Chapter 3: Ads Structure
Once again we have the option to name our ad set whatever we want, or create a template to keep our naming conventions consistent. I do recommend that you take a second and establish a naming convention that makes sense to you, and explains the targeting at a glance in a way that you understand.
Moving on, this next section is where we get specific about the conversion we want to be optimizing for. First is the conversion location. Since I’m assuming we’re trying to sell something on our website, the obvious choice is “Website”. You do however, have other options for conversion location, like “Website and shop”, which refers to purchases either on your website or on your Instagram or Facebook shop. If you have a mobile app, you can also optimize for conversions there.
For performance goal, we will most likely want “Maximum number of conversions”. Once you run some campaigns and your pixel has a lot of data, you can also try “Maximize value of conversions”, so that Meta can go after people who are likely to spend the most money on your store (but this choice is useless without the data to support it). Other performance goals include landing page views, link clicks, reach, and impressions. There may be a time and place for these types of optimizations, but generally they will fall short of just optimizing for the highest number of purchases possible.
Next we want to make sure that this ad set is connected to our Pixel that we set up, and we can then choose a specific conversion event that we want to optimize for. If your store hasn’t gotten any traffic or purchases yet, you will see most or all of the events listed as “Inactive Events”. This is OK, it just means that the pixel hasn’t received any data for those events yet, and won’t be able to optimize properly. There’s no way around this in the beginning, but as soon as you start getting some data, the optimization will go into effect. If you have created custom events in the events manager, here is where you can select those as conversion events for your ads.
The last pertinent conversion option is “Value Rules”, which is a new addition to ad set settings in the wave of Advantage+ domination. Essentially, once you have some data on who your ideal customers are, you can tell Meta to bid higher amounts on specific demographics. For example, if you have data showing your best customers use Android instead of Apple, you can bid more for Android users. We’ll go into more detail on this later.
Next is Budget & Schedule. If you’re using campaign-level budget (CBO/ASC), there’s nothing to do here. However, you do have the option to set your budget at the ad set level as well. This comes in handy when testing different audiences, although it can yield worse results due to Advantage+ targeting expansion.
Now we get to the Audience section. This is where the magic used to happen, but it’s a lot more streamlined these days. Initially we have the option to use a saved audience, which will only make sense later on once we have some data to build custom audiences from. In the beginning, all we really care about is getting some initial data.
Under “Controls”, we can see some options to limit who the Advantage+ AI is going to show our ads to. We can set the location, or a minimum age. These are fairly self explanatory. We also have the option for a custom audience exclusion, which can be helpful when creating retargeting campaigns or when we only want to go after new customers (we can exclude people who have purchased from us in the past, or even engaged with our social media if we want to ensure we’re getting brand new eyes). Next we have the option to select a language, which you likely won’t need to use.
At this point, the Advantage+ Meta AI is going to go out and serve your ads to whoever it thinks has the highest chance to convert. We do however have one more option to at least try and point it in the right direction, and that’s to “Suggest an audience”. Here we have the old-school manual targeting options, but they only work as suggestions. We can get as specific as we want, but Meta says “We’ll reach people beyond these settings when it’s likely to improve performance” (have I mentioned I hate this?).
In the beginning, it can be helpful here to try and give the AI something to go on. Keep the age and gender targeting unchanged, since you probably don’t know enough about your customer to make those decisions just yet. However, feel free to open up the “Detailed Targeting” option and start selecting some interest groups. We can’t test these against each other like back in the day, but we can still carve out an idea for where our customers might be hiding.
The final option on the ad set page is in regards to Placements. Placements refers to where your ad is going to be shown to people. Most posts will be shown in social media feeds and stories, although they can also appear on the Meta Audience Network (other apps and sites that host Meta ads), on Facebook Marketplace, as skippable ads on videos, or even the Threads app. Placements is actually the one thing I’m actually a fan of using Advantage+ for, and it keeps things generally easy. Down the line, once you have some data, you might want to restrict this further (like iOS vs. Android, or Mobile vs. PC), but in the beginning there’s no real reason to change anything here.