Last week, I ran an ad set without audience suggestions and it resulted in spending 35% of my budget on remarketing. Now let’s see whether using audience suggestions with Advantage+ Audience will make a difference.

The Test

Recall that Meta is rolling out an update that allows advertisers the ability to use Audience Segments to break down results for all Sales campaigns — not just Advantage+ Shopping.

I have this update, which makes such a test possible.

First, I defined my Engaged Audience and Existing Customers in Ad Account Settings.

I created a manual campaign using the Sales objective. In the ad set, I used Advantage+ Audience and provided suggestions that exactly match the custom audiences used to define my Engaged Audience and Existing Customers audience segments.

According to Meta’s documentation, these should be prioritized before going much broader. Will they?

Results

I spent a quick $272-ish on this test. Using the breakdown by audience segment, I see the following:

• $74.90 spent on Engaged Audience
• $13.17 spent on Existing Customers
• $183.94 on New Audience

This means that 32% of my budget was spent to reach people in the audience suggestions.

By itself, that percentage seems reasonable — even higher than expected. But what’s so interesting is that more of my budget was spent on reaching these same people when I didn’t provide any suggestions at all. It’s reasonable to assume that providing suggestions actually made it less likely that the people in those suggestions were reached.

Why Is That?

There are lots of potential explanations for these results, and I’ll discuss them in a separate video. Ultimately, it’s possible that audience suggestions may not be all that necessary — especially for specific situations.

More to come…