| Hey, We are continuing our Facebook Advantage Survival Guide this week – if you missed Part 1, read it first or else you might miss a trick… or treat. This week I'm going to tell you the exact settings to switch on/off during the entire ad creation process. Romance authors should particularly pay attention to the section on Advantage+ Audience as there is a lot of confusion – understandably – around gender controls and when Facebook does or doesn't override them. Short version: I have some extremely good news for you. I also explain what happens with each setting if you ignore my advice and go your own way. Which you can do, of course, I'd just like you to be forewarned before you stray from the recommended path. You are free to take your own approach – as always. Here's mine. regain the advantage Facebook is taking more and more control from advertisers by default – seeking to streamline the advertising process, but the one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work for authors – which is why you need to be careful about any general Facebook advice, not just that coming directly from the source. Books are weird products in marketing terms. Readers are (gloriously) odd ducks too. And then the authors selling those books aren't your typical advertiser either. Luckily, the solution is clear enough – even if nailing some of the details can be a little trickier. - You need to switch off as much of the Advantage stuff as possible.
- Your targeting/Audiences need to be on point to nudge/influence/control the bits you can't turn off.
We'll go deep on Audiences and targeting next week – that topic is a huge one all on its own – but let's quickly run through the Advantage settings which I recommend deactivating. I'll have a new video on ad creation soon also, which will go through the interface in detail, but here are the relevant settings for the Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad level – mimicking the three-step ad creation process on Facebook itself. advantage campaign budget (campaign level) The only Advantage setting at Campaign level is Advantage campaign budget (formerly known as Campaign Budget Optimization). This is not so important if you structure your campaigns like I do – i.e. only one ad set per campaign, and often only one or two ads per ad set. However, if you like having multiple ad sets per campaign, which many do, this setting can be extremely important because it will actively move your budget between ad sets when it sees better performance. As covered in detail last week, with typical author ads the system can only see clicks, so if you leave this switched on one single ad set could gobble up all your budget… and subsequently turn out not to be the one that was driving sales. I leave this on personally because it allows me to see all my daily budgets at the campaign level – which I prefer so I can see what's going on at-a-glance – but if you have multiple ad sets within your campaigns, you might want to leave this one switched off. advantage+ audience (ad set level) This one is tricky, so let's go through it carefully - romance authors, pay attention! At the bottom of the Advantage+ Audience box you'll see a button on the left saying "Save audience" (remember this for later) and a link saying "Switch to original audience options." Click that. You'll probably get a pop up warning you not to turn off Advantage+ Audience. Ignore Facebook's urgings and click "Use original audience." Now you have wrested at least some control back – and this is exceedingly important, especially for romance authors or anyone else who wants to control the gender of who sees their ads. Advertisers use gender and age controls a lot less these days. Several years ago, we would slice up every demographic with dozens of small, hyper-targeted campaigns, manually moving our budgets around based on which ad was delivering the cheapest clicks. Now the system can do that for you in an instant – one of the reasons why Facebook generally recommends targeting more broadly; the system does all this heavy lifting for us now. However, this doesn't work well for everyone. For example, you might be a romance author who only wants to target women. Facebook will override your gender controls if it thinks it will get you better results… but as you should know by now, it can only see clicks. What it can't see is those "clicks" are men commenting on your ads to make pervy comments or trash your cover or whatever, so it serves it to more and more of the wrong people. This only happens if you select Advantage+ Audience. In other words, if you take my advice and switch that off, you should retain control over gender. It's not just gender either. Any audience control over something like age, gender, custom audiences, or lookalike audiences may be ignored by Facebook if you leave Advantage+ Audience switched on. Which might be fine for Coke or McDonalds, but generally not authors. The other thing to watch out for in this section is a big one because it's something we have to cede control over now, much to the annoyance of experienced advertisers. The interest targeting interface has been revamped quite a few times over the last couple of years. It's now headed Advantage detailed targeting and where this used to be where you told Facebook who you wanted to target with your ads it's now more of a… suggestion box. Facebook can and will override your targeted interests if it thinks it can find cheaper clicks elsewhere – and it often does exactly this. It is really important to note that, as of this year, this setting can no longer be turned off for Traffic campaigns. Which is terrible, obviously, but you can mitigate the effects quite a lot by feeding Facebook appropriate suggestions and we'll get into that in more detail next time. For now, I recommend plugging in your usual targeting (and perhaps then clicking the Suggestions button to see the kinds of things that Facebook thinks are similar so you can get an idea of what a crapshoot this can be). I recommend making good use of that Save audience feature – I use it constantly so I don't always have to run through this dumb checklist every time I want to make a new ad! advantage+ placements (ad set level) For the love of all things holy, please turn off this nonsense or it can destroy your performance. Facebook has buried the option to turn this off… but it's still there. If you hover your mouse over the middle section a little "Edit" link will appear. Click that and you'll get two choices – Advantage+ placements or Manual placements. I have several ad accounts and the option to switch this off is disguised in different ways, but always there - so keep digging and you'll find it eventually. Choose Manual Placements when the option presents itself and ignore all the BS stats Facebook will throw your way about why that is a terrible decision! It's absolutely critical that you select your Placements manually. I strongly suggest restricting your ads to Facebook-only, and Feed-only. It's the most reliable performer, and it's best to keep things simple when you are getting the hang of things. Even these days, I still mostly stick to that. That means turning off lots and lots of places your ads could appear, but most of them are worthless, quite frankly. And if you don't remove them, they could gobble up all your budget as the system can only see that they generate cheap clicks. Some clicks are cheap for a reason! multi-advertiser ads (ad level) There are no Advantage features as such at the ad level – unless you count the rather crude generative-AI stuff where Facebook offers to "optimize" your ad images or text. Noooooo thank you. While the Multi-advertiser ads feature is not strictly an Advantage thingy, it is relatively new and Facebook is sneakily turning it on by default, so it's important to flag it as I very much recommend turning it off. It's easy to miss - it's a (sneakily) pre-checked box in the Ad setup section just below where you upload your image. Like many of the Advantage features so heavily pushed by Facebook, this may well deliver cheaper clicks, but I bet anything that it considerably reduces the quality of those clicks by a far greater margin. You could look at the entire system as being designed to give you your chosen result as cheaply as possible, and all these human interventions as an attempt to tilt the balance back to quality traffic – buyers rather than browsers, purchasers rather than clickers. A big part of that is your targeting and Audiences – and we'll go deep on those next week. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Your Ghost by my ex-girlfriend Kristin Hersh. | 
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