Get Your Exclusions Right – Jon Loomer Digital

Don’t ignore exclusions, but don’t overdo it either.

There’s a balance when it comes to targeting exclusions that many advertisers get wrong. While exclusions can help limit waste, overdoing it can increase your costs unnecessarily.

If you’re promoting a product that can only be purchased once, it makes sense to exclude those people who already bought that product. You don’t need to spend your money on them.

Exclude every possible custom 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 that would capture those customers. This is necessary because each individual custom audience by itself tends to be incomplete. Combine them to exclude these people as completely as possible.

That includes:

If you’re promoting the registration for a specific opt-in, that could mean three different custom audiences you should exclude:

• Customer list custom audienceA customer list custom audience is created by uploading a customer list that Facebook matches with users so you can target them with ads. More for people who subscribed
• Website custom audienceA website custom audience matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook. You can then create ads to show to that audience. More for the subscription confirmation page
• Lead form custom audience for these subscribers if you use lead forms

You can otherwise overdo exclusions.

You don’t need a true prospecting campaignThe 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 that eliminates anyone who knows you. This is a common strategy where advertisers want to reachReach measures the number of Accounts Center Accounts (formerly users) that saw your ads at least once. You can have one account reached with multiple impressions. More only new people, so they exclude their entire email list, all website visitors, and all engagement.

Beyond excluding the product you’re promoting, there’s just no need. Those people who know you are the most likely to buy. Including them improves the performance of your ad and keeps costs down.

If you separate broad remarketing into its own ad setAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More, you shrink that new audience. It hurts the performance of the prospecting ad set while creating a situation where the remarketing ad set costs more than it should. Smaller audiences result in increased CPMs.

Other than specific remarketing where the offer is unique (abandoned cart or upsells from a related opt-in), these exclusions are not only unnecessary but counterproductive.