Why Meta Keeps Pushing Value Rules

Value Rules are the future of delivery control.

So you surely know by now that your control over Meta ads delivery isn’t the same as it used to be.

In years past, we were mostly in charge of delivery. We defined the specific pool of people who could see our ads. And we obsessed over remarketing and interests and behaviors and lookalike audiences.

We restricted the audience by age or gender, sometimes because it was necessary and other times because we thought it was. And the same went for placements. We exerted our control by removing them, sometimes because it was necessary and other times because we thought we were optimizing performance.

Well, a lot has changed since those days.

Meta discourages our control over these things. And in some cases, it’s actually prevented. Inputs for age, gender, and custom audience targeting are only suggestions by default, though we can restrict by them. Detailed targeting and lookalike audiences are almost always audience suggestions now, and we can’t do anything about it.

And while we can remove placements, Meta doesn’t make that easy. The option to do this continues to move, and now Meta will try to continue spending on removed placements if you don’t turn off the option.

So this continues the trend of Meta slowly, but surely, eliminating advertiser control.

And then a strange thing happened last year: Meta introduced Value Rules.

Value rules allow advertisers to bid more or less based on various variables like age, gender, location, placement, and more. At the time, I thought it was really odd that Meta would add this feature while at the same time eliminating control elsewhere. I assumed that the feature would be buried so that it would only be used by the advertisers who knew it was available.

But some interesting things have happened since then.

Meta now openly encourages advertisers to use value rules. It’s not just a buried option in your Advertising Settings anymore. You’ll see alerts to use value rules to control by age, gender, or placement.

And what makes it especially obvious that this feature isn’t going anywhere is that Meta keeps adding on. I’m part of a test for a version of value rules that ventures into a territory we haven’t seen before. It’s a value rule for Audiences, which allows us to bid more or less based on the specific custom audiences people are in.

This all works with the help of labels, a feature that is expanded for this new value rule. You can add labels to custom audiences to indicate people are qualified leads or disqualified leads. Or they’re high value or low value customers.

You can add labels for people who are recent purchasers, or at risk because they’ve shown signs of being disengaged or churning. You can even label a custom audience for people who have disengaged from you.

Once you’ve labeled these custom audiences, you can then leverage them with value rules. Bid more on your high value customers or less on the low value customers. Bid more on qualified leads and less on disqualified leads. Bid more for certain personas.

You’re only limited by the size of these audiences and your ability to label them accurately. And that’s certainly a technical hurdle.

But this is all so weird because it opposes everything we’ve been taught about control during the past few years. What it says is that Meta understands that there are some weaknesses in algorithmic delivery.

There is a knowledge gap when we have information that Meta doesn’t. That could be because we know the value of certain leads or customer lifetime value or other actions. It’s because of this information gap that value rules are necessary.

So here is where I think the future of Meta advertising is going.

We’ll continue seeing diminished control when it comes to targeting and placements and other aspects related to delivery. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta completely locked it down. Forget audience suggestions, Meta will just remove all audience inputs and ability to turn off individual placements.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to control these things at all. You’ll just need to use value rules to do it.

Most advertisers won’t bother to put the time in to take that control, which is part of the point. Those with the least knowledge shouldn’t be applying their control in the first place.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

Control over Meta ads delivery continues to change. But while the surface level control over things like targeting and placement slowly disappear completely, I don’t think control is going away. It’s just going to take another form.

There’s a reason that Meta is dedicating so much effort to value rules right now, and it’s because Meta knows this, too.

So if you aren’t using value rules, it’s time to get started. They’re the future of delivery control.