| Hey, I've been pretty negative about Facebook's Advantage features – especially Advantage+ Audience – but there is one cool aspect we need to explore today. Especially because there is a crafty way to get all the benefits… and none of the drawbacks. This is the fourth episode of the Facebook Advantage Survival Guide, and you can catch up with the first three over at the Decoders email archive – where we have already covered why this is critical for anyone running Facebook Ads, how all the Advantage features work, the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms, and what changes you need to make to give your ads the best chance of success. And if you are not interested in Facebook Ads at all – that's cool, but you might want to scroll to the end for another great early Black Friday deal for authors (on the reMarkable 2!). Anyway, one genuinely cool thing Advantage+ Audience does is when it starts expanding the targeting for your ad, one of its priorities is to reach readers who previously interacted with your ads. Which is great. This kind of remarketing is incredibly effective; I lean on it heavily. However, if you let Advantage+ Audience handle your remarketing, you must completely surrender control – both of your remarketing efforts generally, and targeting specifically. As you will see today, there is a much better way that doesn't involve ceding control over your targeting, one which will get you much better results with your remarketing efforts as well. Today, we're going to look at Custom Audiences, how you can deploy them to boost your regular campaigns, and how they might provide the beginnings of a solution to those authors who were obliterated by Facebook's removal of certain interests. It's not a neat or easy answer by any means… but it could help. And it's something we should all pay attention to as Facebook continues to remove more and more interests and push us towards broader and broader targeting, as well as the sweet and tender embrace of AI. The direction of travel is only going one way… the limits of interests Interest targeting is great – and remains the foundation of virtually every launch or promotion – but what happens when you need to reach beyond that? Or what happens when Facebook takes away the profitable interests you have been targeting? The first thing I'd suggest – unless you really have exhausted all the possibilities – is to keep panning for gold in the interest targeting interface. While many useful interests have been removed, most of the removals were aiming to address duplication. So, there might be an alternative interest you can target which is just as effective. Of course, Facebook didn't exactly consult with authors or other advertisers for that matter so a lot of this was done in ham-handed fashion, and some interests were removed rather inexplicably – ones without a workable alternative. In other cases, Facebook has deliberately removed all related interests around what it considers sensitive topics, such as religion and ethnicity and sexual orientation. What seemed like an attempt to protect various communities from being targeted in nasty ways has turned into an imposing challenge for authors in various niches – from inspirational Christian fiction to M/M romance. As a historical fiction author who was constantly running into issues about influencing the political situation… in 19th century Chile… I feel your pain. But what are we to do in these situations? There are more options, thankfully. The standard advice is simply to target broadly and turn on Advantage+ Audience and let Facebook's algorithm do all the heavy lifting. However, unless you sell direct and/or run ads via your website, and have the Pixel installed correctly (so the algorithms can see who purchases out of all those clickers, and then recalibrate your targeting), then this strategy is extremely risky – especially for niche fiction – and likely to result in extremely inconsistent results. And a lot of wasted money. And probably a lot of rather unkind comments due to the scattergun nature of the Advantage stuff when it doesn't have that Pixel-driven recalibration. The only authors likely to be selling direct tends to be a smaller subset of experienced self-publishers. Not exactly an option for newbies, or experienced authors who don't wish to sell direct or otherwise futz with the Pixel. The remaining option is not so newbie friendly either – sorry – but at least it is something to work towards, where doing so will have multiple benefits. Given the way Facebook is changing, it's perhaps something we should all be working towards. custom audiences Interest-based Audiences are only one type of Audience on Facebook. Another, which more experienced advertisers use a lot, are Custom Audiences. Where interest Audiences are based on Facebook's data – who likes what, etc. – Custom Audiences are based on your data. Not your personal data, but the data which you supply to Facebook. For example, you can have a Custom Audience based off your mailing list. You can have another based off your Facebook Page itself. But you can go deeper and have a Custom Audience which doesn't just include those who have liked your Facebook Page, but also anyone who has interacted with your organic content, or one of your ads too. If you have enough website traffic (you need a lot), you can have another Custom Audience derived from that. And if you do anything with video content, the options get extremely granular. Super exciting legal note: I'm not a lawyer but suggest that authors should be cognizant of various data protection laws around this stuff, and agree with the best practice advice of having a privacy policy on their site which covers this kind of data use, linked to on your site/sign-up page, as appropriate. This won't work so well if you have a smaller list, few Likes on your Page, or little engagement with your ads or content. As with interest Audiences, you need a certain size before it starts working. Facebook has officially reduced the thresholds several times in recent years from several thousand, all the way down to 100 now. But in my experience, these audiences don't start working very well until you go north of 1000. Preferably a lot further north. So that means, 1000+ people on your mailing list, or Liking your Page, or interacting with your ads/posts. (And once you have several thousand people you can go a step further and start playing with Lookalike audiences too – again, officially, Facebook advises a very low threshold but, in my experience, results will be highly variable until you can feed the system a good quality audience of maybe 5,000+). For those with such-sized audiences right now, I recommend playing with Custom Audiences, if you haven't already. They are a reliable source of sales, and I especially like using them to layer social proof on my ads. In practice, this often means running an ad to a Custom Audience first, then duplicating it after a few days – when it has attracted lots of lovely comments and likes – and showing it to newer, fresher audiences who are invariably influenced by all that nicely bottled-up reader love. The best part is that you get all the benefits from remarketing, but none of the drawbacks that come from turning on Advantage+ Audience. You can choose when to hit this audience, and when to skip it, how much of your budget to spend on it, and view the individual performance of these ads – all without losing control of your targeting and playing Russian Roulette with your campaigns. This is also one of the big steps towards scaling up your Facebook Ads – the Xanadu of advertising. Scaling up isn't just about increasing budgets (known as vertical scaling). It's also about running parallel campaigns which target different audiences (known as horizontal scaling). And Custom Audiences can play an important role here. While I like to throw all my interests into one large group these days, I prefer to keep Custom Audiences separate (and generally lump those into one group for Custom Audiences too). I've seen weird results when mixing the two, but I don't know if that was just me. Anyway, it's better to keep them separate so that you can focus on warmer and colder audiences, as you need. In both cases, I make good use of the Save Audience button so that I can easily access my Interests supergroup and my Customs supergroup for each of the countries I might wish to target. But what about those who don't have audiences of that size to play with yet? Well, this is something you can build towards. Take it as (another) reason why it's worthwhile investing time and energy in growing your mailing list, and (yet another) reminder in the value of posting organic content on your Page which readers find engaging. And I guess it's also further motivation to keep that content genre-focused, and not the kind of easy engagement bait that we might be tempted to post, which might attract a more general audience. the future? Privacy laws, and the general sentiment around tech companies collecting and using third-party data, only seem to be going in one direction. It's not that crazy to imagine a future where there are no interests to target on Facebook, or where the interface is much more restricted than today – leaving advertisers with the choice of either advertising extremely broadly (which could spell trouble for authors), or leaning on their own data, their own Custom Audiences. It's probably wise if we all start thinking about moving in that direction too, getting ahead of whatever comes next. Besides, it can only benefit your advertising efforts to have reliable Custom Audiences to deploy, and it only makes your writing career more sustainable to have a bigger list powering your entire operation. deal on the reMarkable 2 Black Friday is next week – I think I was a little confused on Monday! – but to tide you over until then, I thought you might like to hear about a sweet, early deal which just dropped on my favorite writing tool ever, the reMarkable 2. You can get $50/€50 off reMarkable 2 bundles until December 3. That's in addition to the usual discounts you get when buying a bundle, so I'm seeing discounts up to $79/€79 on things like my preferred bundle – which is the reMarkable 2 + the Marker Plus (the premium pen) + the Type folio (which is the cool keyboard cover I was rhapsodizing about). That is an affiliate link, and I won't even pretend that I'm unbiased here because I'm totally in love with my device. For more detail, check out my 500-day review. Dave | 
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