The Art of Online Business

Beware of Meta Changing Your Ad Settings On You

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie • Episode 856

Share episode

I caught a critical mistake in a client's ad setup that saved their launch! It turns out, a setting was missed when they duplicated an ad set from their previous agency, leading to significantly cheaper lead costs—but not in a good way. 




I'm breaking down how Meta's sneaky default settings like 'Advantage Plus Creative' and hidden 'enhancements' can mess with your campaigns if you're not careful.



Please click here to give an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes! Thanks for your support!




Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:

Speaker 0:

Beware of meta changing your Facebook and Instagram ad settings on you. Okay, I'm a Facebook ad manager, hi, and I recently had a coaching call where the client was in launch mode and you know what happened. They had an agency in the past run their ads and now they're running their own ads. No bad experience with the agency. Just it didn't make sense profit wise, so they had set up their own ads and I was looking at their ads because that's what I do and one-on-one coaching and I noticed their lead cost was dramatically cheaper than it was when the agency was running their ads. So I'm like, oh, red flag, let's dive into this, because either the agency had no idea what they were doing I highly doubt that, because I actually know the person who ran the agency or my client, who I was doing one-on-one ad coaching for, had just discovered the ultimate unlock to super cheap leads or there was some setting that happened to be done wrong, and so what happened is there was a setting that was missed and so they had duplicated the agency's ads and there was this little setting that was missed, and so I'm gonna talk about that setting and make sure that you don't miss that when you duplicate your own ad sets or ad campaigns. And then also, I'm going to tell you about these suggestions that Meta makes. Like, don't you just love it when you set up some new ads in Meta.

Speaker 0:

You've probably seen as I'm clicking on the screen here. You've probably seen and, by the way, clicking on the screen if you're watching the YouTube channel, you can see. If you're not, click down to the show notes below on whatever podcast platform you're listening to and click over to the YouTube channel and watch this. But right now I'm looking at the ad level, something called advantage plus creative, and these enhancements. Right here is one of five. Sometimes there's up to eight, I believe, and it's super sneaky meta, because they want you to let meta just happen. They want you to let them just put all the enhancements on and let them rework your ad how they choose.

Speaker 0:

Now, this is not the episode where I'm going to dive in to which of these are worth using and which are trash, but I want you to know that Meta will sneak all of these on, or some of them on, and even on the screen that you just saw where I clicked, you'll see. Sometimes it says all optimizations are off and it might only show you two little windows here like maybe visual touch-ups and text improvements, and they'll be off and you're like I'm good to go. But then actually right down there at the bottom, this little link, blue text with an underline that says show more enhancements. And you drop that down and you'll see like six enhancements down there and they're all on and some of them are really gonna jack up your ads. So that's not the point of this episode. Just to let you know. Look at what Meta's doing. Okay, sometimes it works in your favor. Many times and I'm telling you this from the bottom of my heart as a Facebook ad manager who looks at accounts daily many times you do not want those enhancements on, and if you do have them on, it would be worth your business lead cost while and ad investment while just to test, kind of test through combinations of them to see what's happening.

Speaker 0:

Now back to what happened with this client, which is we looked because the ad cost was like four times cheaper than was it five times four times cheaper to protect their identity and obviously our confidentiality agreement can't go into detail Four to five times cheaper their ad cost was than the previous agency that was running their ads. And so we looked and it turned out, as they had duplicated the ad set, the country targeting was left off, which is really bad. I'm so glad I found it for them, because what happened then is, as they were duplicating the ad set, meta decided they needed to have worldwide targeting. Any country can be targeted. Now I had talked to another person, not a client, but she had casually DM'd me at the beginning of this year and the same thing happened to her. She was getting leads on the cheap, unreal super happy. Her launch time came and you know what happened Very few people bought.

Speaker 0:

And so here's the issue with this worldwide targeting, or when you don't target a specific country, meta looks for the cheapest opt-ins. Meta doesn't care. Or they do care about your businesses and they want you to give them money, but they don't know what kind of business you have specifically. Their bots might, as they crawl your page and your ads to make sure your ads and your landing page are in line with meta ad policy, but what I'm getting at is they just are looking for the best leads. Leave the targeting open for your ads, and when I say open, I mean specifically, if you don't target the countries you want you're going to get leads from, like, the MENA region, which stands for this is from way back in the day, when I wanted to be a foreign service officer. Did you know I speak Mandarin? One day, long time ago, I was trying to be a foreign service officer with my Mandarin skills. Anyway, mena, middle East, north Africa, that region, right. So you'll get like plenty of leads from Nigeria and from Kenya and Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, right, and India and other Southeast Asian countries. Look, I lived in China for 12 years.

Speaker 0:

Many of my friends came from the continent of africa, because my dad's from ghana. That's where I get my name, kwejo, from which should be said kojo or something like that. It means, like you know, if a boy is born on monday, they could have that random fact. If you remember several secretary generals of the un ago, there was this guy named kofi anan. That is for, like, guys who are born on friday have the name kofi, and and my dad's name is Kofi too because he's from Ghana and he was born on a Friday, but I was not born on a Monday. Actually, interesting, interesting there, my mom was from the States and she didn't like the name of the day that I was born on, and if you want to know the rest of that story, dm me on Instagram. I'm happy to chit chat. By the way, if you want my eyeballs on your meta ads so that you can avoid these kind of mistakes. That would be one-on-one coaching with me and it would take place over a month. You have unlimited access to me and a number of calls with me, and then the unlimited access comes in between those calls. Find out more about that in the link in the description below. So people from those countries are great.

Speaker 0:

The issue here is that if you, as a native English speaker which many of my clients are and listeners for this podcast are in addition to you are selling things to people who are from, let's say, the US, a $500 course could very well be out of the range of what somebody can afford. Who's from Azerbaijan, you know great person might need what you have, but if your course is like what somebody would make in a year, or if your course costs what somebody would make in Half a year, they're probably not going to be able to buy your course, and so that is why we don't want to leave wide open targeting as far as country is concerned, you want to target specific countries. What country should you be targeting? Well, it depends on where your customers come from. So do that research first. But if you're, like me, from the States, and you sell a course in general to people who are english-speaking, target like the countries that can afford your course that speak English natively. Usually we're looking at targeting the US, canada, united Kingdom, australia, new Zealand, sometimes Ireland. You know, I may have seen a few clients targeting Israel too, but in general it's just those five or six or seven native English speaking countries. And many times you just look because you have a survey after somebody buys your program or offer and see where they're from and then go ahead and target more people from that country and don't spend time targeting the other countries. But that is a thing.

Speaker 0:

Be very careful when you are duplicating ad sets, because nowadays you just have to watch out. Here's another thing I see right here. I'm looking at an ad on the screen. Right now there is the ad name and when I duplicate it, this is a mistake. I see Right here it has this screen which says new campaigns will use greater daily budget flexibility. Fine, okay, but sometimes there's extra things there up to three extra like boxes at the top that have other messages like turn this on, turn that on. But they're on automatically and I just don't want you to get in trouble by turning those things on automatically Right now.

Speaker 0:

You've just seen me try to duplicate an ad set and look, the first box that's selected by default says apply recommendations. One box is checked that says website and shop and then it says in green 35% better incremental return on ad spend. Oh no, you don't Meta. You better not. I mean, it sounds good, right, it sounds good. But first of all, they don't know the kind of ad I'm running. Like, yes, this ad happens to be a profitable SLO ad for a client, like a direct-to-sale ad for a client, but, like this client does not have an e-commerce shop. And as far as my knowledge goes right now, when you turn on that setting, it's kind of optimized for folks with an e-commerce shop. And look at this one right here Check advantage plus creative. Well, that's the thing that I warned you about earlier on in this episode. You turn that on and Meta then can twist and warp your ad to their whim.

Speaker 0:

Now some of those enhancements do work and I've been testing them in an attempt to lower ad costs for me and for clients. I've been testing them one by one, not quite ready yet, but once I have definitive like which ones are better and which ones are trash, you'll know because I have it on an episode. But the point is you don't want to blindly just be like, oh look, it's highlighted in blue. Apply these recommendations. Meta has my best interest in mind. Click no, don't do that. Please don't do that.

Speaker 0:

Click the bottom one that says keep current, set up and continue and then, as you have duplicated, scroll down through all of your settings, which I'm not going to show here. Make sure that Meta doesn't screw you over and you all of a sudden have higher lead costs than you should or higher cost per sale, or maybe your SLO funnel isn't profitable anymore because you took Meta's automatic recommendations or didn't quite check and they just did something wonky to your ads, like remove country targeting, for example, or turn on Advantage Plus audiences when you already had an audience that was converting really well. Final tip, by the way, advantage Plus warm audiences are working extremely well right now. In my clients' accounts they have been for the better part of this year 2024. So if you're not quite using advantage plus warm audiences.

Speaker 0:

When you do have, especially for self liquidating offers and like in a purchase camp in a sales campaign where you're running ads directly to a low ticket offer, I highly recommend you try a warm advantage plus audience and all the advantage plus means when you're looking at an audience is that your audience targeting instead of becoming hard limits now becomes soft suggestions. So you upload all your warm audiences into Facebook and Meta knows to start there, but then they can target people outside of those audiences when they choose. So it's kind of like the best of both worlds cold audience and warm audience targeting, where you start warm and then it starts to expand cold via that algorithmic magic. All right, that's it for this episode. Take care, be blessed and until the next time you see me. Well, I hope everything's going well. See you in the next one, okay, bye.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie

Host