then I have the two audiences to compare. And I would say that this is probably more like 70, 30 split where it's 70% of the time the Advantage+ audiences do better.
And then 30% of the time the original audiences do better. So still pretty significant the Advantage+ audiences do frequently outperform the original format audiences. I don't, I'm not comfortable enough with it yet to not do the tests between the two. And as part of my testing protocol, if I have the budget for five audiences, I like to test 10. And so duplicating and having the original format of audiences and the audience like Advantage+. Gives me. Some of the, that like, 10 audiences that I'm looking for to, to test that I can weed out the lowest performing ones and just keep the best performing ones turned on.
One of the ways that the Advantage+ audiences work is what I kind of said already, where they take the information that you're putting in there as a suggestion. And so if I put in, we, WeAreTeacher, TeachersPayTeachers and Scholastic teachers. I often use those three as like when I'm targeting teachers and then I will create like a Venn diagram by clicking on define further.
So I'll put in teachers pay teachers, we are teachers, Scholastic teachers, and then I will define further and I will add in like, Science and all of the different science terms that I can, and it creates a Venn diagram where the one circle is teachers. The second one is people who are interested in science and then the ad goes out to only the people in that middle group that are teachers and also interested in science. Highly recommend that you do that. The first circle I always recommend is what people would describe themselves as like moms, business owners, teachers.
And then the second circle would be one of those attributes that specific to your audience. So it could be a grade level. It could be a subject matter. It could be like, if you're targeting moms, it could be interest based like play, sensory, sleep, nutrition. Right? So that you are getting the type of people you want with the interests that you want. And then Advantage+ is going to take that as a suggestion.
Again, not a boundary, the original audiences it was more of a boundary. And then with Advantage+ it said gestion so they want gigantic audiences. I find that the best audiences work when they are an estimated size of 50 million to a hundred million, like it is insane how big these audiences are. When I first started running Facebook ads, it was like one to 5 million. And then at 5 million, like, oh, it's getting a little bit big.
Right and now my recommendation is make it bigger. Make it bigger. Advantage+ really wants all of those people. As many people have for that audience to be as big as possible so that the, the technology can really zone in and find the right people for your campaign.
I kind of think that this probably goes without me saying, but the next point in my notes is do I like them or not?
And I do. I really like it. It's another way that I feel like I can rely on the technology on the AI. And one last thing for me to think about when the ad, when the audiences are more likely to be successful, there's less likely that there's going to be a problem and. I will need to tweak and fidget with the campaign so I do really like that aspect a lot.
I'm not a hundred percent sure that I love giving over the control, but based on the success that I've seen with these audiences, I am very confident in saying that the numbers don't lie. And. I again, I still test both the original audiences and the Advantage+ audiences. But I. Like. If, if you just wanted to lean on Advantage+ audiences, I would totally totally understand because they're so much more successful so frequently. It's worth it in my opinion to use them.
If you have the budget to test them out, what I typically will do. Let's just say the budget again is that 50 is $50 a day, which I like to have one audience per $10. So we have $50 that's five audiences. So for the first one to two days, I will run 10 audiences. And then at the end of the second day, I'll start pruning off some of the, the the poorer performing audiences and cut back until I only have those five audiences.
And if I can't cut back then I, if it's my own campaign, then I'll make the decision. If I'm going to increase my budget or not, if I really need to prune them off, if it's a campaign that I'm running for a client. And then of course, I'd reach out to the client and be like, Hey. We're having lots of success.
I have these really great audiences. There's seven of them instead of five. How do you feel about increasing your budget by $20 a day? Which is a pretty significant increase, obviously. But yeah, that's kind of the approach that I'm going to take and that approach running the, both of them for the two days helps me to feel confident when I am pruning it off that I've taking, gotten rid of the lowest performing.
And that doesn't mean I'm always picking either the original audience or the Advantage+ sometimes I'll have to get rid of both of them. Like neither one of the audiences is doing well. Sometimes it is all of the original audience. I get rid of them. Sometimes it's a mix of the original audiences and the Advantage+
I don't think I've ever had to turn off all of the Advantage+, and I've only left original campaigns on. But if you have the extra budget for a day or two highly recommend that you use ad set budget and you run. The two ad sets one to the original audience, one to the Advantage+ audience, so that you can feel confident that the one that you are running is the better performer.
I always create one adset make sure everything's done the images are in the ad. Copies in everything looks great. It's exactly what I want. And then I duplicate it and change the audience so that it's a really fair test. You want it to be a fair test? Right? So this is a bit of a shorter episode.
Thank you so much for sticking with it. I hope that you learned something new about Advantage + audiences. Let me know, send me a DM. If you try them, if you had success with them, I would love to hear what other people's experiences are with them. I think in some of my ads manager circles and Facebook groups, I've seen others also have success, but I would love to hear in the teaching world, people are running ads what kind of success that you are seeing with. Advantage+ audiences. As always, thank you so much for being here. I hope that you have a wonderful week and I'll be back in your ear next Saturday with a brand new Saturday strategy session.
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