7 Things That Aren't Worth Your Time

I care less about these things than you do.

Look, I’m not trying to say you’re wasting your time. And I never want to suggest that there’s only one way to do things.

But there are consistent themes that seem to bother most advertisers way more than they bother me. I just don’t waste much time worrying about these things, and I save my energy for things that matter more.

It’s not that these seven things never matter at all, but they are way down my list of items I’m focused on.

First is placement performance and restrictions.

If you’re optimizing for any type of conversion, I spend little to no time worrying about placements. Unless there’s a placement that is directly responsible for low-quality optimized actions, it’s not worth worrying about.

Yes, placements are a source of low-quality clicks and impressions, but only if your goal is clicks or impressions. When you want conversions, Meta will spend very little of your budget there.

You’re not going to optimize performance by removing low-performing placements.

Second is detailed targeting and lookalike audiences.

Detailed targeting and lookalike audiences are only suggestions for most performance goals now. In other words, we have no idea how much impact, if any, they make on delivery in those cases.

Back in the day, we’d test different interests and lookalikes to find what yielded the best results. But now we have no idea if Meta leans into those inputs in some cases or ignores them in others.

They’re unlikely to hurt results, but any evidence of their impact is thin and difficult to prove. So I don’t worry about them.

Third is age and gender distribution, especially when optimizing for a purchase.

I don’t envision my ideal customer and restrict by age and gender. I know that Meta has plenty of data and will optimize to reach the people most likely to convert.

Shrinking my potential audience won’t optimize performance. It only drives up costs. Unless there’s a specific problem to be solved related to the optimization, I don’t mess with age and gender. And when that problem exists, I use value rules instead.

Fourth is location inconsistencies.

Granted, I have little reason to worry about this because I’m not running ads as a local business. But I also fully understand how imperfect Meta’s location targeting is.

Even when targeting by country, I’ll reach people both living or recently in that location. That means I’m going to reach people who may not live there, and I’m totally okay with that.

There is no solution for it, and there’s no reason to fight over it.

Fifth is all of the micromanagement with ads.

I don’t care if Meta is focusing my budget on one ad and ignoring another. There’s usually a reason for that. If I’m getting good results in aggregate, it doesn’t matter which ad or ads those results are coming from.

Back in the day, we were obsessed with finding the best combinations of ad copy and creative. Ad creation is different now.

If you have the new creative workflow, one ad works much the way an ad set once did. It can include up to 10 images and videos, not including AI-generated versions. It can include up to 5 primary text and headline options, again not including AI-generated versions.

When you consider the enhancements and different aspect ratios, we’re dealing with potentially millions of combinations of copy and creative. Getting good results will require MANY winning combinations. Obsessing over a handful is a waste of time.

Next, I care very little about enhancements screwing up my ads.

Granted, these are my ads and not a client, but I know I care way less than most people about this. When Meta applies enhancements, it’s simply one of many variations that someone might see.

I customize enhancements where possible. I turn off those that are completely irrelevant. But I otherwise don’t care if a handful of people saw this version that some will think looks bad.

And finally, I don’t care about Ads Manager results matching up with other data.

It’s not going to match up. It doesn’t matter if you use UTM parameters. It doesn’t mean that Meta is lying or making up conversions.

With the Standard attribution model, there are huge holes in tracking that third parties wouldn’t be able to fill. Click-through attribution doesn’t need to be an immediate purchase. Engage-through and view-through don’t involve clicks to your website. And Incremental attribution is based on advanced models that determine whether an ad drove a conversion.

Know how to make sense of the data and value the clicks most. Make sure the events are set up properly and are deduplicated when sent from multiple sources. But I will not lose sleep over Ads Manager reporting a handful more or less than GA4.

And how about a bonus item that just occurred to me?

I don't care that custom audience exclusions are incomplete. When I try to exclude people from seeing an ad that already converted and they see the ad and they comment, "Hey, should I be seeing this ad?" I don't really care that much.

It is what it is, and that's about it.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

I care very little about these things because I realize they are outside of my control. I understand how things work.

Obsessing over these things may be a way to look busy, but they’re unlikely to help you improve results. I understand there are exceptions when these things matter more, and sometimes these exceptions apply to me.

But more often than not, I find it’s much more productive to push these things far down the priority list.

Instead, focus your energies on the things that make the biggest impact. I’ll talk about those on the next episode.