| Hey, Today we're showing you how to scale your ads with Audiences. This stage doesn't potentially allow for rapid expansion like scaling with interests, but the good news is that we can actually improve performance here, rather than simply trying to stave off decay. Yes, we are going to scale up and improve results at the same time; what can I say, I'm feeling greedy. In case you haven't guessed already, this is another episode in How To Scale Facebook Ads. We're on Stage 3 – Scale the Audience – but to read anything you missed, head over to my trusty page for subscribers Facebook Ads for Authors (it's down near the end). As a very quick recap, we kicked off this series showing why scaling up a successful ad can be so challenging, and why it requires a little finesse. I outlined my four-stage method to effectively scale ads to huge levels. Stage 1 scaled the offer, Stage 2 expanded the number of effective interests to target, this week in Stage 3 we will scale our audiences before putting it altogether and scaling the budget. In fact, Stage 3 is quite involved so we'll cover it over two weeks. scale the audience When you have exhausted potential interests to target – and your patience with that dreadful targeting interface on Facebook – you might think you have maxed out the number of friendly eyeballs you can reasonably reach. Not so, compadre! You've missed the friendliest of all: those who already love you. Like all great love affairs, we're going to take our paramours and subject them to an experimental cloning process. But first let's run through the different types of Audiences you can play with on Facebook and tease out the differences between various kinds of Custom Audiences in particular. Custom Audiences might often be a slow burn, but they are the most sustainable audience to develop on Facebook as well as a great insurance policy against the next time Zuckerberg takes an axe to the interest database. audience types There are three types of Audiences on Facebook - Interest Audiences – the most familiar, i.e. when you explicitly target people who like space opera and/or James S.A. Corey and/or Apple Books.
- Custom Audiences – where you kinda feed the audience to Facebook rather than vice versa, allowing you to target your mailing list, your website traffic, your page follows, and even anyone who has clicked on an ad in the last X days, or those that watched a certain percentage of a video you posted. A broad church, for sure, but definitely a warmer/friendly audience than a bunch of strangers who like a specific thing. Where interest audiences are limited by the number of people who like that thing – as far as Facebook can tell anyway – custom audiences are limited by you, imperfect human. Your list, your traffic, your page activity, your ad reach, and so on.
- Lookalike Audiences – often referred to as LALs by those of an acronymical persuasion, Lookalike Audiences are where you plant a seed in Facebook's garden its hypersonic machine learning force grows thousands more people, just like the ones you need. Okay, I might have some details wrong, but the basic point is this: you give Facebook a taste of your target audience and it releases the bloodhounds to round up people it thinks are similar. It's a bit hokey, but also kind of magic when it works.
In simple terms, LALs will probably be the broadest and coldest audience. Customs – especially your mailing list – will be the warmest and friendliest but in many cases… probably the smallest. And interest audiences lie somewhere along the great yawning middle. authors and audiences Most authors restrict themselves to Interest Audiences as they are the most straightforward to use (in relative terms obviously lol). Often, they dabble in Custom Audiences but often don't explore them more fully because they perhaps see higher click costs and pull the plug, or maybe they simply run through the more limited audience very quickly and have to switch back to interest audiences anyway. (I don't recommend mixing the two BTW. You can lump all your interests together – and then save that Audience for easy access – once you have successfully tested them individually. And you can lump all your customs together in a similar fashion. Just don't cross the streams; things get weird.) More adventurous authors might have also LALs and experienced even choppier seas than normal: huge expansion of reach but muted response, weird comments, plunging conversion – the general feeling of inexplicable inconsistency or just not hitting the right people at all. Not unlike when you experiment with super broad targeting or the various Advantage features – as they work in a similar way. The experiences outlined above are totally normal but there is a better path. One that will help you scale while simultaneously improving performance of all your ads, and building you new, profitable, sustainable audiences that you can tap into at will – and which you have much more control over than interests. Which might go the way of the dodo one day, so you are future proofing your operation for good measure. "What's the catch?" you might reasonably ask. Well, the issue with customs is that you have to build them. And that can take time – especially if you are just starting to grow your presence on Facebook and/or don't already have a good-sized list to play with. building customs The easiest Custom Audience to start working with is your Page – what Facebook refers to by the rather unwieldy moniker of a Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audience. Eh, let's just call it Page Audience instead. Facebook says you can make a Page Audience once you have 100 Likes, but I personally wouldn't bother until you have at least 500-1,000 – you will have difficulty getting the ad to run otherwise, and even if it does, you'll tear through that audience very quickly indeed. Once you have 1,000+ things go much more smoothly. create a page audience The process is relatively straightforward – and because Page Audiences are dynamic, you only need to set it up once and it will automatically refresh from that point onwards. Step 4 is the tricky one where people often miss an opportunity, so pay attention there! 1. Go to your Audiences tab in Ads Manager. 2. Click Create a Custom Audience. 3. Select Facebook Page from the presented options and then choose the relevant Page if you have more than one. 4. Under Events, you have a few options here but unless you have an extremely high number of Page Likes (and are also worried that many of them are terminally disengaged) then I recommend casting the widest possible net at this stage and selecting Everyone who engaged with your Page. This will include anyone who has visited your page, clicked on your ads, or interacted with your content in any form – i.e. this will include the biggest number of people. Just this one switch can increase your Page Audience substantially, and scoop up a lot of stragglers that were near-purchasers last time and might just need one more little push… 5. For Audience retention I almost always go for the maximum length possible, except in very specific circumstances – and for a Page Audience that's 365 days. So, if someone clicked on your ads 14 months ago and hasn't interacted with any of your ads or posts since… they won't be included. 6. We don't really need to Include more people here (the option below events, which is clickable) as we have already included the maximum – the exception being if you have another Page Audience you would like to include here. For example, if you had more than one pen-name and page and want to make a big, targetable audience including everyone. Note you can also exclude people in the same manner, if ever required. 7. All you need to do is name the Audience and hit Create audience. Unlike List Audiences, these populate immediately and can be used right away. Feel free to test it immediately. If you see higher CPCs, don't panic – that's entirely normal and to be expected with a custom audience. However, you should also see far higher conversion (I've seen rates as high as 50% on some Customs). But before you flog this audience too hard, I recommend reading on for my favorite use of Custom Audiences in the context of an overall Facebook Ads campaign. BTW, don't worry about including those who historically clicked on your ads if your ad performance previously was mixed. It only includes clickers, not everyone who saw the ad. But if you really are worried that some wonky ad campaign could skew things here… you can simply restrict the number of days that the Audience reaches back – in Step 5 above. Those with a presence on Instagram also might try to Include more people (Step 6) and run into trouble. Don't worry, you can still do it - you just need to create one Custom Audience for your Facebook Page and a separate Custom Audience for your Instagram Account... and then create new Saved Audience containing both of them. Simple as always, thanks Facebook 😂 Okay, that's more than enough for this week. We'll finish off Stage 3 next Friday when we go through List Audiences and then show you how to use your new beefed up Custom Audiences for maximum affect – improving the results on all of your ads. I'm off to speed date a bunch of houses, Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Waxahatchee with Slow You Down. | 
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