Meta recently started rolling out Value Rules, a new way to adjust delivery towards your ideal audience. I published a short video and overview, but this is a topic that requires a more detailed explanation.
While Meta originally announced the pending arrival of Value Rules last August, it’s admittedly surprising that this feature is a reality. Everything is trending towards automation while Value Rules give advertisers back some control.
I argue that this is a positive addition during a transitional moment when Meta’s AI-powered delivery is improving but retains major flaws. This additional control, though it will certainly result in misuse that can hurt results, has the potential to solve some issues when used properly.
In this post, we’ll explore the following:
- What Are Value Rules?
- Requirements
- Value Rules Basics
- Create a Value Rule
- About Multiple Rules
- How to Apply
- Reporting
- How to Evaluate When to Use Value Rules
- Examples
- Considerations and Concerns
Let’s dive in…
What Are Value Rules?
Let’s consider the following scenario…
You are running ads for website leads. Meta will bid for you to maximize the number of website leads you get. However, you know that women between the ages of 35 and 44 represent the highest value leads. These are the people most likely to buy from you and maintain a high lifetime value.
Value Rules give the ability to influence Meta’s bids based on the demographics of your audience. You can bid more than usual based on age group, gender, location, or mobile operating system (iOS or Android).
You can also create Value Rules to bid less than you would normally. For example, if you find that Meta is spending equally on men and you get more low-quality leads from this group, you can decrease your bid by gender.
With the knowledge of different customer value by demographic, you might normally segment your audience and define different budgets by ad set. You could set a higher budget for women than men, for example. One of the benefits of using Value Rules is that it allows you to consolidate your ad sets.
The end result of increasing your bid for certain demographics may be that you will spend more per conversion when using Value Rules. However, the expectation is that you will get higher value conversions this way.
Requirements
Value Rules are available when using the Sales or App Promotion campaign objectives. They are not available for Special Ad Categories of Housing, Employment, or Financial Products and Services (formerly Credit).
Advantage+ Catalog Ads must be turned off.
When using the Sales objective, you must use the Website conversion location.
The only eligible performance goal when using this conversion location is “Maximize number of conversions.”
When using the App Promotion objective, you can select either “Maximize number of app events” or “Maximize number of app installs” for the performance goal.
It’s important to remember that Value Rules are not available for top-of-the-funnel actions like link clicks, landing page views, and ThruPlay.
Value Rules Basics
Go to Advertising Settings. If you have Value Rules, you’ll see a box for it in the top section under “Your Business.”
Once you click it, you’ll get an option to create a rule set. A single rule set can contain multiple Value Rules. Click that.
You’ll get an overview of how Value Rules work and a checkbox indicating that you understand costs may increase by using Value Rules.
Once you click to create a rule set, you’ll see this…
Create a Value Rule
This is a multi-step process…
1. Define your preferred audiences using up to two criteria.
You can choose from age, gender, location, or mobile operating system.
If your criteria is age, you can select from different age ranges.
If gender, you can select either women or men.
For mobile operating system, you can select Android or iOS.
And for locations, you can select specific countries, regions, or states (can be multiple of a single type).
2. Add criteria.
You have the option of including up to two criteria. To add another criteria, click the “+” button.
For example, your preferred audience could be men aged 25-44.
Or women in the US or Canada.
Or people between 45 and 54 with an iOS device.
3. Adjust your bid.
Next, you can increase or decrease the bid for your defined audience.
Meta automatically makes bids to reach the people who will see your ads. You can have Meta increase your bids for your priority audience to make sure you reach them or decrease your bids for people who provide less value.
The default is to increase the bid by 20%.
You could technically increase your bid by up to 1,000%.
And you can decrease it by up to 90%.
4. Rule name.
Your rule will be named by default, but you can override it if you want. Names can be up to 50 characters long.
About Multiple Rules
A single Rule Set can contain multiple Value Rules. You can create up to 10 rules by clicking the “Add Rule” button.
If you create multiple rules, the rule order matters.
Meta provides the following example:
- Rule 1: Increase bid by 20% for women in California
- Rule 2: Increase bid by 10% for women who use an iOS operating system
If a person meets the criteria for multiple rules, only the first applicable rule will be applied.
For example, consider the group of women in California who use an iOS operating system (they qualify under both rules). The bid will be increased by 20% for this group since the first rule will apply (women in California).
You can change rule order to be sure that your most important rules are prioritized.
These multiple rules will be part of the same Rule Set. After you click “Next,” you can name it.
How to Apply
Just because you’ve created a Value Rule doesn’t mean that it will be applied automatically. This is a good thing because it gives you the flexibility to use them in the situations where they’re most helpful and not use them when they aren’t needed.
Assuming your setup qualifies (see the “Requirements” section above) and your account has access to Value Rules, you will see the option to select your Rule Set below the performance goal.
Reporting
If you have access to Value Rules, you can get further insights into reporting using Breakdowns.
You’ll find this Breakdown option at the very bottom of the dropdown menu.
Once you’ve run a campaign using Value Rules, Meta says that you will “be able to see outcomes, such as conversions, for each value rule in your value rules set.” I don’t have any first-hand experience with this yet to share an example.
In theory, these breakdowns will help you assess the impact of your Value Rules. Combined with data from your other analytics tools, you’ll be able to determine whether the adjusted bidding is effective or if you need to make changes.
How to Evaluate When to Use Value Rules
I find it interesting that Meta is making Value Rules available because it seems to make an admission that there are some inherent weaknesses in Meta’s optimization. My complaint has long been that, barring a few exceptions, the algorithm does not care about the value of your results (leads, clicks, engagement, etc.). Its only focus is on getting you as many of that action as possible, and that can lead to low-quality results and waste.
With all of this said, we shouldn’t automatically assume that Value Rules are required. Here’s how I’d evaluate whether you should create and apply Value Rules…
1. What does your most valuable customer look like?
This type of evaluation will happen within your CRM or external reporting, rather than in Ads Manager. Get a sense of what your most valuable customer by lifetime value looks like by your available demographic segments (age, gender, location, and mobile operating system). In theory, these are the people you’ll want Meta’s algorithm focused on.
2. What is the value of your ad-generated results by segment?
Make sure that you have adequate tracking in place so that you can evaluate the quality of your leads and app installs that are generated by ads. Are you finding that your leads are often low-quality? What trends or consistencies have you learned about those who are the lowest quality? Can they be grouped by age, gender, location, or mobile operating system?
3. How is Meta spending your money?
Within Ads Manager, use breakdowns by demographic group to get a better idea of how Meta is spending your money, particularly when running campaigns that would qualify for Value Rules. Is money wasted on groups that you’ve determined to be low-value? Is not enough spent on those you consider your highest value customers?
Examples
Now that we have guidelines that will help determine when you might use Value Rules, I want to share a couple of specific examples of when I think this could be useful. In each case, it helps override a weakness in Meta’s ads algorithm that is exploited to get more (low-quality) results.
NOTE: The examples below refer to improving lead quality. Because Value Rules are only available for the Sales and App Promotion objectives, the conversion event you use will also need to qualify. The “Lead” standard event, for example, is not eligible for the Sales objective. I use “Completed Registration,” but there are others available (or custom events) that you could use instead with Sales.
1. Lead quality by age group.
I’ve found that if I don’t restrict by age group when running ads for website leads, Meta will spend a high percentage of my budget on people over the age of 65. While I’d be fine spending some money there, I would assume it would take up the smallest percentage of my budget. But since Meta’s able to get me cheap leads there, it dedicates a large chunk of my budget with that group.
That, of course, is bad because these have been low-quality leads. In the past, I’ve countered this by turning off audience suggestions by age group and set an age limit of 54. While this isn’t my preferred approach (I don’t want to cut off leads at that age), it’s been the best way to prevent Meta from wasting my money on cheap and low-quality leads.
With Value Rules, I could attack this differently. I could lower my bids on people over 54. This would allow me to continue targeting these people while spending less on them.
2. Lead quality by country.
I’ve written before about an experiment I ran to target people by different country groups for lead generation. I didn’t want to isolate my ad spend on people to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia only because I had paying customers outside of those countries, too.
The problem was that, while those four countries maintained a similar cost and lead quality, many of the other countries I could target generated very cheap and often low-quality leads. Since the algorithm doesn’t care about lead quality, it would spend most of my money getting me the cheapest leads possible if given the choice.
The way I attacked this before was by creating multiple ad sets to group countries by CPM and adjust my budget accordingly. But I could instead create Value Rules to bid differently by country and combine them into a single ad set.
Considerations and Concerns
While there certainly are reasons to use Value Rules, I worry that many advertisers will assume they are necessary when they aren’t. This is true of nearly every possible customization that you can make (placements, targeting, bidding, etc.). Advertisers often assume they are necessary and drive up costs unnecessarily.
Do not assume that Value Rules are required. Particularly when maximizing the number of conversions where the conversion event is a purchase, the algorithm rarely wastes your money on segments that won’t lead to that action. And while it can certainly happen with leads, don’t assume that it does.
Value Rules are a potential solution to a problem. Make sure that you first have a problem that needs to be solved. Otherwise, using Value Rules may only increase your costs without doing much of anything to the value of results.
This is actually why I’m surprised that Meta is making Value Rules widely available in the first place. Particularly since we’re moving to less and less control, this feels like a feature that would be offered as an exception to a small group of advertisers. If it’s encouraged, it will surely lead to misuse.
Maybe this is a complexity that very few advertisers will bother with. It should be viewed as an exception, rather than as a rule.
Your Turn
Do you have Value Rules? How might you use them?
Let me know in the comments below!
