There’s been a big bug fix for Video View audiences related to Facebook Reels engagement (for now).
When you create Video View Audiences, you select which videos are the source of engagement to build them for targeting. The problem: Beginning in March, Facebook Reels no longer appeared among videos that you could select.
Instagram Reels still appeared. You could also select your normal Facebook videos and videos used for ads. But no Facebook Reels.
So, you could no longer target people based on their engagement with your Facebook Reels. If you get much engagement on Facebook, this could have cut down on the size and possibly quality of that audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More.
While I do much less retargeting these days and have bought into going broad, this was one of the rare exceptions. I’ve found that people who watch my Reels to completion are deeply engaged. I’ve leveraged that with ads.
It’s actually been a lot of fun. I created one ad that asks “Are you my people?” because of the fact that I’ve seen this pattern of people who watch my Reels. Of course, that ad is only shown to people who watched a Reel during the past seven days.
I’ve also used this targeting for promoting my one-on-ones and membership because, again, this is a gold audience I want to leverage.
But once the ability to select engagement with Facebook Reels went away, my audience shrunk. I stopped getting comments and engagement on the Facebook version of my ad.
This changed immediately once I was able to add my three most recent Reels. So, this is a big deal for me!
I don’t know how widespread this bug was or how many advertisers cared about this, but it’s something I’m excited about! Hopefully the change sticks. As we know, what’s fixed today is broken again tomorrow.
