This doesn’t make sense…
I’m a big fan of audience segmentation. It was because of the segmentation of audience segments that I changed my mind about algorithmic targeting.
But there may be a problem.
what happened
I launched a campaign to advertise one-to-one only to people who had visited my website in the past day. I don’t run remarketing campaigns very often, but this was a little experiment. The original audience will not be expanded.
I use sales goals when optimizing daily unique reach. Not related to this, except that you can use audience segments for your sales activities to get more insights.
When I segmented by audience, Meta said 60% of my budget was spent on new audiences.
how?
This shouldn’t be possible.
Why? One way I define an “engagement audience” is to set up a website custom audience for all visitors in the past 180 days.
In other words, this audience will consist entirely of visitors from the past day. Should not leave any impression on “new viewers”.
test theory
I have a theory about what might have happened. It’s been a few months since I used 180-day custom audiences for targeting. You can see this in the Audiences page. Ignore the top activity as it reflects the tests I end up running.
Could this be important? Will the custom audience stop updating, meaning the 1-day audience may include new users?
There is a way to find out. I tested it.
First, I ran a two-day ad set targeting a 180-day audience of website visitors. I then reopened the ad set to target site visitors from the past day.
result: This time, Meta said 0% of my budget was spent on new audiences.
What does this mean? ?
Does this mean that the website custom audiences used to define my audiences have stopped updating? I’ve long heard people suggesting this, but there’s nothing in Meta’s documentation to suggest that this would happen.
Here is an example:
Website Custom Audiences can expire, but this happens after two years of not using them. When they expire, they are deleted.
It goes without saying, but the website custom audiences used to define my audiences have not expired.
Similar viewers have experienced similar quirks at one time or another. They will continue to update every three to seven days as long as you are using them. But even that seems to have disappeared.
this will be a problem
If a Website Custom Audience actually stops updating when you stop using it, I’d be interested to see how this is explained in Meta’s documentation. If that’s true, there’s something wrong.
Meta cannot facilitate both algorithmic targeting and audience usage. This means advertisers are encouraged to avoid targeting tactics like remarketing, knowing that this renders audiences (a tool that helps segment algorithmic targeting distributions) worthless.
If Website Custom Audiences used for audience segmentation do stop updating, advertisers need to know the details. Will updates stop once an audience is no longer actively used for targeting? Is it three months from now? Six months? Anything else?
Anyway, this is nonsense. Audience segments need to be updated regardless of whether they are used for targeting or not. They need to be full of energy.
What I’m seeing may be a temporary glitch. Maybe this is a mistake that won’t happen again.
Or is this an oversight?
How you can help
If you have a similar setup like mine, I encourage you to test it out:
1. You define your engagement audience using an “All site visitors for 180 days” custom audience or something similar.
2. You haven’t used it for targeting in a few months (this can be verified on your Audiences page).
3. Create a marketing campaign using sales goals.
4. Run the ad set using the original audience and target the 1-day website custom audience (turn off Advantage Custom Audience).
5. Use audience segmentation.
What did you see?
