The Foundational Elements of Meta Advertising Today

These are the foundational elements of Meta advertising today.

On the last episode, I discussed the thought process behind my Master Brief: What it is, how I created it, and how I’m using AI to keep it updated.

Today, I want to go through some of the actual details of the recommendations in the brief itself.

How should you approach things like targeting, campaign construction, and ad creation? What actually matters today?

These are the foundational elements, so let’s get to it.

First, I encourage you to simplify campaign construction and consolidate your budget. Prioritize the fewest number of campaigns and ad sets because you know that each additional asset waters down your budget.

This also goes for customizations of settings away from defaults that defy what Meta wants you to do.

I’m not saying that you should only have one campaign and one ad set and accept every one of Meta’s default settings. But that should be your starting point.

Which takes me to the next element: Every change must solve a proven, data-backed problem.

Prioritize the simplest approach to consolidate your budget, but there are exceptions when more complexity is needed.

Just make sure you’re adding that campaign, adding that ad set, customizing placements, or restricting targeting for a reason proven in data.

Do not rely on your gut, old data, or old assumptions for these decisions.

Next, I want you to prioritize algorithmic targeting and embrace the loss of targeting control.

Your audience inputs are only suggestions by default, and in some cases they will always be suggestions. Understand that your control over targeting isn’t what it used to be, and trying to control it can just make results worse.

Suggestions based on detailed targeting and lookalike audiences can’t hurt, but it’s also almost impossible to prove if they help. We never know how much Meta considers them, so there’s no reason to spend a whole lot of time obsessing over them.

That doesn’t mean that algorithmic targeting is perfect. But unless you are selling age-restricted goods where you simply can’t show ads to people under a certain age, there’s actually a better way.

If you have a proven problem that needs to be solved related to age, gender, or placements, use value rules instead.

This proven problem is typically tied to your performance goal, which defines the action that you want.

If Meta can get more leads from people over 65 when your performance goal is to maximize leads, that’s exactly what will happen. Meta doesn’t care if those are low-quality leads.

The same goes for Audience Network if your performance goal is tied to link clicks, landing page views, or ThruPlay Views. If a placement is a source of those actions, Meta will concentrate your budget there when it’s consistent with the performance goal.

Just remember that these value rules are rarely needed when optimizing for a purchase, unless you have information that Meta doesn’t.

So I caution you to make sure you only use value rules when they’re truly necessary because you’re intentionally impacting bids in the auction.

Next, remarketing happens naturally, and audience segments prove it.

Look, remarketing was my thing back in the day, so I get the attraction to it. But you need to understand that Meta prioritizes your remarketing audiences by default now.

If you define your audience segments in Advertising Settings, you can prove this when breaking down results of sales campaigns.

Once you know that Meta is already dedicating 10, 20, 30 percent of your budget or more on remarketing, you start to understand that separate campaign or ad set isn’t necessary.

So if we prioritize algorithmic targeting and rarely bother with remarketing, how do we impact who sees our ads?

Your performance goal is part of it, but the rest of your control rests with the ads themselves.

Creative diversification is how you reach different groups of people, and those different groups could be within the same ad set.

Create ads that are uniquely different from one another, appealing to very different customer personas. Understand their pain points, and highlight the ways that your product is the solution.

Creating ads that attract the action you want from your desired customer groups is where your audience control is now.

Next, build a reliable conversion tracking foundation.

Yes, make sure you have the pixel installed on every page of your website and all of the relevant standard events, custom events, and custom conversions set up.

But the pixel alone isn’t enough these days, so make sure you pass first-party events from the Conversions API.

There’s a no-cost, one-click option for the Conversions API Gateway that will cover you for web events, so you have no excuse.

And if events happen offline, send those, too. Prioritize match rate and make sure events are properly deduplicated.

Next, evaluate your results in aggregate.

Stop obsessing over things like which ad performed best or why this ad wasn’t delivering.

There’s little value now in finding the single winning primary text or headline or image or video because a successful ad set should have lots of winning combinations.

By evaluating in aggregate, you only care whether you’re getting the results you want at the ad set level.

And if CBO is on, only focus on your overall numbers at the campaign level.

Next, there are many layers to conversion results, and it’s your responsibility to uncover them.

Those conversions aren’t necessarily for the product in your ad. Understand how many are click-through, view-through, engage-through, or incremental.

It also matters whether they’re 7-day click or 1-day click, and you can uncover down-funnel conversions with 28-day click.

And use First and All Conversions so that you can isolate inflated results where one customer makes multiple conversions.

Meta doesn’t lie about results, and it’s your responsibility to understand them.

And finally, prioritize result quality and value over volume.

Your cheap results mean nothing if they’re worth nothing.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

These are the highlights of how I recommend you approach Meta ads today.

There are obviously more details and exceptions to consider, but you get the general idea.

If you want my detailed recommendations on how to approach Meta ads now, check out my Master Brief. Read a free version of it at jonloomer.com/master.