167 | Advantage+ Audiences and Other Targeting Recommendations

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]

__________________

Find me on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/heyitsjenzaia/
Email Me → support@jenzaiadimartile.com
Join the Facebook community → https://www.facebook.com/groups/marketscalegrow

Transcript

Jenzaia: 0:06

Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, Jenzaia, and this is a Saturday strategy session. Hello, let's talk about AI, artificial intelligence, specifically. Specifically, today we're going to be talking about Advantage Plus audiences and other targeting options. The AI is the Advantage Plus, so anything within the ads platform that maybe not anything. Many of their AI features are referred to as Advantage Plus. So there's Advantage Plus audiences, advantage Plus budget, advantage Plus placement and Advantage Plus creatives. Advantage Plus 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 Plus AI that distributes the budget fairly and equally not fairly divvies out the budget based on which variations, which audiences are performing best.

Jenzaia: 1:20

Advantage Plus placements I think that was actually the first Advantage Plus thing that came in in and that is where the ads are being placed in the news feed 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 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, then they might. The Advantage Plus 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 plus creative. It's really just taking your creative to the next level, making sure that 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 plus audiences. This is new I think this might be the newest one and I really love them.

Jenzaia: 2:47

You can still revert back to the old audiences, and I also use those, but I have had a lot of success with Advantage Plus 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 plus audiences you can put a lower limit, like you don't want the ads going out to someone who's under 21 per se, 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 65 plus option, so that's a big difference that I've noticed. So the main thing that you're going to put controls in for when you're using the advantage plus audiences is location, that age minimum, and then you can exclude custom audiences. You cannot include audiences.

Jenzaia: 3:42

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 Plus 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 Plus 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 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 Plus 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.

Jenzaia: 4:46

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 plus 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 plus 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 Plus' restriction on not having an age cap, I would go in and remove that with the Advantage Plus ones, and that's the only difference between my original lookalike audience and the Advantage Plus lookalike 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 ten the advantage plus audience performs better. And 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.

Jenzaia: 6:20

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 70% of the time the Advantage Plus audiences do better and then 30% of the time the original audiences do better. So still pretty significant, the Advantage Plus audiences do better and then 30% of the time the original audiences do better. So still pretty significant.

Jenzaia: 6:48

The Advantage Plus audiences do frequently outperform the original format audiences. I don't. I'm not comfortable enough with it yet to not do the test 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 the advantage plus gives me some of the that like 10 audiences that I'm looking for to to test so 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 Plus 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 are teachers, teachers, pay teachers 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 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.

Jenzaia: 8:20

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's 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 Plus 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 Plus, it's a suggestion. So they want gigantic audiences. I find that the best audiences work when they are an estimated size of 50 million to 100 million Like. It is insane how big these audiences are. When I first started running Facebook ads, it was like one to five million and then at five million like, like. Oh, it's getting a little bit big right. And now my recommendation is make it bigger, make it bigger. Advantage plus 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.

Jenzaia: 9:45

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 less 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 100% 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 Plus audiences. But I like, if you just wanted to lean on Advantage Plus audiences, I would totally, totally understand, because they're so much more successful so frequently.

Jenzaia: 10:53

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 $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 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 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 taken, gotten rid of the lowest performing.

Jenzaia: 12:09

And that doesn't mean I'm always picking either the original audience or the advantage plus. 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 audiences that I get rid of. Sometimes it's a mix of the original audiences and the Advantage Plus. I don't think I've ever had to turn off all of the Advantage Plus and I've only left original campaigns on.

Jenzaia: 12:33

But if you have the extra budget for a day or two, I highly recommend that you use ad set budget and you run the two ad sets one to the original audience, one to the Advantage Plus audience so that you can feel confident that the one that you are running is the better performer. I always create one ad set, make sure everything's done. The images are in the ad copy's 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?

Jenzaia: 13:07

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 Plus audiences. Let me know send me a DM if you try them. If you've 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 who are running ads what kind of success that you're seeing with Advantage Plus 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. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow Every week on Saturdays.

Jenzaia: 13:59

Episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe, so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday Strategy Session. In your ears next week with another Saturday strategy session.