To help advertisers keep aware of important updates from Meta, we’ve built a Quarterly Earnings Navigator Tool, available by clicking here. Since publishing our initial overview of the tool, Meta has released a new quarterly earnings report for Q2 of 2022. This article will cover some of the key highlights from the latest release.

Quick Highlight for Advertisers

Meta’s earnings release has a quick mention of ad prices:

In the second quarter of 2022, ad impressions delivered across our Family of Apps increased by 15% year-over-year and the average price per ad decreased by 14% year-over-year.

Advertisers worrying about consistently rising CPMs appear to potentially have some limited relief — at least at the overall level. However, it may be helpful to have some additional context.

Within our Earnings Navigator Tool, we can compare this difference in cost with historical periods:

Apart from this notable item, the release is filled with a variety of key data points. We’ll call out some headlines here below…

Meta Family of Apps – Daily Active People

Daily Active people grew – increasing 10 million vs the prior quarter to 2.88 billion

Meta Family of Apps – Monthly Active People

Monthly Active people also grew – increasing 10 million vs the prior quarter to 3.65 billion.

Facebook – Daily Active Users

Daily Active Users of the Facebook platform grew 8 million to 1.968 billion.

Facebook – Monthly Active Users

Monthly active users of the Facebook platform declined 2 million to 2.934 billion.

You can also check out the Quarterly Earnings Navigator to see a regional breakout of Facebook Daily and Monthly Active Users with more detail.

Meta Headcount

Meta Headcount grew 5,748 to 83,553 – an increase of ~7.4% in overall headcount.

Other Data Points

For additional info such as App Revenue, App Operating Income, Revenue per User, and some other calculations based on provided info in Meta’s Earnings Release, be sure to check out the various tabs across the Earnings Navigator Tool.

Your Turn

What did you find particularly interesting from the earnings report? Does the Earnings Navigator Tool help you identify anything surprising?

The post Meta Quarterly Earnings Q2 2022: Topline Observations appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Quarterly earning reports from Meta can stir interest among advertisers and data watchers. This is particularly true when there are significant shifts in certain key usage metrics. Advertisers might be interested in key platform usage data, but information may not always be easy to find within the formats of Meta’s presentation slides and press releases.

To help provide a window into the most interesting platform usage data, we’ve built the Meta Quarterly Earnings Data Segmenter: a tool that frames the view of key metrics from Meta’s quarterly earnings reports. Our tool has been developed with advertisers in mind. It enables filtering data across time periods and by specific geography (where Meta has made such information applicable).

How This Tool Is Built

We’re hopeful that this tool makes accessing data from Meta’s quarterly earnings reports as easy as possible.

Please note: *Meta does not own or sponsor this dashboard*. The data we’ve synthesized in our tool is all extracted information from Meta’s public slides and press releases on Meta’s investor website. Specifically, data provided from their Financials reporting can be used to identify key data with implications for advertisers. Now, to our tool.

Included Metrics

When Meta publishes their quarterly data, they usually provide it in the form of slides which cover only a two year retrospective. This makes it difficult to quickly cross-reference historical data, beyond the two year period that Meta states. Our tool compiles multiple data releases across time into a single dataset, wherever possible.

The data in our Meta Quarterly Earnings Data Segmenter tool can be filtered, navigated, and downloaded. We made every effort to accurately extract information, but only Meta’s self-published reporting should be treated as official.

We did not extract all available information from all Meta slides. Instead, we have focused on the metrics most relevant for advertisers:

• Ad Revenue: Overall Meta revenue, as well as revenue broken out by region
• Meta Family Active People: Including Daily and Monthly Active People metrics
• Facebook Active Users: Including Daily and Monthly Active User metrics
• Average Revenue per User: Reflecting revenue across all Meta properties
• Average Revenue per Person: Reflecting revenue across Facebook and Facebook Messenger, including a breakout by region
• Meta Apps Revenue by Source: Reflecting how Meta’s different properties are generating income
• Meta Apps Operating Income by Source: Reflecting profitability of Meta’s income sources
• Ad Prices and Impressions: Shows how much ad costs and delivery are changing over time
• Meta Employee Headcount: Reflecting how Meta is hiring

Depending on interest, we may keep this database updated in the future.

Accessing Our Meta Quarterly Earnings Data Segmenting Tool

Throughout this article, we have embedded different pages of the segmenting tool. The tool is fully interactive, built using Google Data Studio. If you find you have difficulty interacting with the reports, you might try using the tool from a desktop computer.

If you’d like to go directly into the tool, Click here to access the dashboard in full-screen.

Meta Family of Platforms – Active People

These are the users who access any Meta platforms within a defined scope.

According to Meta:

Meta defines a daily active person (DAP) as a registered and logged-in user of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp (collectively, their ‘Family’ of products) who visited at least one of these Family products through a mobile device application or using a web or mobile browser on a given day.

Here, we can gather a sense of the overall “Active People” activity across Meta’s mix of platforms. Unfortunately, these datasets do not allow us to segment these active users by different Meta platforms. However, there is specific info for Facebook users, which we’ll cover next…

Facebook Specific Platform – Active Users

According to Meta:

Meta defines a Facebook daily active user as a registered and logged-in Facebook user who visited Facebook through the Facebook website or a mobile device, or used Facebook’s Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day.

This is a key metric of changes in user behavior, so it seems logical that investors might pay particular attention to this data point as a core indicator of Meta’s growth.

Ad Revenue

Ad Revenue is a general indicator for the overall spend that is occurring across Meta’s properties.

How does overall revenue affect advertisers? Key questions to consider:

• As cash inflow increases, is Meta able to keep up the pace via hiring and/or automation?
• Are certain regions potentially over or under-invested vs. the advertising opportunity?

Average Revenue per User – Meta and Facebook

One of the more valuable metrics for advertisers may be the Average Revenue per User reporting. In particular, this metric may be most closely connected to the ad auction.

Meta uses an ad auction to determine which ad(s) to show to a person at a given point in time. The “winner” of the auction is the ad (and the advertiser) which Meta deems most valuable, based on an algorithmic competition among cost bidding, estimated ad action rates (by the user), and ad quality. Generally speaking, as revenue per user increases, competition in the ad auction also increases.

That said, advertisers should remember that an overall increase in ad competition does not necessarily increase advertisers’ costs. The ad auction takes into account other factors far beyond just advertiser bid. Jon has written all about the auction here. He’s also written about how competition among ads can impact results here.

Revenue by Source

Meta recently changed the way they break out revenue, in two new categories: Family of Apps and Reality Labs.

Family of Apps includes “Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other services”, while Reality Labs includes “augmented and virtual reality related consumer hardware, software, and content.”

Understanding the breakout of revenue across these two categories can be a useful point of reference as advertisers explore how Meta prioritizes the VR of Reality Labs against the familiar messaging and social platforms of their Family of Apps, in particular.

Operating Income by Source

Operating Income is categorized in the same way as revenue: by Family of Apps and Reality Labs. Note that Operating Income can be a particularly useful point of reference as it subtracts operating expenses from revenues. Essentially, we can identify what is profitable within Meta’s income mix.

This data point sheds light on which category is not currently generating revenue for Meta, which can be a potential indicator of the degree that Meta prioritizes a particular segment (e.g. Reality Labs’ augmented/virtual) as a long-term investment rather than a short-term revenue stream.

In other words, lines of business that are not revenue (and profit) drivers, might be seen as investments for future profitability to the company. So, tracking these costly investments over time can show us what’s most important to Meta, and that can help advertisers understand when such divisions (cost-heavy investments) transform into profit drivers for Meta.

Ad Impressions Delivered and Average Price Per Ad

Meta has very recently started to include two new key metrics which were not included in older quarterly earnings reports: Ad Impressions Delivered, and Average Price per Ad. Both of these data points are reported as a percentage change year-over-year, for the quarter reported.

Average Price per Ad is likely the most important to advertisers, as this can potentially be used as a proxy for overall auction costs.

Workforce Growth: Tracking Meta’s Employee Headcount

As Meta’s revenue increases, advertisers likely wonder how Meta is adding resources and expertise to match growing usage. Starting in Q1 of 2017, Meta has regularly included employee “headcount” numbers in their quarterly earnings press releases. This data provides a useful point of reference for understanding one way that the company keeps pace with their growth.

Of course, Meta is likely placing significant efforts on automating processes (such as ad approvals), so employee headcount alone should not be considered a direct indicator of how effectively Meta is supporting advertisers. Additionally, not all of Meta’s employees are focused on advertising. However, we can complete our own calculations to discern how headcount may maintain pace with ad revenue by introducing a new metric: ad revenue per employee.

Your Turn

Do you find this tool useful for navigating Meta’s quarterly earnings reports? If so, please let us know! If there is interest, we will look at keeping this updated each time Meta releases their reports.

The post Navigating Meta’s Quarterly Earnings Reports appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Is Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool still available?

In short — YES! Audience Insights *is* still available, though somewhat “rebranded”. It looks very different from the previous version of the tool. The functionality is quite different, also.

A quick background: Back in early 2021, Facebook announced that their Audience Insights tool would be removed. At the time, there were suspicions that Facebook would replace Audience Insights with some type of yet-to-be-introduced functionality within the Business Suite hub.

However, not all advertisers have access to use Business Suite. The lack of clarity around the “new tool” and the lack of consistent access to Business Suite resulted in confusion about whether or not Audience Insights remains available.

In this article, we’ll explain how all advertisers can access the updated Audience Insights tool. We’ll also share some tips and describe some limitations in new, current functionality. Let’s get to it.

How to Access Audience Insights

Business Manager has a general tool called “Insights.” Audience Insights is now a sub-section of that tool.

The instructions below should lead you to the main Audience Insights tool regardless of whether you use Business Suite. The only requirement is that you use Business Manager.

First, be sure you are logged into the Facebook account you use to access your business pages. Then, go to business.facebook.com. From there, select the stacked “hamburger” icon on the left side — from the top of the Business Manager navigation panel:

Your interface may include a pop-up notice like the screenshot above. The notice includes a direct link to the “new Insights Tool.” You can use this link to access the Insights tool, OR you can navigate there via a link available from the stacked selector drop-down:

If you do not see “Insights” available as one of the shortcuts, you can scroll down the selector screen to the “Analyze and report” sub-section, which should include “Insights” as a listed  option:

You may notice that “Audience Insights” is also one of the options. If you click on Audience Insights, it will take you directly to the “Audiences” section of the Insights tool. If you click on the Insights tool, you can click on “Audiences” to get to the same section.

Essentially, either option will eventually get you to where you need to be: enabling the review of both current and potential audiences.

Current Audience Details

Once you’ve selected the “Audience” option, you’ll see a breakdown showing the current audience for the page(s) you have selected in Business Manager. This view will breakdown age and gender segments. It will also show Top Cities and Top Countries details across both platforms.

You can change the Page audiences you are viewing from the drop-down at the top. If you do not see a page you have access to, you can adjust the Business account by changing the selection from the far left bottom side. The screenshot below illustrates these selection options:

Demographic details may not always appear for every page. To display these audience details, a page needs to have at least 100 likes/followers. Otherwise, you’ll see a message like the screenshot above: “Demographic Data Isn’t Available.”

While it’s great to see the details of your Facebook and Instagram page account audiences in a single place, the true strength of the tool is to be able to view the overall audiences across the Facebook and Instagram platforms, and to explore specific segments in detail. Read on to learn how…

The Real Power of Audience Insights: Potential Audience

The “old” Audience Insights had real analytical strength by enabling analysis of essentially any targetable audience on Facebook. The good news: You can generally still do this type of analysis.

First, click the “Potential audience” tab from the top. From there, you’ll see an overall view of the Facebook and Instagram platforms matching the default filters:

Filters will control the estimated audience size, and breakout segments therein. The screenshot above is my default view (yours may be different). Beneath the “Estimated audience size” range it shows the small descriptor for the filters that were applied for this total. The first filter listed is my preset default geography: the United States.

Next, the system simply mentions “2 other filters selected.” Those other two filters are 1) the default/preset age, and 2) the default/preset gender settings.

To manage these filters, select the “Filter” button on the top right:

From here, you can configure various interests or audience segments to better understand their impact on estimated audience size. You can also explore information such as Top Pages liked (these are commonalities among your audience), and other general demographic distribution across your audience.

Analyzing a Potential Audience: Example

To understand how Filters are used to analyze a potential audience, we can work through an example.

For this example, I’ve typed in “Jon Loomer” as an interest into the Filters area. The system has then suggested an existing interest result called “Jon Loomer Digital”:

After clicking the suggested result, the overall audience information populates:

As well as Location breakouts:

And Top Pages liked by this audience:

It’s not clear if Facebook is still making changes to this interface. For now, I have identified a few “quirks” with the new Audience Insights tool. Some of these have resulted in affected functionality vs. the old system — others are just a bit odd.

Key Limitations of the “New” Audience Insights

1) Though it would make sense to select Regions from the Filter options, this does not seem to be available.

You can, however, still select Regions when creating Audiences in the Saved Audiences interface of Business Manager, so my guess is that a disconnect here may be a design oversight within the Audience Insights tool.

Unfortunately, you can’t easily analyze regional data without the ability to enter a region within the locations filter. For example, you can’t enter “South America” to quickly see a breakdown of all countries in the continent.

Perhaps the most significant shortfall from this change is that you can’t enter “Worldwide” as a region of interest. Previously, using “Worldwide” as the location filter could illustrate an overall platform-wide audience across Facebook and Instagram. That said, you can still separately enter multiple countries.

Conceivably you can still arrive at comparable analysis by entering a large number of location filters, but you have to enter them one-by-one (as far as I can tell). There is no option to apply filters in bulk.

If you have found a way to apply bulk filters – or analyze a Worldwide audience in the tool – please let me know in the comments!

2) Though you can “Create audience” at the bottom of the Filters section, it doesn’t always correctly save a new audience the way you might want it to.

In testing, I’ve found that any audiences I save within the Audience Insights tool save to my *personal* ad account. This happens regardless of the Business Ad Account I am accessing when viewing Audience Insights. I expect this may also be a programming oversight, perhaps similar to the lack of Region targeting mentioned above.

3) You *may* have duplication of audiences across Facebook and Instagram.

This depends entirely on whether individual users have connected their Facebook and Instagram accounts. This issue is not quite a limitation of the Audience Insights tool, but instead a result of how Facebook/Meta treats audience size estimates size overall. Here’s how they describe this in Meta’s help article on the topic:

“Note: In cases where a person has connected their Facebook and Instagram accounts in Accounts Center, their Facebook and Instagram accounts will be counted collectively as a single account for ads estimation purposes. If a person has not connected their Facebook and Instagram accounts in Accounts Center, their accounts will be counted as multiple accounts for ads estimation purposes.”

Lost Functionality vs. the “Old” Audience Insights”

1) Page Like Indexing is not available in the new interface.

The old version enabled advertisers to assess how likely an audience member was to like a specific page vs. the general platform audience (Jon covered an example of this in an older article about Audience Insights, in the “Demographics” section of that article in case you’re curious). That feature is no longer available.

Perhaps many advertisers were confused by this previous functionality due to the way the general platform audience was defined. The little-used function may not be too great of a loss. That said, in the current version, the Top Pages for many segments often contains the same core group of pages. These are often popular pages that just happen to be very large on Facebook. Due to their large audience following, these popular pages are more likely to appear as a commonality among various audience segments. Some examples of these skewed common audiences might include pages such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Tasty.

2) A variety of previously available audience breakdowns are no longer presented.

The old version offered detailed comparison views such as Relationship Status, Education Level, and Platform Activity. These are no longer available. There does not appear to be a workaround or manual way to access this information within the current form of Audience Insights. Some of these data points were interesting for a better understanding an audience, so this change is a net loss.

So… Is Audience Insights still useful in its updated form?

There are definite differences versus what was previously accessible via Audience Insights. However, potential benefits remain from using the tool in its updated form. Here are some examples:

1) Understanding an Interest. You may be populating an audience in Ads Manager and wonder how relevant a particular interest is for your business. You could of course test the performance by adding it to your ad targeting. However, it could be useful to have the ability to dig into Audience Insights to analyze the audience in greater detail.

2) Checking Our Biases. I’ve found that we often assume a particular interest contains more of a specific demographic segment. For example, assuming that a specific topic is made up of more women versus men, or fewer younger people versus older, or more people in a certain state or city versus another. Audience Insights allows us to quickly check to see if our assumptions are correct. In many cases — reality may be quite different from what we expect!

3) Communicating an Opportunity. If you’ve ever had trouble convincing a client or partner that Facebook and/or Instagram have a large enough audience for a certain segment, the Audience Insights tool might be a fantastic resource to quickly illustrate the significance of a particular audience. You can even sit side-by-side with someone and use live data to individually compare different interests and audiences in real time. Though general audience size information is also available by building a Saved Audience, the dynamic demographic breakout functionality from Audience Insights adds additional context.

Other Resources

Is going down the “rabbit hole” of audience analysis particularly interesting to you? For another angle, we can identify overlap between audiences to better understand relationships between groups of people. Thankfully, that’s one technique that we still have access to (for now). For more info, you can check out this article from Jon.

Your Turn

What interesting findings have you come across with the “new” Audience Insights tool?

The post Yes, Facebook Audience Insights Still Exists appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The world of advertising on Facebook and Instagram is dynamic. Managing effective ads requires constant learning, testing, and optimization. Marketers should utilize available data sources — particularly free sources — to better understand how the social platform landscape is shifting. We can use Google search data (via Google Trends) to identify social media opportunities – especially related to advertising.

To help make this process easier, we’ve developed a dashboard that captures and compiles a variety of search data — all based on Google Trends. You can access that resource here. This article highlights context for the dashboard and guides advertisers on how to approach using Google Trends as a powerful resource in their toolkit.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free, publicly available tool that we can use to identify search popularity for specific search terms, as well as general search topics.

A few caveats: The information is provided for aggregate groups of Google users, and is not traceable user-level data. Also, note that Google Trends does *not* report direct search volume data. Instead, it is intended to provide base data to compare changes in search popularity over time. Importantly, it also provides comparison for popularity between terms or topics.

The tool can be simple to use, but there are many nuances for understanding all the possible data comparisons. While this article won’t go into depth on all of the limits and considerations of Google Trends, I will cover some key points within the context of the Social Media Search Activity tool we have available on Jon’s site.

Why Does This Matter?

Search behavior is a fantastic indicator of what people care about. You can think of it as an unfiltered read on what problems people are trying to solve.

For advertisers, this can be a powerful source of understanding what people want to learn more about. Or, what services people are seeking. Best of all, you can understand how these interests shift over time. This enables an adaptive approach where advertisers can consistently adapt their offerings to match against human needs.

To better understand potential implications, let’s explore some examples….

“Facebook Ads” as a Google Search Interest

Below, we’ve used Google Trends to snapshot a single search query: Google searches including the term “Facebook Ads,” as measured over time:

We’re looking here at a portrait of changes over time. Search popularity is presented on a scale from 0 to 100. Every chart you look at in Google Trends will be indexed in this way. This means that the high point is relative to whatever query or group of queries you are comparing in your data set.

In this specific example, we can see that there was a high point in the beginning of June 2020. We can also see that recent activity is continuing to be higher than any prior period. What this chart can not tell us is what may be driving that increased search interest. We can look more deeply at “Related Queries” (which is covered a bit later in this article) to explore potential drivers of changing patterns.

To dive deep, we can segment specific time ranges and evaluate related queries just for an isolated point in time. As an example: we can look just at the beginning of June 2020, and then see how Related Queries compare during that period vs. some other time frames when popularity may have been less for a similar search term. Needless to say, the topic of Related Queries deserves its own series of articles.

In the meantime, on to the next component…

Google Searches of “Facebook Ads” vs. “Instagram Ads”

Here we’ve added a second search query to compare, so we can see “Facebook Ads” vs. “Instagram Ads.” Notice how we still see the same high point in early June for Facebook Ads.

However, the addition of “Instagram Ads” to our research shows that, generally speaking, searches for Instagram ads are far less popular than searches for Facebook ads. We can also see that the volatility in search popularity for “Facebook Ads” is not as evident in searches for “Instagram Ads.”

Comparing Google Searches for “Ads” on Various Social Media Platforms

Now we’ve added additional social media platforms to our same advertising research term comparisons, including Google Ads, Twitter Ads, and Snapchat Ads. We can add up to 5 queries in any single view.

The snapshot above shows that search popularity for “Google Ads” is about twice as large (in popularity) compared to “Facebook Ads.” Additionally, “Google Ads” and “Facebook Ads” both experience similar changes in search popularity over time.

For some extra nerdy fun, you can export the underlying comparison data and calculate correlations between terms. Again, this may be material for a future article. However, I can share that “Google Ads” and “Facebook Ads” are highly correlated in this comparison. In this specific example, they have a correlation of .94 (whereas a score of 1.0 would be a “perfect” correlation). Meanwhile, “Facebook Ads” and “Instagram Ads” have a correlation of 0.86, which is also quite strong. This means that searches for “Google Ads” are more highly correlated with “Facebook Ads” than the same for “Instagram Ads”. Both comparisons have a strong correlation overall. These are interesting findings that we could explore more deeply.

Identifying Potential Opportunities based on Related Search Queries

We can look at how “Related Queries” differ between the search activity for various social platforms. Google Trends defines “Related Queries” as “users searching for your term also searched for these queries.” In this example, we’ll look at “Top Terms”, which are further defined as “terms that are most frequently searched with the term you entered in the same search session, within the chosen category, country, or region.”

Here in our homemade dashboard, we’ve pulled data for search popularity of “ads” for the different platforms, and placed these results into a side-by-side view for comparison:

We can learn quite a bit from this single view. First, “facebook ads” is the most common related query for searches for “Google Ads”. This is an indication of what we found in the correlation assessment earlier. People looking for information on Google Ads are often ALSO searching for Facebook Ads in the same search session. We can also see that people are often looking for information on “google analytics” in similar sessions that they are looking for info on “Google Ads”.

Meanwhile, with Facebook Ads we can see that “ads manager” is a common theme. This is an indication that people are seeking information on the Facebook ad buying interface. If you are in the space of offering services for advertisers, such findings can be a potential source of important insights.

Assessing Risks and Threats for your Social Media Platforms

Search data can provide a way for us to assess interest in a certain action that could be considered negative to a brand or cause. Deleting a specific platform is an example:

Here, we can see that interest in “deleting Instagram”is actually higher than “deleting Facebook.” This may be a surprising finding.

Again, as with other areas of search, there is opportunity for us to dive much deeper. The point is: there is insight in being able to explore and compare searchers’ activity regarding these social media platforms. It’s also interesting to be able to see when spikes happen. Or, to see how those spikes may –or may not– correlate, such as Facebook and Instagram in our example above.

Comparing Searches for Facebook Advertising Terms

Google Trends provides the ability to compare essentially any search term(s). We can apply that to an analysis more directly looking at search terms related to “Facebook Ads”:

An interesting finding from this is the strong association between searches for “Facebook Pixel” and searches for “Facebook Business Manager.” It’s also interesting to see how the popularity of searches for “Facebook Pixel” is actually higher than all of the other comparison searches here. If you are in the business of offering services related to Facebook Ads, focusing on the pixel could be an opportunity.

Search Data and Social Media: Powerful Possibilities

There are countless potential applications for using the information available from Google Trends. The dashboard we’ve provided is intended as a starting point for understanding generalities of how search trends can inform us about what’s occurring in the social media advertising landscape. Hopefully, the search data tool is useful for quickly identifying opportunities for social media. Or, at least to serve as the starting point for a deeper dive.

Feel free to bookmark the dashboard resource. The Google Trends information will stay updated over time, automatically. We’ll also plan to keep human-crafted written commentary, updated regularly.

Your Turn

How are you using Google Trends to identify advertising opportunities or threats? Do you find the dashboard we’ve developed useful?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Using Google Trends to Identify Social Media Opportunities appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook has a variety of targeting options. Knowing which to choose for specific scenarios can be confusing.

In advertising, a specific product or service may only be relevant to owners of certain devices. For instance, a Facebook ad for an iPad case might not be useful if shown to a target customer who doesn’t own that device (unless of course they are looking for a gift for an iPad-owning friend.) In such cases, an advertiser may want to control whether the ad is only seen by those who use that specific device.

In this article, we’ll cover some tactics for utilizing Facebook’s targeting options to ensure that this happens.

Tactic 1: Targeting Device Usage via Placements

The most explicit option for targeting specific devices is available at the ad set level within Ads Manager, via ad Placements.

Once you have created your campaign and accessed the ad set section, you can select to Edit Placements:

If you scroll down beyond the many options for platform placement (such as Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network), you should see an item called “Show More Options”:

From here, if you hover over the section called “Specific Mobile Devices & Operating Systems,” you should have an option to edit:

A drop-down selector will appear, where you can select certain device groups (such as “Android Devices Only”):

If you select one of these items, an area will appear that allows you to enter specific devices. In the example below, I’ve started typing “Samsung Galaxy s10,” and options populate that can be selected:

You can select multiple options in this list of devices where you would like to have Facebook place the ad:

Of course, some specific devices may not be available in this list.

Excluding Devices

Just as we can target devices, we can also exclude specific devices. Immediately below the option to include devices, there is an area where you can choose specific devices to exclude.

In this example, I’ve let Facebook know that I need the ad to appear for all Android Smartphones and Tablets, except for these specific devices:

Other Device Options

If you select for an ad to appear on a specific device category (such as Android devices), you also have the option to define the range of operating systems used for the devices. This may be appropriate, for example, if you are advertising a certain type of software only compatible for users with a certain operating system version on their device:

Note that you can also choose to only have the ad appear when a user is connected to Wi-Fi. This could be appropriate if you are linking to a website requiring a faster loading speed for an optimal experience.

General Device Placement Considerations

Two things to note on using these device placement options:

1) You can still adjust your platform placements. This means that you can select to only have the ad appear on Facebook News Feed for a specific device, or only on Instagram Stories for a specific device, etc.

2) As far as I’m aware, you cannot target specific Android Devices along with specific iOS devices in the same ad set. To do this, you would need to generate separate ad sets, each with their own devices selected.

Option 2: Targeting General Device Owners via Behavior Targeting

There may be a scenario where you want to target people who at least own a specific device, regardless of whether they are using the specific device in the moment they are seeing the ad.

Facebook has a targeting category available that can be used in this way for some device owners. This option is available under the “Detailed Targeting” section within the ad set options.

For example, if we begin typing “Samsung” into this area, we can see some options for “Owns” appear:

Note here that the option for S10 that we utilized for specific placement in an earlier example is not explicitly available from the “Owns” options. Instead, we simply have “Owns: Galaxy S9+.” However, Facebook does make occasional updates to the available targeting options. It’s worthwhile to regularly verify current options, if this is a feature you commonly use.

You can also access these targeting groups via the “Browse” option, in addition to typing the keywords into the text field:

Option 3: Targeting by Device Interest

If you scroll down the list of options that populate when you enter a keyword, you may notice some other options that appear, which are not related to device ownership:

Notice how Facebook refers to this as an “Interest,” not as a “Behavior.” We can see from the description that this is not necessarily someone who owns a Samsung Galaxy device. Instead, they’ve simply liked pages or interacted with content related to the topic.

Comparing Interests with Ownership Behavior

It can be important to differentiate between audiences who are considered “Interested” in a device from those who supposedly “Own” the device.

To test this, you can create audiences that reflect ownership and audiences that reflect interest. Then, you can compare the two using the Audience Overlap feature.

To do this, we’ll first access the Audiences section of Ads Manager, available from the drop-down menu at the top left of Business Manager or the main Ads Manager interface:

From here, you can create saved audiences, and compare their overlap. For this test, I’ll create an audience of people who own the Samsung Galaxy S6. I’ll also create an audience of people who are considered interested in the Samsung Galaxy S6:

Audience 1: Galaxy S6 Ownership

Audience 2: Galaxy S6 Interest:

Now that we have created both audiences, we can select both, and choose to Show Audience Overlap:

The overlap, which is our comparison metric for these two audiences, will then appear:

This example shows that many more people are classified as owners of Galaxy S6 devices than those who have expressed interest (or liked pages) related to the S6. Very few of the owners are considered interested in the device. This is perhaps not surprising because they already have the device, but it’s great to know that we can analyze interest audiences in this way directly with these data.

Device Targeting Recap

Here’s what we covered:

1) In many cases, we can tell Facebook the specific devices (or device categories) where we want to show our ads. We can also tell Facebook where we would like to not show our ads. This is the most direct option for controlling placement for those people who are actively using a specific device in the moment that they are shown an ad.

2) We can also target device owners. This allows us to potentially reach someone who owns a specific device, even though they may be seeing our ad while using a different device (such as on a workplace desktop computer).

3) Facebook also provides the option to target people who are interested in specific devices, regardless of the device they may or may not already own or use. In many cases, interest audiences may be quite different from ownership audiences. Luckily, Facebook has tools available via Audience Overlap that allow us to compare specific device ownership vs. interest.

Comparing and overlapping audiences is one of my favorite topics of Facebook advertising. To dig deeper, check out this article about comparing Facebook and Instagram audience sizes.

Your Turn

For what sort of campaigns might you utilize device targeting? Do you simply ignore device targeting, and let Facebook run your ads across all potential devices?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post How to Target Specific Mobile Devices on Facebook and Instagram appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Things change quickly. Usually, I have the pleasure of writing about new Facebook Advertising features. Unfortunately, this post is about the removal of a feature.

Facebook has deprecated the feature allowing for the combination of Lead Forms paired with Instant Experiences. As part of this, the advertising goals available for Lead Forms have also changed.

What Has Changed

In a help center article related to Lead Ads and Instant Experiences, Facebook has shared that all ads using Lead Forms now can only be paired with the Lead Generation objective.

Here is Facebook’s update message from the help center:

What This Means

• For all ads that utilize Lead Forms, you can only use the Lead Generation objective to create and run these ads. You can not use any other objective for these ads.
• Lead Forms can not be embedded within an Instant Experience. You can not link to a Lead Form within an Instant Experience.
• Any campaigns you have already running using this feature will stop delivering on December 13th (2019).

Why This Matters

There are cases where using other advertising objectives could be beneficial.

First, Lead Generation may not be the primary goal for an advertiser. The ability to use other objectives could be more important.

Second, an advertiser might primarily focus on a creative message (delivered through an Instant Experience). Lead generation may only be a secondary consideration.

Unfortunately, advertisers will no longer be able to optimize for other variables when using a lead form – at least not directly within Facebook’s optimization system.

Of course, an advertiser could still focus on driving a creative message in a video or image and link from that to a lead form. However, the automatic optimization that Facebook delivers will no longer consider anything other than Lead Generation.

Why Did Facebook Make this Change?

As with many recent changes, I imagine this might be due to a few advertisers messing things up. Facebook is simply implementing systems that allow their oversight to be more streamlined.

As we have seen previously, Lead Forms can be an incredibly effective feature for gathering a large amount of signups in very little time. Potentially, Facebook wants to more actively monitor the gathering of data.

It’s possible that Facebook’s forced adherence to the Lead Generation campaign objective enables more effective monitoring for these types of ads, as they would not need to consider other potential objectives when they review the usage of Lead Forms across their platform.

In any case, it would be great to see the return of this feature in the future. For now, advertisers will need to adjust their campaign structures accordingly.

Are There Any Other Options?

As far as I’ve seen, there are no ways to circumvent this requirement, as Facebook has fully deprecated the feature. The bottom line: if you are using a Lead Form, you can only use the Lead Generation objective to run an ad associated with the form.

In testing, I attempted to create a Brand Awareness objective campaign, using an existing post that utilized a Lead Form. I received an error message like this:

Additionally, when selecting the Lead Generation objective, I’m only seeing the option to optimize for Leads:

What Now?

While the integration with Instant Experiences is no longer available, there are still opportunities to continue improving the effectiveness of Lead Ads. In particular, we’ve seen advertisers report success when adding Instagram as a placement for Lead Generation campaigns (in addition to many other campaign types!)

Your Turn

What are some creative ways you have used Lead Forms, or any other advertising options on Facebook or Instagram, to build your customer lists?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Forms No Longer Available with Instant Experience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook’s library of guides and resources is vast, yet these references can be a bit intimidating to navigate. Fortunately, for advertisers who are in need of case studies, best practice guides, tips, resources, updates, and industry-specific information, Facebook offers a trove of helpful information presented in visually-appealing formats.

After I put together A Short Reference of Facebook One-Sheeter Guides, I realized there were some advertisers who could use some help in navigating Facebook’s reference resources in general.

Sometimes, an advertiser simply needs some pre-built documentation for themselves, or to help educate colleagues, clients, or partners about a specific topic.

Below, I’ve curated a variety of Facebook’s resource pages for topics that are relevant to a wide range of advertisers. I focused on resources that have been updated within the past two years to help ensure the information is as current as possible. Many of the resources have been updated within the past six months.

I’ve grouped these by topical area to ease navigation. To access the reference page related to any specific item, simply click on the title at the beginning of the description. Feel free to bookmark this list if you’d like!

Industry-Specific Resources

There are definitely more materials relevant to each industry in addition to those that are shown in each of these topics pages. However, what I love about these is that they provide a great focus point, and more links to training resources, case studies, and Facebook research on various topics.

Food:

Food on Facebook and Instagram: CPG Food
Includes a downloadable guide on how to partner with Facebook on product launches.

Food on Facebook and Instagram
A general guide that is not specific to CPG. This resource also includes a downloadable guide with appealing visuals and detailed presentation of data.

Automotive:

Play with Cars: Automotive
Includes a downloadable Creative Best Practices manual focused on the automotive industry.

Facebook Strategies for Auto Dealers
Includes a downloadable strategy and resource guide.

Auto Insurance Insights
A very basic page, this also has a downloadable guide with research on the auto insurance industry.

Tech, Telecom, and Gaming:

Technology and Telecom Facebook Resources
Includes a downloadable “B2B Creative Playbook.”

The Art and Science of Movie Marketing
A simple page that includes a link to a downloadable deck with research about what influences audience film choices.

Facebook Business for Gaming
Links to various best practices and insights related to gaming, with a focus specifically on mobile gaming.

Real Estate:

Connect Your Real Estate Business with Customers Using Facebook
Single-page resource for understanding the opportunities of Facebook for the real estate industry.

Beauty:

Inside Beauty
Includes a downloadable “New Beauty Decision Journey” document. Note: This resource is focused on Europe, as of the time this list was put together.

Direct Response and Online Sales

Discover Growth: Facebook Marketing Solutions for Direct Response
Includes a downloadable whitepaper and links to various resources focused on driving online sales, offline sales, lead generation, and app installs.

Global Ecommerce Market -– Facebook for Ecommerce Industries
Includes a downloadable guide called “Drive Sales with Facebook: The Guide for Retail Marketers.” This comprehensive document is 89 pages long!

Lead Ads Playbook
Includes a downloadable Lead Ads guide.

Facebook Marketplace
A general resource on Marketplace, with links to additional resources.

Facebook Marketplace for eCommerce
This is a more specific resource related to third-party integrations for Marketplace.

Creative Development and Execution

Facebook Ads Inspiration
Includes examples of creative ads, intended to serve as inspiration for design.

How to Make a Video for Facebook
Includes links to different resources for creating videos.

It’s a Great Day to Video: Tell a Story with Facebook Video Solutions
Includes resources on development and performance measurement for video ads.

Facebook Through the Lens
This video series is focused on driving inspiration for those who are creating mobile-first video ads for Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook Mobile Studio
Includes guides as well as a downloadable template for creating a mobile content planning brief.

Facebook-Curated Editorial Content

Grow: By Facebook
Using Facebook’s own description for this resource: “Grow is a content and events programme that shines a light on people, companies and trends challenging the status quo.”

I would describe this as an “interesting read” resource, where Facebook aggregates interviews, opinions, and research on a variety of topics. There’s also a chatbot feature as well as an opportunity to subscribe to a mailing list.

A recent example is the “Headset and Heart” article discussing virtual reality’s power for social good.

Three and a Half Degrees: The Power of Connection (Podcast Series)
Somewhat similar to Grow, this is a series focused on interviews with subject matter experts and conversations on topics of connection enabled (and challenged by) technology.

Facebook Success Stories/Case Studies
Here is a repository of case studies (with results, where available) that can be filtered by Business Size, Objective, Industry, Product, and Region. You can also use a search bar to look for specific companies or topics, which is great for those moments when you think to yourself, “I know I read an example case study about this somewhere!”

Holiday Campaigns

Facebook traditionally releases campaign planning guides related to the holiday season, and I imagine they will again this year. Here are the resources from last year that are already available — these could help those trying to get an early start on planning for this year:

Facebook Holidays 2018 Shopping Insights and Marketing Tips
Includes a downloadable guide for the 2018 holiday season.

Facebook Christmas 2018
Includes links to downloadable guides about email and video, along with fact sheets.

Small and Medium-Sized Business Resources

Boost Your Business
Information on participating with in-person events to learn about Facebook resources for businesses.

Build to Break by Facebook Business: Accelerating Growth for Disruptors
This is an interesting resource focused on disruption. It includes an annual report titled “The State of Disruption 2018,” as well as a “Build to Break Playbook.”

Facebook and TV

Turn Great TV Ads into Great Mobile Ads
This resource covers some best practices on adapting traditional TV creative into mobile experiences. It also links to a specific Blueprint learning course on the topic.

TV and Facebook Work Better Together
A single-page resource that links out to more in-depth topics related to measurement, planning, and creative development for campaigns that utilize both Facebook and TV components.

General Topics (which didn’t fit neatly into one of the above categories)

Zero-Friction Future
This includes a downloadable guide to reduce friction across the various stages of a consumer journey.

Facebook Events
This is a repository for more “big event” types of occasions, e.g. Cannes Lions and Facebook Summit. Along with lists of upcoming events, the page also contains recaps of past events.

And that’s all… for now :-)

Your Turn

Are any of these particularly useful for you?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post A Curated List of Facebook Marketing Reference Guides appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram involves details which can seem complicated. To nurture skills, advertisers often look for simplified how-to instructions for topics, particularly to help them have conversations with people who are less involved with the details of Facebook advertising mechanics.

Facebook occasionally releases “one-sheeter” reference documents. Often times, these new or amended resources are not heavily promoted. Typically, these take the form of a Facebook quick reference guide focused on a specific topic.

These documents can be great references with clear, thoughtful design to communicate complex ideas in a succinct format.

This short article will help provide an easy resource to bring some of these Facebook one-sheeter resources together. Feel free to bookmark it! While this list is by no means exhaustive, it captures some of the main topics.

Video Requirements and Ad Specs

Video Requirements One-Sheeter: This resource has an easy-to-use chart layout showing the various design requirements and recommendations for different ad placements.

Conversion Lift and Media Campaign Testing

Conversion Lift One-Sheeter: This resource provides a quick guide on how a Conversion Lift test works on Facebook.

Facebook Test and Learn Tool: This is related to the Conversion Lift tool, but provides a reference for the various other options available through Facebook’s Test and Learn products. This resource deserves a mention here, even if it is not in the same one-sheeter format.

Bidding

Facebook Bid Strategy Guide: This guide includes graphical examples of the differences between three bidding strategies: Target Cost, Cost Cap, and Bid Cap.

**This Bid Guide resource is what inspired the creation of this article!

Value Optimization with Minimum ROAS Bidding: A bit of a more specialized feature that allows you to work with Facebook’s ad delivery optimization to achieve a minimum return on ad spend.

Facebook Pixel and App Events

Facebook Tracking Pixel: A single-page resource all about the tracking pixel, which is used by Facebook to measure (and optimize) activity on a website, and associate it with activity on Facebook’s suite of properties.

App Events: This is similar to the Tracking Pixel resource, but this tool is focused on events within an app that you own or manage.

Click-to-Messenger Campaigns

Click-to-Messenger Tips: A reference sheet for tactics that can improve Click-to-Messenger campaign performance.

The Power5

Power5 – Rewriting the Playbook for Marketing Excellence: Facebook has begun showcasing some best-practice principles for advertisers. In a single page called the Power5, this tool is meant to capture the various concepts in one place.

For more on the Power5, check out the Power5 Hub, complete with case studies and deeper details.

Advertising Transparency

Ads Related to Politics or Issues of National Importance: Facebook has increasingly made efforts to establish transparency in their ads and ad policies. This resource helps advertisers understand when and what actions they need to take when these topics apply to their content.

Facebook Ad Frequency

Controlling Frequency: This resource provides an overview of Facebook’s various options for controlling the frequency of advertising impressions.

*Bonus: Jon wrote an article all about managing Facebook ad frequency, and I wrote another about considering an ideal frequency, in case this topic is of specific interest to you.

Honorable Mentions

The following are great resources, but not technically in one-sheeter format…

1) Facebook Account Security

Facebook recently posted a blog entry on their Facebook Business News page, called: “Tips to Keep Your Facebook Account and Business Page Secure“.

2) GDPR

What is the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR): Here is a page to initiate understanding of GDPR and how it matters for advertisers.

GDPR Developer FAQs: This is a basic overview with some common questions from developers related to GDPR.

That’s it… for now!

All of the resources above have much greater detail and context than these simple Facebook one-sheeter pages can cover. Hopefully, this may provide a starting point on these topics. In most cases, there are links within each of these page for further detail.

Your Turn

Do you have any quick reference guides you like to use?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Short Reference of Facebook One-Sheeter Guides appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

When it comes to Saved Audiences, a question commonly repeats: How do I duplicate a saved audience in Ads Manager?

While there’s currently no direct way to duplicate a saved audience, there is manual process that allows you to do this. We’ll cover that here.

What Are Saved Audiences?

Facebook’s Saved Audiences feature allows advertisers to create audiences that can be re-used in multiple campaigns. This can be a serious time saver. The feature can also enable more detailed analysis, such as understanding audience overlaps.

To access Saved Audiences, you’ll first need to access Facebook Business Manager, or, if you’re not using Business Manager, go directly to the desired ad account. At the time of this writing, both paths have a standard URL convention, which I’ll share in case it helps.

As an initial step, be sure you are logged into your personal Facebook account. To access Business Manager, you can go to business.facebook.com. To access ad accounts that are not in Business Manager, you can go to www.facebook.com/manage. In either case, you should be sure to select the Ad Account for which you want to create the saved audience.

Once you’re viewing either Business Manager or Ads Manager, click on the drop-down from the top left of the page. Then, select “Audiences” from under the “Assets” section:

Duplicate a Saved Audience

Since there is not an automatic feature to duplicate an audience, here is how we can do it manually, with an easy, straightforward workaround.

First, confirm again that you are in the correct ad account by looking at the ad account name on the top left.

Now, select the saved audience you would like to duplicate by checking the box to the left of that audience’s name. Then, select the “Edit” button:

From here, the audience will open. To duplicate that audience, we can simply edit the name (I’ll add a “Copy1” tag to the current name). From here, we can make any changes we’d like to the existing audience.

For this example, I’ll add an interest of “Cars”. Since I want to tell by the name some of the information about the audience, I’ll go ahead and include a reference to Cars in the name as well.

Once you’ve made any changes you’d like, click the “Save as New” button. Be sure *not* to click the “Update” button, as that will simply rename the previous, existing audience vs. duplicating it as a newly-named option.

**If you accidentally click Update, you can re-open and change back to the original audience name, remove any changes you made (such as the adding of interests), and then click Update again to essentially undo the change you just made.

Once we click “Save As New,” a confirmation screen appears letting us know the audience is about to be copied. Notice here that Facebook automatically adds a ” – copy” tag at the end of the audience name. Since I already added “Copy1” in the name of my newly duplicated audience, I’m going to delete the additional tag before I click “Save”:

Once the change is saved, you should see the new, duplicated audience appear in the saved audience list:

**If the duplicated audience doesn’t appear, click to reload the page. Doing so normally causes it to populate the newest version.

There you have it! You’ve successfully duplicated one of your existing saved audiences.

This trick works especially well for audiences that have a large number of interests, or when there are other targeting components that you want to avoid rebuilding manually.

Your Turn

I love handy tricks to save time in Ads Manager. How have you used any workarounds?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Duplicate a Saved Audience in Facebook Ads Manager appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Location targeting on Facebook can be a powerful feature. However, there are challenges to understand exactly how Facebook uses different pieces of available information to determine a user’s location.

I’ve written in detail about location targeting before. Yet, as with many topics, there is always room to explore in more detail. Facebook’s “Recently In” target feature is one such area that deserves a bit more attention.

The “Recently In” Target Feature

First, a quick refresher. Facebook has four primary location targets available. Facebook’s Help Article defines them as follows:

• Everyone in this location (default): This option allows you to reach people whose home or most recent location is within the selected area. You might want to advertise large fairs or high-profile sporting events, for example, to everyone in a location.
• People who live in this location: This includes people whose home is within the selected area. You might want to advertise a local retail store, for example, to people who live in a location.
• People recently in this location: With this option, you are reaching people whose most recent location is within the selected area. You might want to advertise time-sensitive sales, for example, to people recently in the location you choose.
• People traveling in this location: This includes people traveling in the selected area as determined by the device and connection information that Facebook collects who are more than 125 miles from their home location. You might want to advertise rental cars, for example, to people traveling in a location.

The option for “People recently in this location” may seem fairly straightforward. We’re targeting those users who had this as their most recent location – ok, got it.

But, there are several questions around this. Specifically….

How is Location Determined?

When I published the Detailed Guide article on location targeting, Facebook had a dedicated help page with additional info on location targeting. Now, it appears the help page has changed, and it no longer has the reference. Thankfully, I already captured that info in the article. Here’s what we had:

• Everyone in this location: People whose current city on their Facebook profile is that location, as well as anyone determined to be in that location via mobile device.
• People who live in this location: People whose current city from their Facebook profile is within that location. This is also validated by IP address and their Facebook friends’ stated locations.
• Recently in this location: People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined only via mobile device. This includes people who live there or who may be traveling there.
• People traveling in this location: People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined via mobile device, and are greater than 100 miles from their stated home location from their Facebook profiles.

Other articles across the web had captured this information as well. I’m not sure why Facebook removed this detail, but we do still have one additional reference via Facebook’s Blueprint training program…

Facebook Blueprint’s Training Module on Location: Confusion

The original help page where I pulled the device targeting info now redirects to a variety of general ad targeting resources. One of these is Facebook’s Blueprint Training Module on Core Audience Targeting.

To add to confusion, this module has a specific section on Location-Based Audiences. That section seems to alter the definitions or details of the targeting options:

Huh? This is very confusing. According to the way this is worded, it seems that we should interpret the “People recently in this location” to equate to New Residents. That is, the “People recently in this location” is more about people who have recently arrived to a location, which is seemingly differentiated from “People who Live in this Location” based on recency alone.

One potential explanation? This may be simply a mistake in Facebook’s training. Here’s why I think this: The definition above is not reflected anywhere else in Facebook’s documentation on this topic.

As described earlier in this article, the main help page dedicated to Location Targeting defines “Recently In” as “People whose most recent location was in the area.” This does not imply anything about newly arrived residents. This seems like a mistake in Blueprint. If you’re reading this, Facebook, we’d love an updated Blueprint training that has more detail on this topic!

How Could “Recently In” Work in Reality for Advertisers?

I believe we can most easily think through the various targeting options by looking at some scenarios.

Scenario 1: A resident is traveling on vacation.

Let’s say we have someone (I’ll call her Cassandra) who normally resides in New York City, and is currently traveling in Miami.

Which targets would include Cassandra?

• Everyone in this location: New York City
• Everyone in this location: Miami
• People who live in this location: New York City
• People traveling in this location: Miami
• People recently in this location: Miami

The possibly unclear area is for “Recently in.” The way I interpret Facebook’s documentation on this is that if Facebook can determine that Cassandra’s current location is Miami (based on her mobile device), then she would NOT be targeted with ads associated with “People recently in this location: New York City.”

That said, I can think of one scenario where it might be possible that Facebook would still include her in this target.

Here it is: Maybe Cassandra last opened the Facebook app on her phone in NYC. She has enabled location services for the app in her smartphone privacy settings, but only when the app is open. She arrives to Miami, but doesn’t open Facebook on her phone. Instead, she arrives to her hotel, and opens Facebook on her laptop.

In this situation, at least theoretically, ads that are targeting People Recently in New York City may appear on her desktop, as the documentation that we’ve seen in the past indicated that Facebook relies on mobile device location only for the Recently In target. Since Facebook would not have her current location, it would assume she was most recently in NYC.

However, these types of scenarios are likely not the norm. Let’s cover how your campaigns might be impacted by the various location target functionalities.

Implications on Ad Campaigns: “Recently In” Target Option

There are potential implications on how people might presume this target functionality works. Based on the way I’ve seen and heard Facebook advertisers discuss the “Recently In” target feature, it seems they are sometimes using the option almost as a physical re-targeting capability.

As an example, you might have an event in Atlanta, and you want to later re-target everyone who was recently in Atlanta – hoping to capture those who attended the event. Since Facebook would be constantly updating people’s “Recently In” location based on the most-current mobile device data, our ad would mostly be reaching people who are currently in Atlanta.

That’s different than what we may have thought. This means the “Recently In” location target actually should NOT be used for physical location re-targeting, such as after an event held in an area.

This may pose the question: Why does Facebook’s “Recently In” target even exist?

For an answer, we can review the first breakdown of definitions at the beginning of this article (in The “Recently In” Target Feature section). As we saw there, the default “Everyone in this Location” target is going to include both people who live in that location and people whose most recent location was in the area. Since this includes people who live there (but who may be traveling), that could mean we actually have people seeing our ad who are not even in the location we specified.

This thinking aligns with a scenario that Facebook mentioned where the “Recently In” target may be applied. As they state: “You might want to advertise time-sensitive sales, for example, to people recently in the location you choose”. Knowing that using “Recently In” is the closest alignment we have for people currently in a location, this makes sense.

What To Expect When You Use the “Recently In” Target

This can still be confusing for Facebook advertisers. To simplify, let’s break down campaign planning into two categories for your campaigns that use the “Recently In” location target.

Category 1) Ads appearing on the mobile app. In this scenario, you should mostly just expect to reach people who are currently in that location you list. If they are on their mobile app, Facebook will continuously update their location based on the latest data. The latest data should reflect their current location.

Category 2) Ads appearing on desktop. You should expect to reach people based on the location where they last were while using their mobile device, when Facebook had access to their mobile device location info.

Given the different ways that mobile app usage can impact the way ads are targeted, it may be cleanest to focus only on using mobile app placements for any campaigns that using the “Recently In” target. Experiment, see what you find out, and feel free to share with us in the comments below.

What We Know: “Recently In” Targeting

That was a fun ride down the targeting rabbit hole!

Here’s the summary of what we covered:

• “Recently In” can most easily be interpreted as Currently In a location, based on mobile device data.
• The “Recently In” option should not be considered an effective way to physically re-target people based on a location they visited in the past.
• Different location targeting options use different data to determine location information.
• Facebook’s Blueprint training module about Location Targeting appears to potentially have a mistake, or is outdated.

Your Turn

A quick shout out to Trey Edwards over at getnerdywithme.com. After we published our own Detailed Guide on Location Targeting, he put together a super-interesting walkthrough on using exclusion targeting to get a much narrower location radius for a specific target – even down to a single building!

How do you use Location targeting? What creative methods do you have?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Understanding “Recently In” Facebook Ad Location Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Ads Manager changes constantly. It is dynamic, with users seeing regular roll-outs of new features. Keeping track of these changes can be a challenge!

We commonly see member posts in the Power Hitters Clubs where users share screenshots of something they see, asking “is this new?” Luckily, Facebook has recently made available some features to help with these types of questions, keeping advertisers aware of changes.

Why Facebook Ads Manager Changes Are Important

Digital advertising is an area of regular changes; some huge and some small. Keeping up can be important, not only to ensure that you take advantage of features available, but also to continuously test advertising processes, techniques, and systems. Constant testing is a hallmark of many successful advertisers.

Facebook (and Instagram) have grown tremendously in a very short period of time. As new resources continue to be added, advertisers must proactively maintain an awareness of what is newly available. In some cases, it’s equally important that advertisers be aware of features that may no longer be available. For example, the removal of Partner Categories, with the subsequent reinstatement of some targeting features, illustrates just how quickly things can change.

Changes to ad tools might be due to regulatory pressure, platform competition (e.g. Google), or simply behind-the-scenes continued innovation. Advertisers are tasked with staying current with what is possible, regardless of Facebook’s rationale.

To avoid overwhelm or distraction, I don’t recommend testing absolutely every new change or feature that Facebook releases. Instead, start with your core business goals, and align the items you test against those needs. I would not advocate simply testing or implementing the “shiny new toy”, merely because it’s available.

What’s New with Ads Manager: Facebook’s Help Center

Within the Help Center, there is a dedicated page that tracks features and changes within the Ads Manager tool. As of this writing, this resource goes all the way back to March 2017. However, this resource has not been updated in 2 months. While it’s unclear whether Facebook plans to continue supporting this on an ongoing basis, it can still be a useful reference point.

Nestled within the November 2018 updates, there is a small note about a new feature within Ads Manager:

Perhaps somewhat ironic in nature, this call-out mentions a feature in Ads Manager that will communicate new changes and updates directly within the interface. It seems there are two main ways to access this information. I’ll cover both.

Option 1: Accessing Ads Manager Release Notes via Help within Ads Manager

If you log into either Business Manager or Ads Manager, you should be able to click the small question mark icon (?) to the top-right corner of Ads Manager. Note, if you’re using Business Manager, you need to do this from within an ad account. That is, you need to be within the actual “Ads Manager” sub-tool of Business Manager, at the ad account level.

After you select the help icon, the release notes should populate at the top of a box on the right side of the page. There is a “View All Releases” link that opens to a longer view with more release notes available:

After selecting the “View all releases” link, there should now be a log of release notes separated by week appearing down the right side of the screen:

Option 2: Accessing Ads Manager Release Notes via a Direct Link

I also found a notification within Business Manager that took me to the release notes:

After deconstructing the destination of this notification, it seems that users can navigate directly to the screen by following a standard main link. For this to work, you need to already be logged into your Business Manager or Ads Manager account.

Here’s the link: https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager/manage/campaigns?launch_help_tray=RELEASE_NOTES

By using this link, you should be taken to the same release notes log as shown earlier in this article, populated to the right side of Ads Manager.

Final Tips: Navigating Ads Manager Release Notes

If you scroll to the very bottom of the Release Notes section, you should be able to click on the navigation buttons to access older, or newer, release notes:

Certain items even have additional information available on the specific feature. Normally you can spot these based on a link to  “Learn More” that appears below the specific item:

Other Resources for Keeping Up to Speed with Facebook Ads Manager Changes

Facebook (and Instagram) have a variety of resources to maintain an awareness of changes, new features, and best practices. While the Ads Manager Release Notes are specific to changes for that tool, there are some helpful resources located elsewhere.

Here are a few I find myself reviewing often:

Facebook IQ: A central hub where Facebook regularly shares research, case studies, and best practice examples of advertiser ads and strategies.

Facebook for Developers Blog: A space where Facebook tends to place more technical updates. Though these are sometimes highly technical in nature, you can occasionally get a sooner-than-others preview of potential new features, prior to their release in general advertising resources. There’s also a Facebook group for Marketing Developers.

Facebook Business is a Page where updates are often shared from the Facebook team. Facebook Business also has an email list that you can sign up for here.

Of course, there’s always Jon’s Newsletter, if you aren’t signed up already!

Perhaps the strongest resource: If you’d like to connect with a community of like-minded advertisers on topics such as these, the Power Hitters Club (PHC) offers go-to expertise. Here, members discuss not only the individual changes, but also the direct implications on advertising activities. Jon also shares weekly updates (via webinar) directly with his PHC members, which is a fantastic way to stay current.

Your Turn

How do you remain up-to-date with changes in Facebook advertising?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ads Manager Changes: How to Keep Up appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Saved Audiences are a built-in feature allowing advertisers to pre-build an audience for repeated use in targeting. By using the Saved Audience tool, you can save time and ensure consistency in your advertising. You can also gain insight into the make-up of a particular target group.

Are Instagram users also included in these pre-configured audience groups? In this article, we’ll review what Saved Audiences tell us, and use available data to answer this question.

How to use Facebook Saved Audiences

To create a Saved Audience, navigate to the Audiences feature from within the Assets section of Business Manager (or Ads Manager if you do not have Business Manager set up).

From within Audiences, click the Create Audience button, and then click Saved Audience.

From here, create a name for your audience by typing it into the name field at the top. You can then select your targeting factors.

For this example below, I’ve given the audience a sample name, with some basic targeting information to include people in California between the ages of 25 and 45.

A quick tip: Be sure to use a consistent naming convention that includes important tags for different audience groups. This allows you to easily sort and find audiences later.

Once you have your targeting details set, save the audience you’ve created by clicking the Create Audience button on the bottom right.

You will now see the Saved Audience listed in your main audience screen.

What does the Audience Size include?

At first glance, we might assume that our audience size comprises all Facebook users who meet the parameters of the Saved Audience.

However, this is not the whole story. We can dive further into some other data to confirm this.

If we check the box to select this audience, we can then choose the option Create Ad to open Ads Manager with the Saved Audience automatically included.

Once Ads Manager opens, you will have the option to access the Campaign, Ad Set, or Ad details. For this exercise, we’ll access the Ad Set setup screen.

From the Ad Set screen, we can see that the Potential Audience size is 15,000,000 – which matches what we would expect from our Saved Audience.

However, it’s important to note that this currently includes ALL placements (including Instagram). If we choose to Edit Placements, we can identify differences between placement options.

Here’s an example with only Facebook placements selected:

We can see in this example that selecting the placement of only Facebook dropped our audience size to 12,000,000. If only Facebook users were included in the Saved Audience size, our Saved Audience would also have said the size was 12,000,000 (instead of the 15,000,000 indicated).

What does this mean?

Many advertisers may have been operating under the false assumption that a Saved Audience is made up only of Facebook users.

But, we now have confirmed evidence that Facebook Saved Audiences DO INCLUDE Instagram users (and Audience Network/Messenger) in the audience size.

If you regularly use this audience size for planning or some other data generation, this is an important insight.

If you’re interested in diving into further detail about segmenting audiences and comparing overlap between platforms, check out this article.

Your Turn

Had you assumed that Facebook Saved Audiences only included Facebook users?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Are Instagram users included in Facebook Saved Audiences? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook advertisers continue to experience challenges when using the platform’s custom audience feature to estimate potential audience sizes. In particular, many advertisers report seeing errors that state the audience size is “not available”.

In conversations among advertisers in the Power Hitters Club groups, these issues have been a recurring topic, with members sharing differing experiences (and frustrations!).

But there’s hope: Some advertisers are again seeing custom audience sizes. This post covers scenarios when audience size data may be available. We’ll also bring you up to speed on why this problem exists in the first place.

A Brief History on Facebook Custom Audience Size Issues

In March of this year (2018), Facebook removed the ability to view custom audience sizes. This was in response to a vulnerability that could be potentially exploited, allowing an advertiser to identify individual user data.

The official Facebook response (via a post on the Bug Bounty program page) stated that custom audience size data would simply no longer be available. The issue also made it into the platform status tool, and it appeared this would be the new normal.

While not directly related, Facebook’s recent issue with the log-in information of almost 50 million accounts may lead to increased scrutiny of user data. These types of issues are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Based on these challenges, it may seem safe to assume that advertisers will no longer have access to custom audience data.

However, it’s not that simple, and for some advertisers, the size data has returned.

Facebook Custom Audience Size Back? (Sort of!)

After reviewing several scenarios, we know that some advertisers are once again seeing custom audience size estimates. We haven’t been able to identify why this is available for some, but not all, advertisers.

Based on what we’ve seen, advertisers are not seeing custom audience sizes for website audiences, but they are populating for certain engagement audiences. Here’s an updated screenshot from this week to illustrate:

However, there are certain scenarios where the data becomes unavailable. In the example screenshots below, I’ve replaced the audience names for purposes of illustration:

1) If you use a custom audience as the base for a saved audience, the size will not populate. Instead, you will get a “Data is not available” error in place of the potential reach:

Similarly, saving the audience generates a “Not available” message on the main audience screen:

2) If you combine two custom audiences together for a saved audience – the size will not populate:

3) Using the custom audience to compare overlap with any other audience gives the message: “To protect the privacy of people on Facebook, the audiences you selected are unavailable for audience overlap.”:

*If you need a refresher on how to compare audience overlap, check out this write-up from Jon.

Funny enough: In the above example, the Test Custom Audience 1 shows as “Not available” under the audience title name, even while the audience number does appear in the main audience list:

Using Ads Manager, Estimated Potential Reach during ad setup will also not populate for custom audiences, even if the audience number does appear in the main Audiences screen:

As a final note, Audience Insights still displays no data for these custom audiences.

Implications for Advertisers: Custom Audiences

If inconsistency in the display of custom audience data is any indication, Facebook is still working through these issues. Given the high public scrutiny of any potential privacy irregularities, it’s unlikely we’ll see the wide availability of deep data for custom audiences anytime soon.

But, things change quickly, and as always, advertisers must adapt. We will continue to monitor this space (along with the advertisers in the Power Hitters Club!).

Regardless of the changes, custom audiences can still be a highly valuable feature for advertisers.

If you’re looking for inspiration on custom audiences, check out this fantastic guide to 55 custom audiences from Jon.

And remember, you can still use audience data for non-custom audiences for clues about your potential target groups, such as comparing Facebook and Instagram audiences.

Your Turn

Is your experience of seeing custom audience sizes any different from ours?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Custom Audience Sizes Have Returned (sort of!) appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook’s removal of Partner Category targeting options has been a topic for some months now. However, Facebook recently sent out an email to advertisers, warning them that they may have campaigns using these now-defunct targeting options. Here’s the email:

If you’re left wondering what to do with these changes, read on.

What is Partner Category Targeting?

Partner Categories are simply targeting groups that Facebook had previously made available based on partnerships with third-party data providers. This type of data sharing is common practice in digital advertising realms, but following various challenges (i.e. Cambridge Analytica news stories), Facebook has removed these targeting options.

After a somewhat murky period following the brief Facebook announcement that Partner Categories were being removed, Facebook updated their Partner Category help article with a phased schedule for the changes:

As noted in Facebook’s recent email to advertisers, after October 1st these campaigns may be “paused or modified.” The “paused” component of this language is what could cause some advertisers to experience a mild panic.

Which leads us to….

Confusion About Facebook’s Warning Email to Advertisers

There are a number of factors contributing to advertiser confusion.

• Facebook’s email does not make clear whether campaigns with partner category targeting will simply be paused, or if targeting changes will be made automatically.
• It appears the link in Facebook’s warning email does not lead advertisers directly to their campaigns which may be an issue.
  • Instead, this link simply opens Ads Manager, which leaves some doubt about what to do next.
• It also seems that advertisers may have received the email even in cases where they have an unused, paused ad set.
  • This often happens with ad sets created with a daily budget, which advertisers may have paused long in the past and never used again.
• To add to the challenge, it seems there are no warning or error messages that are appearing in the Ads Manager overview.

However, there are actions you can take to make sure your affected campaigns are clear of issues. Read on…

How to Address Ad Set Targeting Issues

To make your ad review easier, I suggest you only look at Active, Scheduled, and In Review ad sets. Previously completed or unused ad sets should not have any issue, unless you plan to activate them again in the future (in which case, you should review those setups as well!).

You can apply a filter in Ads Manager to view the ad sets that meet these conditions. Click the Filter button, then Ad Set Delivery, then select Active, Scheduled, and In Review:

Now you’ve used a filter to populate only the campaigns, ad sets, and ads that meet the applied conditions.

You can review your ad sets and individually inspect the targeting set up for each of these.

To do this, follow these steps:

1) Select the ad set tab. I also suggest making sure you have the Lifetime date range selected, as viewing an overly specific range of time can inadvertently miss relevant, active campaign data:

*The Lifetime date range will reflect the dates in your ad account’s lifetime range, so it will appear different than in my example.

2) Select the ad set you want to review by checking the box to the left of your ad set name.

3) Select the Edit button, which looks like a pencil, to the far right of the screen:

Once you select Edit, you can scroll down to the Detailed Targeting section to review the targeting in place.

We have found that ad sets with partner categories included display a warning message, such as this example:

You can remove problematic targets individually, or simply click the removal button in the warning message to make changes automatically.

Once you have changed the target options, you can click to Review and Publish changes from the main Ads Manager screen.

What Happens Now to Partner Category Targeting?

Partner category targeting as an “easy-add” option is no longer available.

However, some advertisers have reported to have negotiated agreements directly with some of these same data providers. It seems that there may be potential options to establish independently with providers (such as Axciom). That said, we’ve heard from some members of our Power Hitters Club that this process can be somewhat slow.

Your Turn

How are you responding in the wake of the removal of Partner Category targeting? How might these changes affect your strategies?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Partner Categories Removed: What Now? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Instagram continues growth at a fast pace, and Facebook advertisers are becoming more accustomed to considering Instagram as a placement for their campaigns. At the same time, Instagram continues adding new features that make ad setup easier than ever.

With Instagram recently passing the 1 billion monthly active user mark, advertisers may wonder just how large is their potential Instagram target audience? Thankfully, there are tools available to help answer this question. We can use these to compare audience sizes on Instagram and Facebook.

Why Does Audience Size Matter?

We normally recommend you focus on specific objectives, rather than merely audience sizes, when prioritizing ad placements and activities. However, with the growth of Instagram, many businesses ask if they should be planning a more permanent presence on the platform, or if they should consider creating campaign assets specifically for Instagram use.

Though Facebook has made it easier to simply use Instagram as another place to publish your ads, my recommendation is to create specific assets optimized for each platform whenever possible.

This is particularly important to harness emergent options, such as Instagram Stories. While you could have a standard static image that appears in this type of placement, more dynamic assets that are customized specifically for this purpose are far more likely to perform better.

Audience size can be an initial “yardstick” metric to better understand how important Instagram may be to your objectives. You may even be surprised to find that Facebook is much larger than you had expected!

Accessing Audience Sizes: Instagram and Facebook

To estimate audience sizes, we can create a “dummy” campaign. This means we’re going to create a campaign that we won’t actually use or make live, but one that can give us an understanding about a particular target audience.

To do this, follow these steps:

First, navigate to Ads Manager. If you use Business Manager, you can go to business.facebook.com to access. If you do not, you can go to www.facebook.com/manage to access.

Click the “+ Create” button on the far left:

This will open the Quick Creation screen. You can leave all the settings as the default:

To name the campaign, ad set, and ad, I’ve typed in “Audience Size Test” for this example. You can enter whatever you’d like, though I find it’s helpful to name them something to easily identify in Ads Manager, in case you accidentally make something live.

Once you have given a name to the campaign, ad set, and ad, click “Save to Draft” on the bottom.

You should now see that Ads Manager defaults to the Campaign view, and the Campaign will appear in your campaign list as a Draft. From here, you will click the second tab to go to do the Ad Set view:

You should now see that the second tab is selected, and you’re on the Ad Set View:

From here, you can scroll down the Ad Set creation window to the Audience section. This is where we can enter our target details.

Identifying Platform Audience Sizes For A Target Audience

To demonstrate, I’ll use a very general audience of everyone in California aged 25-35:

Notice that the platform tells us our Potential Reach. In this case, it’s 9,600,000 people. You can ignore the Estimated Daily Results section for now, as this is based on the schedule, budget, and ad account history. Since we’re just looking at the overall audience number, these more specific results are not important.

The 9,600,000 people in this example are based on automatic placements. These placements are selected by default.

For my setup, this normally includes Facebook Feeds, Instant Articles, Right Column, and Marketplace, along with Instagram Feed and Stories, and various Audience Network and Messenger placements.

If we would like to understand specific audience sizes for different types of placements, we can do so by making changes to the placement(s) selected. The placements section is further down the Ad Set edit screen:

When you click the Edit Placements button, you should see any that are selected. Here are the placement options shown for me using the pre-selected Automatic placements:

Selecting Specific Platforms For A Target Audience

Since we’re trying to compare Facebook vs. Instagram, we can be very general, or we can be specific. For the purposes of this demonstration, I want to compare Facebook Feeds vs. Instagram Feeds, as this is where both paid and organic content most typically appears on both platforms on a regular basis.

First, let’s select Facebook Feeds only, and de-select all other placements:

Here we see that the Facebook Feed placement has 7,300,000 people from our target audience of people 25-35 years old in California.

Let’s compare that with the same target for Instagram Feed placement. We do this by selecting only Instagram Feed, and de-selecting all other options:

Here we can see that Instagram Feed placement has 6,700,000 people in our target audience of people 25-35 years old in California.

It’s important to note that these two audiences are not necessarily exclusive of one another. We can take another step to understand how many unique people are in both groups (Instagram Feed and/or Facebook Feed). Select both placements at the same time:

Now we have 9,100,000 people who are in the target audience of people 25-35 years old in California. There are this many people who are available in either Facebook Feeds, Instagram Feeds, or both.

Comparing Audience Placement Sizes – Nerdy Deep-Dive

You may be interested in learning how many users you have in your target who only use Facebook or who only use Instagram. We can use some math to identify the numbers of available people only in one platform or the other.

From our example, to find only the Facebook Feed audience, we take Combined Placement minus Instagram Feed. That is: 9,100,000 – 6,700,000 = 2,400,000 people who are only available via Facebook Feed.

For only the Instagram Feed audience, we take Combined Placement minus Facebook Feed. That is: 9,100,000 – 7,300,000 = 1,800,000 people who are only available via Instagram Feed.

If you’re extra curious…. To find the audience of people who are users of both platforms, we take Combined Placement minus Facebook Feed Only minus Instagram Feed Only. That is: 9,100,000 – 2,400,000 – 1,800,000 = 4,900,000 people. This means, in our target audience of 25-35 year olds in California, there are 4,900,000 people who use both Facebook AND Instagram.

Bringing this all together, we have the following data in our target of 25-35 year-old people in California…..

• Users of Facebook OR Instagram OR Both: 9,100,000
• Total Facebook Feed: 7,300,000
• Total Instagram Feed: 6,700,000
• Only Facebook Feed: 2,400,000
• Only Instagram Feed: 1,800,000
• Use both platforms: 4,900,000

For illustrative purposes, here’s a visualization of these data:

**Bonus Tip: If you would like a handy Excel file to guide analysis of different groups, CLICK HERE.

Audience Comparison Formulas

If you love a good formula structure, here’s a simple summary:

• • Facebook Feed Only = Combined Placement – Instagram Feed
  • Instagram Feed Only = Combined Placement – Facebook Feed
  • People in BOTH placements = Combined Placement – Facebook Feed Only – Instagram Feed Only

You can use this approach to compare any placements. This comparison process can be helpful for accurately understanding the potential audience sizes of people who are using various platforms, instead of basing your decisions on assumptions and/or guesswork.

Quick Reminder: When you are finished with configuring your estimates, be sure to click the Discard Draft button and not the Publish button. This will ensure you do not accidentally make your dummy campaigns live.

Where to Go From Here

In the future, I’d love to see Facebook separate Instagram and provide more detail in tools such as Audiences and Audience Insights, so that advertisers could better understand user differences.

Until then, it’s great to manually understand audience sizes. This helps advertisers prioritize efforts and better identify types of ad content they may develop.

Your Turn

What have you learned from analyzing your audience sizes for various platforms and ad placements?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Compare Audience Sizes on Instagram vs. Facebook appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook’s unpublished posts, also referred to as “dark” posts, are actively used by advertisers. The Ad Library has pulled back the curtain on just how frequently advertisers are utilizing this feature.

Sometimes unpublished posts are intentional, such as cases where advertisers want to test out multiple posts, but without all the ad variations appearing on their page. Other times, they are the result of Facebook’s functionality (Example: Lead Ads are unpublished by default).

Let’s cover what unpublished posts are, when you might want to publish them, and how to navigate the publishing process.

What is the Difference Between a Published Post and an Unpublished Post?

A published post means that the post appears on the Facebook page associated with the post. An unpublished post never appears on the Facebook page, and instead only on News Feed (or other placements as applicable). These are often used as advertised (also referred to as sponsored) posts only. However, both published and unpublished posts can be either sponsored or organic.

Why Would you Use an Unpublished Post?

There are sensible business scenarios when advertisers might use an unpublished post. These are just a few examples:

Creative Testing of Ads: An advertiser may test out multiple creative or copy combinations and may not want the page’s visitors to see all of the variations.

Lead Forms: Posts for Facebook’s Lead Forms are created within Ads Manager, but the Lead Forms themselves can be created directly from a page. This means that by default, Lead Form posts on Facebook are unpublished posts.

Instant Experience Ads: Posts for Instant Experiences tend to be created from Ads Manager, and are unpublished by default.

Why Would You Publish an Unpublished Post?

There are multiple reasons why you may want to publish an unpublished post. Here are a few:

Creative Testing of Ads: You may let multiple posts run for some time before determining the best performer. You might then select the top performer for publishing directly to the page, thereby ensuring that page visitors would see the best you have to offer.

Lead Forms: You may want to publish Lead Form posts directly to the business page to be certain that Facebook users can find them easily. This might be particularly important when running a contest that is likely to generate high interest, for example.

Instant Experience Ads: If you want these posts to be discoverable from your page, you will need to publish them directly to your page.

Remember that the Instant Experience creative unit is only viewable from mobile devices, even though the initial post may appear on desktop. For this reason, I only recommend publishing Instant Experience ads if it is absolutely required that they be visible on your page. Otherwise, keep them unpublished to avoid frustration from users visiting your page on desktop who can’t see the Instant Experience after clicking the initial post.

How to Publish an Unpublished Post

To publish an unpublished post, navigate to Ads Manager. If you use Business Manager, you can go to business.facebook.com to access. If you do not, you can go to www.facebook.com/manage to access.

From Ads Manager, click the drop-down “stack” at the top left, and from the Engage customers section, select Page Posts.

After landing on the Page Posts tool screen, you’ll see a Page Selector drop-down on the top left. If you are unable to locate your page in this drop-down list, make sure you have selected the correct Business Manager account, or Ad Account, from the top right of this screen:

*I’ve labeled the two drop-downs in this example.

You’ll see various Posts options on the left: Scheduled Posts, Published Posts, and Ads Posts. At the time of this article’s update (August 2023), both Published Posts and Scheduled posts redirect you to use Business Suite to access that feature. However, Ads Posts is seemingly not yet integrated into Business Suite. The Page Posts tool from within Ads Manager is where they can be accessed currently.

• Scheduled Posts shows posts that are scheduled to be published to your page, but have not yet been published.
• Published Posts shows posts that have been published to your page. These are already visible to your page visitors, provided that you haven’t restricted the audience.
  
• Ads Posts shows posts that have already been used in ads. These are the posts which we can now publish directly to our business page.

From here, you can select the specific post you’d like to publish by choosing the button on the left of the post.

After selecting the post, a new menu for the post should appear with a drop down called “Actions”. If you click to expand the Actions drop down, there will be an option to Publish.

You can choose to “Publish,” which will immediately place the post on your page, visible to page visitors.

You can also choose  “Schedule,” which will allow you to set the time and date for when you’d like the post to appear on your page. Be careful not to mistakenly select “Delete.” This would completely delete your post.

The option to Create ads allows you to create a new ad using the same post used previously – including using a Facebook ad post on Instagram placements. Remember that multiple ads can use the same post, which is a common tactic for building on “social proof.”

Locating Unpublished Posts in the Page Posts Tool

To see your unpublished posts, you can use a search bar in the Page Posts tool to navigate through your Ads Posts. This is particularly useful if you have a large volume of posts associated with ads.

You can search by the text copy within the ad post using this search bar. You can also search by the Post ID number.

You can locate the Post ID in Ads Manager by navigating to the Post Preview of an ad. Here’s a quick review of the steps to do this:

1) Navigate to a specific ad within Ads Manager, and check the box beside that ad.

2) Select the edit button on the far right. It looks like a pencil icon:

This will now display the Ad details. We can use the post link here to locate the post ID.

To access the associated post link for the ad, navigate to the Ad Preview section, and select the small upward right facing arrow. From here, choose the option Facebook Post with Comments:

This will open the link to the URL for the post associated with the ad. The Post ID is the very last string of numbers, after the “/posts/” segment of the URL. It will look like this:

www.facebook.com/PageIDHere/posts/PostIDHere

You can copy the Post ID, and search in the Ads Posts of the Page Posts Tool search bar using this number.

Considerations on Publishing Unpublished Posts

The Page Posts tool we are using to publish unpublished posts has a history of being a bit buggy. I’ve found that it often works best in Google Chrome, but sometimes switching between browsers can resolve errors.

If you happen to run into issues, you might try again in a day or two, as these errors tend to resolve themselves. If you continue to have problems, you might try reaching out to Facebook Support for help.

Your Turn

What other scenarios do you have for publishing unpublished posts?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Publish an Unpublished Post on Facebook: How to appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Location Targeting options can provide powerful methods to reach specific users in certain areas. However, as Facebook has created additional options, advertisers may be confused about how to take complete advantage of these features. Some also may not fully understand how Facebook determines target audience locations.

Note that this post is focused primarily on paid targeting. I’ve also written about restricting your audience using location targeting at the page or post level.

This post dives into what Facebook Location Targeting is and how location is determined. We’ll also cover scenarios when you might want to use the different capabilities offered. Along the way, we’ll take a nerdy detour into segmented audience analysis.

Let’s get to it…

What Is Facebook Location Targeting?

Location Targeting on Facebook simply allows us to tell Facebook the relevant geographic locations where we would like to show our ads.

At the time of this writing, Facebook allows you to target by Country, State (or region, depending on the country), City, Zip/Postal Code, and Business Address. In the United States, you can also target by DMA, which is a media market as defined by Nielsen.

You can also target multiple locations within a single targeting group, though there are limits to how many specific targeting parameters you can build. For example, you can include up to 25 individual countries, or up to 250 individual cities, in a single group.

Facebook also offers very broad targeting capabilities, including the “Worldwide” targeting option. You can also target by broad region, such as Asia, and by Free Trade Area. A list of options is available here. If you are using broader target groups, there are limitations to what Facebook will include. We’ll cover these in more detail later in this article.

How to Use Facebook Location Targeting

There are three phases when you can define locations to target: during the campaign creation process, when creating a saved audience, or when using Audience Insights.

Within each of these phases, there are three primary methods for selecting a location:

1) Type the location:

In this example, as we type “California” the various options populate. Be sure to select the correct geolocation!

2) Perform a “Drop Pin” on a map.

Navigate on the map using the +/- options, and also by dragging the map, to where you’d like to drop a location pin. Once you’ve found your location, click the “Drop Pin” button:

Your mouse pointer will now be highlighted with a “check” mark, which you can drop wherever you’d like on the map:

Once you click to drop the pin, the map will populate with the GPS coordinates for the location you’ve chosen:

You can now click the mileage/kilometer radius to adjust as needed. You can type in the new radius, or slide the bar to the desired location:

3) Bulk Upload Locations

This less common method is useful if you need to target many locations, and you don’t want to have to manually select them. Facebook covers this method here.

How to Exclude Locations

Instead of targeting a location, you can also change the selector to the left of the location name to exclude specific locations from your target:

As an example, you could target people in a State, but exclude a specific city (or cities). Here’s an example targeting people in California, while excluding San Diego:

*Excluding locations has some special considerations, which are covered later in this article.

What Types of Locations are Eligible for Targeting?

Facebook has four options for location targeting:

• Everyone in a location
• People who live in this location
• Recently in this location
• People traveling in this location

Strangely, Facebook’s help articles indicate that Everyone in a location is the default option, though in my own experience I have seen the People who live in this location seems to be the default selection when creating a new audience.

You might wonder how Facebook determines whether a user lives in a location, or is just passing through. Glad you asked!

How Facebook Determines Location of a User

Facebook uses multiple signals to determine (or more realistically, to estimate) a user’s location. The platform may use IP address, mobile device info, a user’s profile data (i.e. city listed in their profile), and sometimes a combination. They can also use info from the locations of the Facebook user’s friends.

Thankfully, Facebook does shed some light on this. The data source they use depends on the location segment (i.e. Traveling In, People who Live In, etc). Location data sources are defined by Facebook as follows:

• Everyone in this location: People whose current city on their Facebook profile is that location, as well as anyone determined to be in that location via mobile device.
• People who live in this location: People whose current city from their Facebook profile is within that location. This is also validated by IP address and their Facebook friends’ stated locations.
• Recently in this location. People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined only via mobile device. This includes people who live there or who may be traveling there.
• People traveling in this location. People whose most recent location is the selected area, as determined via mobile device, and are greater than 100 miles from their stated home location from their Facebook profiles.

It’s important to remember that Facebook uses multiple signals to determine a user’s location (with the exception of the Recently in this location target, which is based solely on mobile device signals).

You may be surprised to see that the Recently in this location group can include people who live in the location as well as those traveling, based on Facebook’s definition. Some may assume that Recently in this location would exclude People who live in this location, but that’s not the case…

Nerd Break Warning: Audience Location Overlap

If you are interested in slicing, dicing, and diving deep into comparing the different Location segmentation audiences, this section is for you. Feel free to skip ahead to the section “Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting” if this is a bit too much detail.

Thinking back to how Facebook defined the data source for the Recently in this location audience, we might assume that this audience would automatically include everyone who is in the People who live in this location audience, at the very least.

Let’s do a quick experiment using the Audience Overlap tool within Facebook’s Ad tools to see if that holds up. We can use it here to better understand Facebook’s definition of the various Location audiences, and how they interact with one another. Sidenote: If you want to dive even deeper into this tool specifically, Jon wrote about it here.

Audience Segmentation Analysis

Access the Audiences tool within Ads Manager:

Choose the option to Create Audience, and select Saved Audience:

Enter the name of your audience. In this example below, I’ve used the very basic “People Who Live in California.”

Change the Location selection from the drop-down menu to choose “People who live in this location,” and type California into the location list:

Click the “Create Audience” button on the bottom right to save this audience.

Now that we have our People who live in this location audience set for California, let’s now set up a Recently in this location audience for California.

Similar to above, we’ll select Create Audience again, and then choose Saved Audience:

As before, we’ll enter the name of our audience. This one I’ve named “People Recently in California.”

We’ll change Location selection drop down to choose “People recently in this location,” and type California into the location list:

Here’s where the fun begins. Click to Create Audience at the bottom right of the audience creation screen.

From our main Audiences screen, we should now see both audiences listed:

The first thing to notice in our example is that the “People Who Live In” audience is larger than the “People Recently In” audience. Based on the way Facebook defines each of these audiences, this result doesn’t seem possible. Let’s investigate further by comparing the Audience Overlap.

Select both audiences by checking the box to their left, then from the Actions drop-down menu choose the Show Audience Overlap:

Here’s what we find:

Here’s how we read this chart: The top shows the base audience. The bottom chart is the Comparison Audiences section, which reports the comparative audience against the base audience. In our example, 9,396,000 of the total people in the “People Recently In California” audience are also in the “People Who Live In California” Audience.

Interpreting Our Audience Overlap Findings

This comparison exercise suggests that a literal interpretation of Facebook’s definition of People Recently In would be incorrect. We should not assume that People Recently In includes all of People Who Live In AND People Traveling In.

When we review the data sources and definitions of the different targeting options (as outlined earlier in this article), this makes sense for several reasons. First, the target for People Recently In is determined using only mobile device info as the signal, whereas the other targeting options use additional signals.

Just as we can create audience groups and compare them in Audience Insights, we can also compare People Recently In with People Traveling In to test our assumption that a literal interpretation of Facebook’s audience definitions would be incorrect:

Here we find that the People Traveling In audience includes people who are not also within the People Recently In audience, confirming our assumption that the Recently In audience does not fully encapsulate the entire audience of Traveling In. I’m not certain whether this is because the two are based on different data sources, or if Facebook is categorizing users as Recently In if they normally live in that location but are currently elsewhere.

It’s helpful to be able to compare different audience segments and their overlap patterns. If you like this sort of thing, check out this write-up from Jon specifically on the use of the Audience Overlap capability.

Quirks/Limitations to Consider with Location Targeting

1) Excluded Cities When Using Broad Targeting

When you target broad locations, such as Country (or Worldwide), certain cities are sometimes not included. Most of the locations subject to this limitation are islands, or in locations where Facebook usage is limited or restricted, such as China.

For a complete list of locations that exclude cities when using broader targeting, check out this Facebook help resource page. The list is located near the bottom of the article.

2) Excluding Locations

If you exclude certain locations from your advertising audience, keep in mind that this only guides Facebook to not run an advertisement in this location. It does not prevent people in those locations from seeing the ad.

We can illustrate with an example: Let’s say we tell Facebook to target people in California, but exclude people in San Diego. Facebook will not show our post as an advertisement (i.e. sponsored post) to people in San Diego. However, there might be someone who lives in Los Angeles, who shares our post. That person in Los Angeles could have a Facebook friend in San Diego. The friend in San Diego may see our post as an organic placement because their friend in Los Angeles shared the post.

If you need to completely restrict people in a location from seeing the post, you have some options. I covered those options here in a more detailed article regarding Restricted Audiences on Facebook.

3) Drop-Pin Radius Limitation

If you elect to use the “drop pin” method, and the radius of the circle crosses into another country, that country is not included in your target audience. Facebook covers other reminders about radius targeting here, near the bottom of the page.

Scenarios When You Might Use Different Location Targeting Options

1) Everyone in this location:

You could use this if you don’t mind whether the people in your target live in the area or are just traveling through. Coffee shops, restaurants, online sales, etc.

2) People who live in a location:

This targeting segment is for something more relevant for people who live their daily lives in an area and may use services or products on a regular basis. Think gym memberships, community centers, etc. It could also be useful for services related to property, such as home repair, plumbing, electrical HVAC, security services, etc.

3) Recently in this location:

I’ll be honest – I have trouble thinking of times when this is more useful vs. the other targeting options. Facebook’s help article suggests this segment for time-sensitive sales. An example might be inviting people back to a location – local visitor bureau ads, perhaps? If you have an idea for a great use of reaching people recently in a location, tell me in the comments!

4) People traveling in a location:

This is naturally suited to tourism offerings. If you have a tourist attraction, event tickets, hotel, rental car company, or any other service of use to a traveler – go for this.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Location targeting was one of the first “fancy” targeting options to become available on Facebook. The potential from this is often overlooked, likely because of newer targeting options based on travel behavior. From our dive into Facebook location targeting, here’s what we covered:

• You can target very broad (as broad as the entire globe) or very specific (down to a one-mile radius of a pin drop) locations.
  • Broad targeting does not always include all cities in a location. There are exceptions.

• You can exclude specific locations from targeting… but this doesn’t mean the users from excluded locations will definitely not see an ad.

• Facebook uses different data sources to determine estimates for the various location segments. These segments are: Everyone, People Who Live in, Recently In, and People Traveling in.
  • The definitions of these estimates are not aligned exactly with the realities of each segment.

• Different situations call for different targeting options.
  • You might have a business justification for wanting to target only users who live in a location, and other times people traveling in a location. Facebook offers options for these.

Your Turn

Do you use different Facebook Location Targeting options? Is there a way you use it that I’ve missed?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Location Targeting: A Detailed Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There is a need to sometimes limit the audience of people who see your Facebook posts (or page!). While it’s counter to the standard “more reach, please” attitude of most Facebook marketers, occasionally there are circumstances that require you to restrict your Facebook audience.

Let’s review three ways to apply audience restrictions on Facebook. We’ll look at an example of Page-Level Restrictions, Post-Level Restrictions, and a special case involving Lead Forms.

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Page-Level

To limit the visibility of your entire Facebook page to certain audience groups, you can adjust the page settings by following these steps:

First, access the admin panel for your Facebook page. If you use Business Manager, you may need to log in to your Business Manager account.

Click Settings on the top right of the panel:

Make sure you are on the General tab:

At the Page Level, you have two restriction options. You can limit the audience to specific countries as well as set minimum age restrictions.

For Country Restrictions, you can choose to either set specific countries where the page will be visible or choose regions where you want to hide the page:

For Age Restrictions, you can select a minimum age for users to see the page:

If there is not already a minimum age selected and you select one of the options to set a minimum age, you may see a warning message from Facebook. This warning reminds you that fans who have already liked your page from outside your minimum age will automatically unlike the page, so be careful with this. There is also a message indicating that age-restricted pages cannot be linked to groups:

As the warning message indicates, people outside the specified aged group will not be able to see your page. They’ll simply see a content unavailable notification, like this:

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Post-Level

You can limit the audience of specific posts on your page.

Similar to how we approached this with Page-Level targeting above, begin with the General tab of your page’s Settings section.

Beside the option “Audience Optimization for Posts”, click Edit. From here, select to enable the “Audience Optimization for Posts”, if the box is not already checked:

By updating this setting, you will now have an option to add audience restrictions when you create a post.

With this setting enabled, you have two options to add restrictions to a post.

To add restrictions to a post created directly on the page, select the targeting drop down:

*Facebook recently changed the way this looks, so it’s possible your targeting selector may appear different from this screenshot.

Select the option for Restricted Audience:

You can specify your audience restrictions here, and then save the changes:

You may have noticed that alongside the Restricted Audience option, there is an option for News Feed Targeting. If you’re interested in this functionality, check out this write-up from Jon on Facebook Audience Optimization.

To apply post-level audience restrictions for a post created via the Publishing Tools interface, click on the globe icon at the bottom of the post:

Select the option to Limit Audience By Demographics:

From here, you can specify the demographic parameters you’d like to use as limitations for your audience:

Location targeting at the Post-Level offers a few more options than location targeting at the Page-Level. In particular, at the Post-Level, you can target specific countries, states/regions, cities, or postal codes — even congressional districts. But at the Page-Level, you can only restrict the audience by country.

Lead Forms Audience Restrictions

Facebook Lead Forms have their own special options for audience restrictions. These are set during the form creation process. This feature is easy to miss, and you may even find that your Lead Forms already defaulted to a restricted audience in the past.

To set restrictions on Lead Forms, click on the Settings tab during the form creation process:

If you want to change the audience to Open, simply select that option.

As defined by Facebook (when you hover over the small ‘i’ beside the “Sharing” indicator):

By default, only people who are delivered your ad directly will be able to see and submit this form. Select “Open” to let people share this form with friends and allow submissions from people tagged in the comments.

Note that the restriction applies to the Lead Form itself, not to the associated post. This means users outside the specified audience could see the copy and creative of the post, but if they click to open the form, the Lead Form would not appear.

Generally speaking, I recommend changing Lead Forms to Open. Why? You may have users who want to share the form with their friends. If those friends are not in the audience you are using for the Lead Ad associated with the form, they will not be able to see the form even though they can view the post. This can be frustrating to your audience, and damage their perception of your brand or business.

That said, there may be certain scenarios where you only want people in the ad audience to be able to enter the form. Having this option available may be helpful to you.

The Restricted Facebook Audience Roll-Up

• You can restrict the audience on Facebook at the Page Level and at the Post Level.
• Page-Level restrictions apply to all posts that come from the page.
• Post-Level restrictions apply only to individual posts.
• Post-Level restrictions have some added location targeting functionality that Page-Level lack.
• Lead Ads/Lead Forms have their own restricted audience capabilities. They may have defaulted to restricted audiences without your realizing it!

Your Turn

Do you have a need for restricting your audience on Facebook?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Three Ways to Restrict Your Facebook Audience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Many recent announcements from Facebook concerning targeting are seemingly about the removal of features. Thankfully, this post is not about that! Facebook quietly mentioned some new (and some reinstated/returning) professional targeting options on the Facebook Developers blog.

Facebook’s Developers blog is normally a space for more technical announcements, so the updates mentioned here are sometimes easily missed by advertisers.

On August 9th,  the announcement was made that Facebook has new interest segments to reach professional audiences. It also let us know that some previously removed targeting features will be coming back, although the update implies that rollout will be gradual.

According to the update, we can find the new and reinstated professional targeting options pertaining to the following interest segments:

• Page Admins: Behaviors targeting > Digital activities > Facebook page admins
• Employer Targeting: Demographics > Work > Employers
• Job Title Targeting: Demographics > Work > Job Titles
• School Targeting: Demographics > Education > Schools
• Field of Study Targeting: Demographics > Education > Field of Study

These classifications provide the navigation flow to find the updated targeting segments. To review any of these, you simply set up an audience, choose the Browse option under Detailed Targeting, and follow the outline provided.

The areas of Employer and Job title, in particular, seem to have had various targeting options removed in the past. I imagine that advertisers will be excited to see some of these options returning.

Let’s do a quick review of a few of these…

Page Admins

Within Behaviors -> Digital Activities -> Facebook page admins, we can now see a number of Page Admin targeting segments available.

Though Page Admin targeting was previously available, I do not recall seeing some of these options. If anyone out there in the interwebspace knows otherwise, please let me know in the comments below!

As of today, here are the options that populate:

The option Facebook Page Admins appears to encompass all the other segments.

This general target is very large! Over 350 million people.

To dive deeper into how Facebook might be classifying admin segments, I created an audience made up of all the individual page admin segments.

120 million people is far fewer than the 350 million number we saw for Facebook Page Admins in general. We can compare Audience Overlap between these two audiences to verify that the broader group of “Facebook Page Admins” does in fact encompass the specific segments:

This tells us that over 230 million page admins are not contained within one of the specific segments. I imagine Facebook might start adding more categories in the future.

Other Targeting Segments: Employer, Job Title, School, Field of Study

As far as I’m aware, all of these options were already available. I did a quick spot check of Field of Study below, using “Bio” as the input, to see if these options had become more robust:

The results seem quite limited for now. Similar to the Page Admins segments, I imagine Facebook may start adding more fields in the future.

Your Turn

What new targeting options are you seeing within these segments? Have any new doorways opened for you with this update?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post New and Reinstated Professional Targeting Options on Facebook appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

What should your Facebook ad frequency be? This is a common question among Facebook advertisers, and a source of discussion in the Power Hitters Club groups.

As with many aspects of Facebook, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. But, that does not mean you cannot consider the ideal frequencies for your own advertising. This article provides a general guide for approaching this important issue.

Facebook Ad Frequency Defined

Facebook defines frequency as the average number of times each person saw your ad. It’s important to note that this is an estimated metric. This means that it’s not always an exact number.

Remember that (Impressions divided by Reach) = Frequency. Said another way, (Reach multiplied by Frequency) = Impressions. This formula will come in handy later.

It’s also important to remember that Facebook ad frequency is an average. You may have some people in the audience who were reached a very large number of times, and others who were reached only once. The overall average is what Facebook reports. If you want to dive into deeper detail on frequency distribution, I’ve written about this topic in an article about Page-Level reporting.

Determining Frequency

Within Ads Manager, Facebook has a functionality that allows us to include Frequency metrics in any reporting view: Campaign, Ad Set, or Ad Level.

From the top right of Ads Manager, you should have a button called “Columns: Performance” listed below the date range.

If you select this button, you can select “Customize Columns” to add a variety of data points to the export:

From here, you can select Frequency from the metrics available. On the right side of the selector, you can also “slide” the metrics up and down the list to change the order in which they appear:

I like to place Reach, Impressions, and Frequency adjacent to one another, as these three metrics are directly related.

Now that we have added Frequency to the reporting view, let’s look at an example to illustrate the math involved:

Using our formula, we can see that (119,045 / 76,551) = 1.56. That is, Impressions divided by Reach equals Frequency.

Daily Frequency Breakout

Using the Charts functionality of Ads Manager, we can also look at Daily Frequency for a specific campaign.

Here’s how we find this data point.

1) Select the Campaign from the list of campaigns.

2) Select the “View Chart” button from the top right of Ads Manager.

3) Click on the “Custom” button (depending on your default view, you may not need to do this step, or step 4)

4) Change “Impressions” to “Frequency” in the drop down in the center:

You will now see the overall Frequency for the selected reporting period, for the specific Campaign:

If you hover over a specific day, you will see the Frequency metric for that day. Here’s an example of what we would see if we hovered over April 18th from our sample data:

Notice that the frequency changed from 1.56 (our overall Campaign frequency for the reporting period) to 1.25 (our Campaign frequency for the specific date of April 18).

You can repeat the above process for an Ad or Ad Set. You can also do it for multiple Campaigns (or multiple Ad Sets, or multiple Ads), depending on your reporting needs.

If you are having trouble with navigating how to look at multiple Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads, check out my write-up on Paid Reach Reporting in Ads Manager where we covered this methodology.

Cumulative Frequency Breakout

We can also use the “View Charts” functionality to dive deeper into Cumulative Frequency.

Cumulative Frequency tells us how the frequency increased each day to accumulate for the campaign over time. This can be an indicator of how you began “saturating” the same audience over time. It can also show where you might have specific points of time in the history of a campaign when the same individuals were being shown ads.

Let’s look at our example again. We can change the Frequency indicator to Frequency (cumulative), as illustrated here:

You may notice that overall cumulative frequency for the reporting period is the same as the overall frequency. This is as expected, as the final cumulative frequency is an overall aggregation of the entire period.

The more interesting detail comes from looking at specific dates. Let’s look at April 18th to compare what the daily cumulative frequency was telling us for the same period:

Notice here that the data is telling us our Cumulative Frequency is 1.21 for April 18, vs. 1.25 Daily Frequency for April 18th that we obtained previously.

At first glance, this seems impossible… How could we reach fewer people cumulatively, over time, than those whom we reach on a single day?

This can happen because frequency is an overall average, over time, for the period in question. Meaning – the average frequency on a single day could be higher than the average cumulative frequency for an extended period of time. You will likely see similar data points in your own campaigns, with specific dates having a higher average frequency than a multi-day period during the life of a campaign.

The above process can be followed for an Ad or Ad Set. You can compare it across multiple Campaigns (or multiple Ad Sets, or multiple Ads), depending on your reporting needs.

The Ideal Frequency

Now that we know how to look at our Frequency metrics, let’s discuss the big question: What’s an Ideal Facebook Ad Frequency?

Facebook has a very interesting analysis titled Effective Frequency: Reaching Full Campaign Potential. I definitely recommend you check this out, if the topic is of particular interest. If you’d like deeper detail of the analysis, they have a companion white paper where the methodology and implications are covered in more detail.

While the analysis from Facebook has a lot of content, my favorite component is their Frequency Factors Chart:

I consider this to be a compact, concise, and clear framework for thinking about when you may benefit from differing frequencies.

But to go even further, I believe there are some additional contextual considerations, which are also important when thinking about Facebook ad frequency. Let’s walk through these:

1) Variation in the Ad Creative

When you have highly similar creatives across your campaign, multiple exposures of the same imagery/copy (high frequency) can be an issue for your audience.

When there is larger variation between creatives, the high frequency can be less of a problem.

We can use a hypothetical example to illustrate. Let’s say we have 10 ads about basketball.

In a campaign with high creative variation, each ad might be about a different basketball team. Therefore, people who see multiple ads from the campaign might be less annoyed by each, since the ads are about different topics, likely featuring a different team logo or visual layout, etc.

In a campaign with low creative variation, there might be 10 images of the same team. They may all show a slightly different angle of the image, or slight variations in the text used. A user with exposure to several of these ads may perceive repetition. This user may more likely be annoyed if they are being shown your ads over and over. While you may consider each ad to be different, the casual user may consider them to be the same, because they look so familiar.

An important reminder on this: Even if you have many creatives in a campaign, they may not all be receiving impressions. This is due to Facebook’s ad delivery system favoring high performing ads. Remember that you can check impressions for each specific ad in a campaign (as well as the Reach and Frequency for each ad).

If you have a large number of creatives that are clearly different and they’re all receiving impressions, high frequency is far less likely to cause issues.

2) Consideration of Placement

Facebook’s study of effective frequency did not discuss consideration of ad placement. The placement of an ad is how your audience encounters your post, and can affect your results wildly.

For example, placements in Right Column can be very high compared with other placements such as Facebook News Feed and Instagram News Feed, without resulting in the same level of annoyance or frustration from the exposed audience.

Placements in the Right Column tend to be seen as less intrusive. They live in the “traditional ad space” where users might be accustomed to seeing ads in other website experiences. Of course, this placement also tends to be the least likely to drive engagement from your audience, which is why these are often at the lower cost of all placements.

Why is this important? If you are looking through your own ad results and you see a specific unit that has a very high frequency, the very first thing to check should be the placement breakdown. You can do this by clicking “Breakdown: By Delivery,” then selecting “Placement” to see the breakout of results:

Once you’ve selected the breakdown, it should display something like this:

Notice in our example that average frequency for Desktop Right Column placement is much higher than other placements. This can sometimes skew the way a campaign appears to perform for overall frequency, because a higher volume of placements in Right Column may not be so problematic.

I often notice advertisers have high frequency for Right Column placements in cases where they have selected campaign goals that are more tied to eyeballs on ads – such as Reach, for example.

If your overall campaign objectives are more tied to specific action results, such as the Conversions or Video Views objectives, you’ll likely find that Facebook’s optimization system generally works to optimize the placement for the specific action you desire. Since Right Column placement tends to result in low ad interaction, you will normally see lower impression numbers for this placement (and therefore lower frequency), for such campaigns.

Is Your Frequency a Problem?

It can be tough to determine whether your frequency is the source of performance issues. Unfortunately, Facebook removed the Negative Feedback metric from Ads Manager reporting. This was once a great metric for considering the source of fatigue issues.

Fortunately, there are certain cases where you can still get an idea of negative feedback. Specifically, for published page posts that you are promoting, you can export Post-Level data and check two data points in particular: Lifetime Negative Feedback from Users and Lifetime Negative Feedback.

At the time of this writing, these are columns R and S in the Post-Level export. Negative Feedback from Users is a count of people who have given negative feedback. Negative Feedback is a measure of the times that negative feedback has been given.

These metrics can be a potential indicator that your frequency may be too high, though sometimes it can just be that the audience dislikes your ad. That said, it’s always important to look at this number in context as a proportion of your overall reach. As your reach increases, so will negative feedback. If the proportion of Negative Feedback from Users vs. Post Total Reach seems particularly high vs. your average, you may have a problem.

How to Control Facebook Ad Frequency

If you are concerned about your Frequency and would like to control it a bit more directly, there are options available.

1) Reach and Frequency Buying: You can use this option to define goals in advance. Specifically, the amount of people you want to reach, and how often you want to reach them.

There are some limitations to this tool. First, this option is not available to all advertisers. It’s a feature that Facebook seems to make available to advertisers with higher spend levels. Second, it “locks in” your results to the agreed upon amount. If you have content that has the potential to perform extremely well in the ad auction, you could have outperformed what the guaranteed results may have been, had you utilized this option.

2) Use the Reach Objective: This option allows you to set a maximum frequency on your campaign. However, there are many, many cases when I would not recommend using the Reach objective, such as when another goal is more likely to optimize to your specific results (as with Brand Awareness or Conversions, for example). I tend to use this objective only in very specific cases. Jon’s write-up on his structure of 15 Facebook Ad Campaigns included a few examples of where he uses Reach.

3) Using Automated Rules: You can set automated rules to take action on your behalf. You’ll find automated rules in Ads Manager, useful for when certain parameters (such as Frequency!) are met. Jon wrote about this feature in detail here.

4) Manual Monitoring: You can closely monitor your campaigns and simply make changes manually when frequency exceeds your comfort level. For example, you might lower budgets, expand the target, add new creatives, or simply pause Ads, Ad Sets, or Campaigns if it seems your audiences may be getting fatigued based on high frequency. However, keep in mind that certain actions reset the learning phase for your ads.

The Low-Down on Facebook Ad Frequency

You may notice there is no hard rule for frequency listed in this post.

As with many aspects of Facebook advertising, the ideal depends on your specific situation! The outlined approaches are intended to provide a guide for consideration. This will likely be far more effective than a single rule that does not consider the context or needs of your activities.

1. You can monitor Frequency at the Campaign, Ad Set, or Ad Level
2. High frequency is tied to audience fatigue and may impact your results.
3. High frequency can be less of a concern when you have high creative variety, or for particularly high volume placements in your Campaign (such as Right Column).
4. If you believe high frequency may be a problem for your campaigns, you have some options to control Frequency.

Your Turn

Do you consider Frequency in your performance analysis?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post What is an Ideal Facebook Ad Frequency? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I’ve written previously about reporting on reach using Facebook Insights, both at the Page Level and the Post Level. Now we’ll dive into reporting on Facebook Paid Reach using Facebook Ads Manager.

We’ll address some of the pitfalls in reporting inaccurate data, and how to identify Reach Overlap at the Ad, Ad Set, and Campaign levels.

Remember that reach is a measure of unique users. One of the most common mistakes is to simply add numbers together (for different ads, ad sets, or campaigns), and presume that you have total counts of the people reached.

However, since reach should be a measure of unique people, there are safeguards to ensure that your overall counts are accurate (or at least as accurate as possible for a measure that is estimated).

Luckily for us, Ads Manager has some built-in tools to help us better understand reach. We can use these to avoid common reporting mistakes and identify interesting insights.

Understanding Overlap – Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads

One metric that has been available for some time via the Delivery Insights tool is auction overlap. This handy resource is useful for understanding if your ad sets are “competing with themselves” within an ad account.

However, there are other ways to get similar information by using some built-in reporting process from Facebook, along with some simple math. We can also compile information in ways that represent all levels: Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad.

Let’s illustrate this with an example from campaign reporting.

Campaign Reporting

You may be familiar with pulling topline information from your Campaigns tab in Ads Manager.

While Delivery Insights gives some information about audience overlap, it can be somewhat limited. If we are interested in understanding a specific group of campaigns, there is a more powerful method.

When you initially navigate to the Campaigns tab of Ads Manager, you will see all campaigns listed, for the time range that you select.

Protip: Always be sure to double-check the time range, listed on the top right of Ads Manager. This can default to certain values based on what your recent history. I often make the mistake of forgetting to verify this. Therefore, a good habit is to always select “Lifetime” view to start, and then narrow down the data to your specific date ranges needed.

From this initial Campaign Overview, you should see all of your campaigns that ran during the time range listed. For the purposes of this example, I’ve selected to see specific campaigns for the first 6 months of 2017 in this ad account.

Using Filters for a Cleaner View

You may encounter a situation where you have campaigns listed that did not have spend during the time frame. These should not affect your analysis, but if you want to remove them, you can easily apply a filter.

You can apply a filter by clicking the Filters drop down, or by clicking the Plus (+) sign beside the drop down. I’ve called out the Plus sign with a blue arrow in the above image.

My personal preference is to use the Plus sign method, which is most similar to other analytics tools.

I normally use a simple filter. For example, “Impressions ‘is greater than’ 0” populates only those campaigns that delivered impressions during the time range.

Click Add to apply the filter.

We now see only the filtered results matching our conditions:

*I’ve given these generic names for purposes of our example.

We can use these data to understand overall metrics among multiple Campaigns that match our parameters.

Overall data is reported along the bottom of the page, where we can see aggregated results from these four campaigns.

Important: Note that these results are showing paid data only, and do not include organic results. General organic, post-level results are available elsewhere. If you’re interested in diving into that topic, check out this article.

Mistakes with Filters and Important Items to Keep In Mind

Using the Filter feature easily warrants an entire article of its own, but here are some helpful reminders for filtering data to ensure you are not missing any results in your reporting.

1. Deleted Campaigns

If you have deleted campaign(s), you may see a message at the bottom that says “Excludes deleted items.” It’s small and easy to miss:

If you wish to capture these results, change the delivery filter as the message indicates. Select the available options from the drop down (Active, Inactive, Scheduled, Deleted… etc).’

Facebook will update the filter to say “Campaign Delivery: Any” once you select all of the available values and Apply:

If you want to save this filter, you can click the “Save Filter” button on the far right:

2. Large Volume of Campaigns/Data

If you have a high number of campaigns, Facebook’s system may sometimes present an error message about trouble loading the overall aggregate information. You can usually address this by applying some filters to decrease data and add specificity. I’ve found that when this error message appears, I can just let the system continue loading, and it eventually resolves without issue:

3. Historical Metrics

You may also see other notifications called out, depending on the metrics you are viewing. These are usually warnings to keep in mind if you’re trying to compare data over long periods of time, as some metrics are only available as of a certain date. Here’s an example regarding video metrics:

Using Campaign Data to De-Duplicate Facebook Paid Reach

Along the bottom of the reporting view, the summary data will show de-duplicated reach across the campaigns in view. Keep this mind, as we’ll come back to this in a moment.

If we look at the reported Paid Reach for the campaigns in the examples above, we see that we had four campaigns with the following results:

• 10,308 People Reached in Campaign 1
• 3,875 People Reached in Campaign 2
• 2,286 People Reached in Campaign 3
• 1,419 People Reached in Campaign 4

Notice I’ve said “People Reached” instead of just “Reach”. This is a healthy and helpful habit to ensure that I understand which metrics are “People” metrics, as these are the measures of unique users. This is important, as it impacts how we correctly understand overlap using de-duplicated data.

For example, with our sample data from these four campaigns, you may assume that we should simply add these numbers to understand our Total Paid Reach.

This would give us: 10,308 + 3,875 + 2,286 + 1,419 = 17,888 Total People Reached. However, we can look at our summary row at the bottom of this data set and see that Facebook reports our Total Reach as: 16,696 People.

What does this mean? Some people were reached multiple times in these campaigns. In this specific example, we had 1,192 people who were reached at least twice (17,888 – 16,696).

Reporting on Impressions is a simpler process, as this is not a unique user metric. We discussed this previous articles on Post-Level Reach and Page-Level Reach. We can validate this in our sample data. Facebook reported that our Total Impressions were 23,077. This is the same number we would find if we simply added the four rows of impressions together (12,577 + 6,532 + 2,399 + 1,569).

The Power of This Approach

In our example above, we are using data to understand overlap across our entire mix of  campaigns. The super cool thing about the summary row? We can use this to compare campaign vs. campaign.

Let’s re-visit our example: We can determine what sort of overlap existed for Campaign 1 and Campaign 2, specifically.

While we could do this by applying various filters, a super quick way to do this is to simply select both campaigns using the check boxes to the left, and then click to “Filter By Selection”. This will show us just the data for those selected Campaigns.

Selecting the Campaigns:

Filtering by Selection:

Now we have narrowed our view to only these two campaigns:

Similar to the calculation we used above, we can figure out how many people were reached by both campaigns.

In this example, by adding our numbers together, we would incorrectly assume we reached a total of (10,308 + 3,875) = 14,183 People. However, this is not a reflection of the complete picture.

Since Facebook reports that our de-duplicated Total Reach was 13,853, we can calculate how many people were reached by both campaigns by finding the difference between these numbers.

In our case, we had (14,183 – 13,853) = 330 people reached by BOTH campaigns. How cool!

But wait… there’s more!

We can use this same methodology to understand overlap between specific Ad Sets, and between specific Ads. We can even do this for Ad Sets from separate campaigns, and Ads from separate Ad Sets.

Essentially, we can determine overlap across any component of the Campaign->Ad Set-> Ad structure across all activities within a single ad account.

A final example to illustrate this:

Say you had a random assortment of Ads, sorted by Reach, and you wanted to see determine reach overlap for three specific ads from a large group of ads.

We would first select the ads:

Then we would choose the “Filter by Selection” option:

We now have our filtered view showing only our desired ads:

Again using our same calculation methodology, we apply our formula: (1,989 + 1,459 + 710) = 4,158.

Facebook’s de-duplicated Total Reach is 3,997. Therefore we can find that (4,158 – 3,997) = 161 people who were reached at least twice by this group of ads.

The (Facebook Paid Reach Overlap) Formula

We’ve gone through applying the calculations to our data. To boil it down to a single formula, this is what we do:

• Facebook provides us Total Reach from the Summary Row at the bottom of Ads Manager. We’ll call this the Facebook De-Duplicated Reach.
• We identify the specific data rows we would like to compare. We add these together to get a Total Summed Reach.

Using this approach:

1. Reach Row 1 + Reach Row 2 = Total Summed Reach
2. Total Summed Reach – Facebook De-Duplicated Reach = Reach Overlap.

It’s that simple!

What Did We Learn?

1. Applying filters to data in Ads Manager can be a powerful way to segment information.
2. Facebook Paid Reach Overlap can be calculated. We do not need to rely only on Delivery Insights for this information.
3. We can use a straightforward formula for these calculations across Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. These insights can help us determine if particular ad creatives or targets may be more heavily saturated.

This method can be a powerful tool to understanding ad, ad set, or campaign overlap. Have fun!

Your Turn

How do you use Ads Manager to report reach? What particular challenges do you experience with comparing performance data across Ads, Ad Sets, or Campaigns?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Paid Reach: Why Your Reporting May Miss the Complete Picture appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I’ve written previously on Reporting on Facebook Reach, particularly at the Page Level. Another opportunity is to dive more deeply into Reach reporting at the Post Level.

This can be useful in many cases and allows us to more fully understand Facebook Post Reach.

Why You Need to Report on Facebook Post Reach

There are a couple of times in particular when reporting on post reach is useful…

1) When you want to consider organic results in your reporting for paid posts.

• Particularly relevant when you have a paid post or campaign that performs extremely well among paid content, as it can often become heavily served by Facebook’s system organically as a result.
• Without including organic results, you might be missing out on a great deal of performance data and insight.

2) When you are trying to identify particularly high performing posts — potentially for promoting them later — and you’d like to use Reach data as an indicator of post performance.

Facebook Post Reach Defined

First, let’s clarify reporting of organic and paid reach metrics.

• If a user sees the post as a paid placement (i.e. it has the “Sponsored” label in News Feed, for example), that user is included in the Paid Reach count.
• If a user sees the post as an organic placement (i.e. it came directly from the page into the News Feed without a “Sponsored” label), that user is included in the Organic Reach count.
• Importantly, if a user sees placements as both of these types, they are counted in each individual metric, but they are only counted once when the cumulative numbers are totaled for overall Reach.

Here’s how Facebook explains it on one of their help pages:

If your post reaches someone through both paid and organic distribution, they’re counted toward each. Keep in mind that the sum of organic and paid reach won’t always equal post reach. For example, if one person sees your post through both organic and paid distribution, they’ll be counted as 1 in organic reach, 1 in paid reach, and 1 in post reach.

This will likely make more sense in a bit once we get through some specific examples.

Accessing the Data: Post-Level Reporting

First, Facebook does have a method for accessing high-level data on Posts. You can review this simply by clicking on the Insights tab from the top of your page. Facebook may require you to log into Business Manager first if you have your page managed there.

You can either scroll down on the Insights panel or click on Posts from the left side. If you click Posts, you’ll see a list of recent posts, with high-level info:

For further detail, back from the main Insights panel, you can click the “Export Data” to the right:

You can then select to export Post Level data from this screen, by clicking the Post data option. You can adjust the date range, as well as adjust the data you choose to export. Facebook offers several options here to change the layout of the data you export.

I normally like to download all of the data in bulk, instead of running into a situation where I wished I had captured something and have to re-export. If you want to make a change to your selection, you can do so from here. You can also save a favorite layout so that you don’t have to rebuild it in the future.

Post-Level Data vs. Ads Manager

One thing to note is that you will often find somewhat different results from this report, compared to what you would see when viewing similar data in Ads Manager. I’ve seen some indication that this could be due to different estimation models between the data sources, but it can also be impacted when you have additional placements for your ads (such as if you use a Facebook post as the ad material to publish on Instagram or in Instant Articles).

Post-Level data should only be showing you results from your post appearing on News Feed and on your Facebook Page (viewed when users visit your page directly).

Now that we have the data exported, we get to the fun part.

First, you should notice the various tabs across the bottom of your exported file. Though there are fewer options than at the Page Level, there is some potentially valuable data in these. We’ll get to some of this in a bit.

Comparing Paid, Organic, and Total Results for Facebook Post Reach

Going back to our earlier definition of Total Reach vs. Organic Reach or Paid Reach, you should see that if you attempt to add together your Organic and Paid Reach values for a specific row, the total is (almost) always more than the value indicates in Total Reach, at least in cases where you had any paid support for your post. It may look something like this:

*Facebook reports columns I, J, and K in the Post-Level export. In this example, I’ve included L as a calculation of adding J and K together. Column M is L minus I, which is explained more below.

We discussed earlier that the Total Reach metric will not double-count an individual that is reached by both Paid and Organic placements. When some users are reached by both Paid and Organic placements, our numbers can be thrown off. Calculating specific, post-level frequency can be a bit tough (some would say technically impossible).

However, we can evaluate how many people were reached by both Paid and Organic posts by using this data. Essentially, it should just be the difference between our manual calculation and the Total Post Reach number Facebook provided.

In our hypothetical example above, for the post on July 14th, we would do the following: Organic Reach PLUS Paid Reach = Manually Calculated Total Reach, or 2027 + 112,841 = 114,868. The difference between this number and the Facebook Reported Total Reach is our overlap, so 114,868 – 114,539 = 329 people who were reached by both organic and paid placements of the post in question.

Would you want to do this manual calculation breakout? I don’t see much of a reason, but you could use this method if needed.

Reporting Impressions is not as problematic, much like Page-Level reporting. Facebook separates Paid Impressions and Organic Impressions accordingly, and these require no de-duplication or manual re-calculation. You should see that simply adding these numbers together will equal the Total Impressions reported metric. This makes for easier reporting.

Breaking Out Facebook Post Reach Results: Fans vs. Non-Fans

Another under-utilized, interesting metric available from Post-Level data gives us the ability to understand what portion of reach was comprised of page fans vs. people who are not fans. Some might think of these as your “not-yet fans.”

If you navigate toward the right in the exported file from earlier, you’ll find a metric called “Lifetime Post Reach by People Who Like Your Page.” This simply means Lifetime Post Fan Reach.

If you subtract this value from the Total Reach, you have a measure of non-fan reach.

You can use this to estimate how much of your content is reaching fans vs non-fans, which could have interesting implications on ad targeting and investment. Normally, you will see that your paid posts reach a much higher percentage of non-fans vs. fans.

You should also find that organic-only posts reach many more fans than non-fans. However, there are exceptions — especially when a post is shared heavily.

Though this makes intuitive sense, some advertisers might be surprised by these findings.

Here’s a sample calculation to illustrate how you can do this:

*Facebook includes columns I and U in the Post-Level export. I’ve included V, W, and X as calculated fields.

Unpublished Posts: Organic Reporting Challenges

You’ve likely heard of “dark posts” or unpublished posts. These are basically just posts that never appear directly on the Facebook page used to publish ads (except for those appearing on the Info and Ads tab as part of Facebook’s transparency work).

The challenge with these posts is that they also do not appear in Post Level exports from your Facebook page. This means that we are unable to utilize the exported data to do the fun analyses of separating out paid vs. organic results, fans vs. non-fans, etc.

Sometimes, in the case of particularly strong posts that create a great deal of engagement, missing out on this organic reporting can be a big deal. You may have posts that deliver a much larger amount of organic results vs. paid, even in cases where the paid results are robust.

If it’s particularly important to ensure you capture organic data, there is a small, somewhat manual workaround to this.

First, we go to Ads Manager or Business Manager. Then we select the drop down from the top left, and select Page Posts, under the Create and Manage option.

Once selected, you can specify the page you’d like to review post data for.

Though it can take some patience to navigate, you can select to see all Ads Posts. You can then individually explore and review post results.

From the main screen of Page Posts, you’ll see metrics for topline Reach, Engagement, and “People Talking About This.”

If it’s a video post, you can select to open the post and then see an indication of results.

If you hover over the Reach bar on the bottom left, you’ll see a breakout of data for Organic vs. Paid performance.

Note: You can get to the same data from within Ads Manager if you select the Preview Arrow and then open the Post from the link…

When your post is NOT a video, unfortunately, there’s not a straightforward way to break out the organic results for unpublished posts (at least not yet that I’m aware of!). However, the Page Posts tool would at least show you the top-level reach results.

You could spot check this against your Ads Manager reach data. If the number shown on the Ads Post in the Page Posts tool is vastly larger than the reach number reflected in Ads Manager, then you know you might have a particularly strong organic performer on your hands. Congrats!

One bright spot: Page-Level reporting DOES include data on unpublished posts, though it is not broken out for each post. You can see a write-up on that topic here.

What Does All This Mean?

1. Total Post Reach is not simply the sum of Organic Reach and Paid Reach.
2. You can separate and analyze performance of posts for Fans vs. Non-fans, which may provide interesting insights.
3. Capturing Organic performance data on Unpublished Page Posts is possible in many cases, though this data can be limited.

Your Turn

Do you use Post-Level Reporting? Do you have any particular challenges with comparing performance data from Ads vs your Organic results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Post Reach: Post-Level Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Reach is one of the metrics you hear about a lot when it comes to Facebook reporting. When we report on Facebook Reach, there are two main classifications to remember – Facebook Page Reach and Facebook Post Reach.

Facebook Page Reach tends to be the least troublesome of the two, so let’s start here first.

Properly understanding reach tends to be a source of confusion for many marketers, particularly when it comes to reporting on Organic Facebook Reach. I often see it arise in conversations with other members of the Power Hitters Club who are working on performance reports.

Jon has written about this metric in the past, particularly after Facebook made changes to the way reach is defined.

A general disclaimer: For organic Facebook Page Reach, I do not recommend over-emphasizing this metric. It can be a vanity metric that is not connected to actual results.

However, you may have a reason for more holistic performance reporting, such as when you have a particularly high performing advertised post or campaign, and you wish to include organic results in broader performance analysis.

How to Get Facebook Page Reach Data

The simplest way to access page-level Facebook metrics is to click the Insights tab at the top of your page. Note: if your page is in Business Manager, you’ll need to log into Business Manager first to view this option.

After you click the Insights tab, you can click Reach on the far left. At the top right, you can adjust the date range. As you’ll no doubt notice, this is very high-level information. The options on the top right of the chart can split the data into Organic or Paid.

If you are a bit more daring with your data and want freedom to manipulate it more (don’t be afraid to jump in!), you can export Page Level insights info directly from the page.

You can export by clicking the Insights tab, then clicking “Export Data” from the top right.

You’ll see options to export Page Level data from this dashboard by clicking the Page data option. You can adjust the time range, and specify the data to be exported.

Facebook offers several options here to change the layout of the data you export. I normally like to download all the data in bulk, instead of running into a situation where I wished I had captured something and have to re-export.

If you want to make a change to your selection, you can do so from here. You can also save a favorite layout so that you don’t have to rebuild it in the future.

Once you have selected the data points you need, click Export, and it should generate a .xls file for downloading.

If you’ve left All Page Data in the export, the first thing you’ll notice is just how much information is captured. There are many tabs offering deeper, fragmented detail. For now, we’ll just focus on the Reach Metrics.

Getting Facebook Page Reach Information out of Page-Level Data

At the time of this writing, on the main tab, you should see the following columns related to Reach: Daily Total Reach, Weekly Total Reach, 28 Days Total Reach.

These are also broken out into Organic and Paid for each time range, as well as something Facebook refers to as “Viral Reach” – which essentially means that a Facebook user saw the post along with some form of social context. That is, they saw the post along with a message saying their friend has interacted with it.

A helpful tip in case you get confused: There is a definition under the header of every column of the export to tell you what it means.

Now comes the fun part!!! (Also where most people tend to make a few mistakes.)

The golden rule on this: you cannot add together lines to get a total number of reach. Said another way – you cannot simply add together reach numbers, line by line, for a total.

This is because each data row is a measure of unique people for that date, and you may have people reached on multiple days who could be counted twice if you simply sum the rows.

For example – let’s say you wanted to know the total number of people who were reached by your page from July 1 – July 5. It seems logical that you could simply add together the numbers from the rows associated with those days. However, Reach is a measure of Unique Users, which is a very important distinction. When you add these numbers together, they are not de-duplicated… so your sum would be incorrect.

We can illustrate this with a hypothetical example…

Let’s say we had the following results, for three different days in July:

• 100 People on July 1
• 200 People on July 2
• 100 People on July 3

If you simply added these together, you would assume you have reached a total of 400 FB users over these three days. However, you (almost) always will have some level of user overlap of reach from day to day. Therefore simply adding these numbers together will give you an inaccurate count.

It’s important to note that de-duplicating is primarily an issue with metrics associated with unique people (such as reach, Daily Page Engaged Users, or any “user” metrics). If you are reporting on a metric that is not unique per user – such as Impressions – you can add across rows without any of these issues associated with duplications in your data.

De-Duplicating Facebook Page Reach Results

While page-level reach reporting is somewhat limited based on how we can de-duplicate user-specific data, there are some ways that Facebook’s system does this for you automatically. An example is the inclusion of the Weekly and 28 Day numbers.

Based on the way these numbers are presented, they should be providing rolling counts of select metrics against the time frame indicated. What this means: for a Weekly Total Reach count, the number indicates the user reach Facebook estimates for your page on a weekly basis, for the dates associated with that specific row.

If you’re more on the nerdy side (or just curious!), you can do your own de-duplication exercise by adding the daily data for a 7-day period and comparing that with the Weekly data reported for the same date.

This will give you an idea of just how badly you can overestimate results if you were to simply add the raw numbers together. This also provides a better understanding of the number of people who heard from your page more than once in a specific period.

Here’s an example with some sample data from a page to illustrate. We’ll walk through the numbers to make sure this is clear.

*In this example, the Page-Level export includes columns H and J. I’ve added I and K as calculated columns.

If we use the weekly reported numbers from June 30th as our specific example, we would have simply added the rolling day count from the 7-days prior period had we been doing this manually. This would give us 4,274 total people reached (15 people on June 24th + 24 people on June 25th… etc). However, Facebook reports that the total Weekly Unique Reach was 3660 people. That’s a difference of 614 people.

What does this tell us? For the 7 day period, we had 614 people who were reached at least two times over the period.

While some bit of caution is advised for taking these numbers too deeply to heart (due to the fact that the reach metric is estimated and therefore sampled), this is one method that allows you to get a general idea of your overlap.

Reporting on Impressions

Given the challenges of correctly assessing and interpreting sampled data and manual de-deduplication, it can be easier to stick with the simpler, non-unique metrics such as Impressions.

We can validate that Impressions can be added together with no issues. We can do this by using a similar approach as the above Facebook Reach de-dupe method. This can be seen using this sample page data below:

*In this example, the Page-Level export includes columns W and AA. I’ve added Z and AB as calculated columns.

The 28-day metric can use a similar approach.

Reporting on Frequency

You can also combine these data points of Reach and Impressions to get a general idea of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly frequency levels. However, remember that frequency is an average of all impressions. Some people might be reached many times per person, and some are only reached once. You can use this method to report the overall average.

Here’s an example of the method in practice. Remember: Impressions divided by Reach equals Frequency.

*Estimated Daily Frequency and Estimated Weekly Frequency are columns that I’ve added to the spreadsheet. The Page-Level export included Daily and Weekly Reach and Impressions numbers.

Bonus (nerdy) tip: If you want to get an idea of the frequency distribution (how many people were reached one time, vs. two times, vs. three times, etc) for the Daily, Weekly, or 28 day metrics, you can find those in the additional tabs along the bottom of the page level export. You should find that the cumulative averages of these distributions are equal to the estimated method we used above.

It will look something like this:

These numbers are telling you the overall frequency distribution that your page delivered on a specific date. On June 3, this page reached 109 people 1 time, 13 people 2 times, 2 people 3 times, etc.

Monitoring Frequency

How many times your page content reaches a similar audience can be a good thing to monitor. I normally recommend paying closer attention to frequency at the ad-level (or post-level), instead of page-level.

Bigger problems can arise here when high frequency occurs and users tire of a single ad. By running many different ads (or posts) for a single page, higher levels of frequency may not be as problematic.

If it seems these frequency numbers are higher than you’d like, you could consider doing different targeting (primarily using your paid activity) to evaluate different target audiences for your content. Another option is lowering your budgets for particular ads that have higher frequency.

People often ask about the ideal frequency to mitigate these issues, and there is no simple answer to this. Facebook has published an interesting framework on thinking about frequency, which may be useful for considering your own results.

What Does this All Mean?

1. Reporting on your Facebook Page Reach has some challenges. We should fully understand what’s behind the numbers before simply adding a bunch of rows together in a spreadsheet.
2. Impressions are a safe metric you can add together with reckless abandon (mostly).
3. You can estimate Average Page Frequency. You can also investigate details on frequency distribution in Page-Level exported data.

I’ll write more in the future on Facebook Reach Post-Level reporting, which carries its own strengths and weaknesses.

Your Turn

Do you use Page Reporting? Do you have any particular challenges with comparing performance data from Paid Ads vs your Organic results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Page Reach: Page-Level Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.