Meta recently started rolling out the value rules, a new way to adjust delivery to its ideal audience. I posted a short video and overview, but this is a topic that needs a more detailed explanation.
Although Meta initially announced the value rules for last August to be determined, it is certainly surprising that this feature is realistic. Everything tends to be automated, and value rules allow advertisers to control some control.
I think this is a transitional moment when Meta’s AI-driven delivery is improving but retaining major flaws, and it’s a positive addition. This additional control, while certainly leading to abuse that could harm the outcome, has the potential to solve some problems when used correctly.
In this article, we will discuss the following:
- What are the value rules?
- Require
- Value Rules Foundation
- Create a value rule
- About multiple rules
- How to apply
- Report
- How to evaluate when to use value rules
- example
- Consider and pay attention
Let’s dive in…
What are the value rules?
Let’s consider the following situations…
You are running an ad for a website lead. Meta will bid for you to maximize the number of website leads you gain. But you know that women between the ages of 35 and 44 represent the highest value prospects. These people are most likely to buy from you and keep their lifetime value high.
Value rules give the ability to influence bids of RMB based on audience demographics. You can bid more than usual based on age, gender, location, or mobile operating system (iOS or Android).
You can also create value rules to be less than usual. For example, if you find that Meta spends on average on men and you get more low-quality leads from that group, you can reduce your bid by gender.
Given the knowledge of different customer values in demographics, you may often segment your audience and define different budgets by AD set. For example, you can set a higher budget for women. One of the benefits of using value rules is that it allows you to merge ad sets.
The end result of increasing some demographic bids may be that when using the value rule, your spending increases for each conversion. However, expect you to get a higher value conversion in this way.
Require
Value rules available when using sales or app promotion goals. They are not applicable to special advertising categories (formerly credit) for housing, employment, or financial products and services.
Advantages + catalog ads must be closed.
When using sales targets, you must use the website to convert locations.
The only qualified performance goal when using this conversion position is to “maximize conversions”.
When using an application promotion goal, you can choose “Maximize the number of application events” or “Maximize the number of application installations” for performance goals.
It is important to remember that value rules cannot be used for top-level operations such as link clicks, login page views, and Thruplay.
Value Rules Foundation
Go to Ad Settings. If you have valuable rules, you will see a box in the top section under “Your Business”.
Once you click on it, you will get the option to create a rule set. A single rule set can contain multiple values. Click.
You will outline how value rules work and a checkbox that shows that you understand that costs may increase by using value rules.
After clicking Create Rule Set, you will see this…
Create a value rule
This is a multi-step process…
1. Use up to two criteria to define your preferred audience.
You can choose from age, gender, location, or mobile operating system.
If your criteria are age, you can choose from different age ranges.
If gender, you can choose men and women.
For mobile operating systems, you can choose Android or iOS.
For locations, you can choose a specific country, region, or state (can be multiple of a single type).
2. Add criteria.
You can choose to include up to two criteria. To add additional criteria, click the “+” button.
For example, your favorite audience may be men aged 25-44.
or women in the United States or Canada.
Or people aged 45 to 54 using iOS devices.
3. Adjust bids.
Next, you can increase or decrease bids for defined audiences.
Meta automatically bids to touch people who will see your ads. You can increase bids for your priority audience to ensure you contact them or reduce bids for those who offer less value.
The default value is to increase bids by 20%.
Technically, you can increase your bid by up to 1,000%.
You can reduce it by up to 90%.
4. Rule name.
By default, your rule will be named, but you can override it as you like. The name can be up to 50 characters long.
About multiple rules
A single rule set can contain multiple values. You can create up to 10 rules by clicking the Add Rules button.
If you create multiple rules, the order of rules is important.
Meta provides the following example:
- Rule 1: California women’s bids increase by 20%
- Rule 2: Women using iOS operating system increase bids by 10%
If a person meets the criteria for multiple rules, only the first applicable rule is applied.
For example, consider using a group of women in California using the iOS operating system (by both rules, they are eligible). As the first rule will apply (Women in California), the group’s bids will increase by 20%.
You can change the rule commands to ensure that the most important rules are given priority.
These multiple rules will be part of the same rule set. After clicking Next, you can name it.
How to apply
Just because you created a value rule doesn’t mean it will be applied automatically. This is a good thing because it gives you the flexibility to use them when they are most useful and not to use them when they are not needed.
Assuming your settings are eligible (see the Requirements section above) and your account has access to the value rules, you will see the option to select the rule set below the performance goals.
Report
If you have access to value rules, you can learn more about the reporting of usage failures.
You will find this breakdown option at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
Once you run your campaign with value rules, Meta says you will “for each value rule in your value rules, you can see results like conversions.” I don’t have any first-hand experience to share an example.
In theory, these breakdowns will help you evaluate the impact of value rules. Combining data from other analytical tools, you will be able to determine if the adjusted tender is valid or if changes are required.
How to evaluate when to use value rules
I found Meta to make value rules available interesting because it seems to acknowledge some inherent weaknesses in Meta’s optimization. My complaint has long been that unless there are some exceptions, the algorithm does not care about the value of your results (leads, clicks, engagement, etc.). Its only focus is to give you as much action as possible, which can lead to low-quality results and waste.
All of this says we should not automatically assume that the value rules are needed. Here is how I evaluate whether you should create and apply value rules…
1. What is your most valuable customer like?
This type of evaluation will occur in your CRM or external reports, not in ADS Manager. Learn what your most valuable customers feel about your most valuable customers through the available demographic segments (age, gender, location and mobile operating systems). These are the people you want meta-algorithms in theory.
2. What is the value of the results generated by advertising generated through segments?
Make sure you have enough tracking so that you can evaluate the leads generated by ads and the quality of your application installation. Have you found that prospects are usually of low quality? Do you understand the trend or consistency of the lowest quality? Can they be grouped by age, gender, location, or mobile operating system?
3. How to spend money on Yuan?
In ADS Manager, use the breakdown of demographic groups to better understand how Meta spends money, especially when running campaigns that qualify for value rules. Are you sure you’re wasting money to be a low-value group? Isn’t it enough to spend on people who you think are the highest value customers?
example
Now that we have guidelines that can help you when to use the value rule, I want to share some specific examples that I think this might be useful. In each case, it helps to cover the weaknesses of the Meta ADS algorithm, which is exploited to obtain more (low quality) results.
1. Lead quality by age group.
I found that if I don’t limit ads for website prospects by age group, Meta will spend a lot of budget on people over 65 years old. Although I could spend some money there, I think this would take the smallest percentage of my budget. However, since Meta was able to find my cheap prospects there, it gave most of my budget with that group.
Of course, this is terrible because these are low-quality lead. In the past, I have turned off audience suggestions by age group and set the age limit to 54. While this is not my preferred method (I don’t want to cut off potential customers at that age), it’s the best way to prevent Meta from wasting my money with cheap and low-quality leads.
With the value rules, I can attack in different ways. I can lower my bid for people over 54 years old. This will allow me to continue targeting these people, and spend less on them.
2. Dividing leading quality.
I’ve written an experiment before, and I ran to target people from different groups of countries to target potential customers. I don’t want to isolate my advertising spend to the US, UK, Canada and Australia just because I also pay customers outside of these countries.
The problem is that while the cost and lead quality in these four countries have similar cost and lead quality, many other countries I can target are very cheap and often low-quality leads. Since the algorithm doesn’t care about the quality of lead, it will cost me most of my money if I have the option, making me the cheapest prospect.
The way I used to attack this was to create multiple ad sets for group countries via CPM and adjust my budget accordingly. However, I can create value rules to bid differently from countries and merge them into a single ad set.
Consider and pay attention
While there are certainly reasons for the use value rules, I am worried that many advertisers will think it is necessary when not needed. This is true with almost every possible customization (position, positioning, tendering, etc.) that can be made. Advertisers often consider them necessary and unnecessarily increase costs.
Don’t assume that the value rules are needed. Especially when maximizing the number of conversions for conversion events, this algorithm rarely wastes your money on a segment that won’t lead to that action. While it can certainly happen through prospects, don’t think it will happen.
Value rules are potential solutions to problems. Make sure you encounter the problem you need to solve first. Otherwise, the use value rules can only increase your cost without doing anything for the value of the result.
This is actually why I was surprised that Meta made the value rules first. Especially because we are controlling less and less control, it feels like a feature offered by a small group of advertisers. If encouraged, it will certainly lead to abuse.
Perhaps this is a complexity that few advertisers can bother. It should be considered an exception, not the usual one.
now you
Do you have valuable rules? How do you use them?
Let me know in the comments below!
