This doesn’t make sense…
I’m a huge fan of audience segments. It’s because of the breakdown by audience segments that I’ve changed my opinion about algorithmic targeting.
But there could be a problem.
What Happened
I started a campaign to promote one-on-ones only to people who visited my website during the past day. I don’t run remarketing campaigns often, but this was a little experiment. Original audiences, no expansion.
I used the Sales objective while optimizing for Daily Unique Reach. Not relevant here except that you can utilize audience segments with sales campaigns for additional insight.
When I broke down by audience segments, Meta says that 60% of my budget was spent on NEW audience.
How?
This shouldn’t be possible.
Why? One way I defined my Engaged Audience is with a website custom audience for all visitors during the past 180 days.
In other words, that audience would fully include the audience for visitors during the past day. There shouldn’t have been any impressions on the “new audience.”
Testing a Theory
I had a theory about what might be happening. I hadn’t used that 180 day custom audience for targeting for a few months. You can see this within the Audiences page. Ignore the top activity since that reflects the test I ended up running.
Is it possible that this matters? Did that custom audience stop updating, which meant that a 1-day audience could include new people?
There was one way to find out. I ran a test.
First I ran an ad set targeting the 180 day audience of website visitors for two days. Then I turned the ad set back on to target website visitors from the past day.
The result: This time, Meta said that 0% of my budget was spent on New Audience.
What Does It Mean??
Does this mean that the website custom audience used to define my audience segment stopped updating? I’ve long heard people suggest this, but nothing in Meta’s documentation says that this would happen.
Website custom audiences can expire, but that happens after two years of not using them. And when they expire, they’re deleted.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but the website custom audience used to define my Audience Segment had not expired.
There was once a similar quirk with lookalike audiences. As long as you were using them, they’d continue to update every three to seven days. But even that seems to have disappeared.
This Would Be a Problem
If website custom audiences actually stop updating when you stop using them, I’d love to see where in Meta’s documentation this is stated. And if it’s true, it’s a problem.
Meta can’t promote algorithmic targeting and the use of audience segments at the same time. That would mean encouraging advertisers to avoid targeting strategies like remarketing while knowing that this would then make audience segments — a tool that’s helpful to breakdown distribution of algorithmic targeting — potentially worthless.
If the website custom audiences used for Audience Segments do stop updating, advertisers need to know the details. Does updating stop immediately once the audience is no longer actively used for targeting? Is it after three months? Six months? Something else?
Regardless, this is nonsensical. Audience Segments need to update, regardless of whether the audiences are used for targeting. They need to be dynamic.
It’s possible that what I saw was a temporary glitch. Maybe it’s a bug that won’t happen again.
Or is it an oversight?
How You Can Help
If you have a similar setup like I do, I encourage you to test it:
1. You use an All Website Visitors 180 days custom audience or something like it to define your Engaged Audience.
2. You haven’t used it for targeting in in a few months (this can be verified on your Audiences page).
3. Create a campaign using the Sales objective.
4. Run an ad set using original audiences, targeting a 1-day website custom audience (turn off Advantage Custom Audience).
5. Use the Breakdown by Audience Segments.
What do you see?
