Common Advantage+ Shopping Campaign Mistake

Do not make this mistake with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. I’ve seen this a few times, so I want to be sure that you’re not doing it, too…

Existing Customers

In your Ad Account Settings, you have the ability to define your Existing Customers.

This impacts your Advantage+ Shopping CampaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you’ll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More in two ways.

First, it’s at least a consideration when determining who should see your ads. It’s especially important if you apply a Customer BudgetA budget is an amount you’re willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More Cap.

It’s also used for audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More segmentation of Advantage+ Shopping CampaignAdvantage+ Shopping Campaigns offer a streamlined way of creating a Sales campaign that leverages machine learning to get the best results. Presets are locked in and can’t be changed. The advertiser provides custom audiences at the account level that define current customers and can then determine a budget cap for how much of the budget is spent on current customers. More results.

What to Do and Not to Do

I’ve seen advertisers not put enough thought into defining their current customers. Don’t use a website custom audience of all of your website visitors. Most of these people aren’t your customers.

I’ve even heard that an ad rep told someone to use lookalike audiences. That’s crazy. (NOTE: This advice is so bad for numerous reason, but one is that it’s not even technically possible to use a lookalike audienceLookalike audiences allow advertisers to reach people who are similar to an audience of people already close to you. Lookalike audiences are based on custom Audiences, which tend to include your current customers or people who have engaged with your business. More for this purpose).

Use website custom audiencesA website custom audience matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook. You can then create ads to show to that audience. More and data custom audiencesA customer list custom audience is created by uploading a customer list that Facebook matches with users so you can target them with ads. More to define your current paying customers as thoroughly as possible. But only include your paying customers.

This isn’t meant to be complicated. But you could definitely screw up both how delivery is optimized and the reporting. Otherwise, your Existing Customers audience segment is meaningless.

Are you doing this right?