Hey,

Meta made some pretty big changes to Facebook Ads – continuing its embrace of machine learning, AI, and Advantage branding.

This has caused something of a panic, if my swollen mailbag is anything to go by, with authors worried that they are going to lose control over who sees their ads, and where they are shown.

A lot of this stuff is now switched on by default, but fear not, compadres; I have your back – solutions, workarounds, and a handy video guide too.

Call it my way of making up for missing the last two weeks. I’m in the process of selling my house and moving to another town and it is so very disruptive. But I want to deal with three big Facebook concerns in one fell swoop, as each are bubbling over in the author community.

1. Facebook is now forcing Advantage Placements and Advantage Targeting.

This is not quite true as you will see – more in a moment, as this is the focus of today’s newsletter (and a video guide).

2. Facebook Groups will be throttled (further).

This fear seems to be based on Facebook finally rolling out the option to run ads to Groups – a reasonable concern.

I don’t have a Facebook Group for all sorts of reasons, but for those who do, here’s Jon Loomer on how you can now advertise directly to Group members. This kind of targeting option often presages a throttling of organic reach, so that might be the next step – i.e. get Page owners hooked on Groups via free visibility, then throttle that and charge them for access. Some would call that the Facebook MO.

I wouldn’t quite put it like that but I understand the sentiment and think that’s a reasonable prediction of how things might play out. For now, you can play with this ad option – if you like.

3. Facebook is launching an ad-free version.

This new initiative gives users an option to pay a monthly fee and see no ads on Facebook. Some are worrying that this will affect ad performance, shrink audiences, or otherwise pose an existential threat to the viability of Facebook’s ad platform.

I’m not worried about it whatsoever – for three key reasons:

• this is launching EU-only, and specifically in that territory because of tough, new privacy laws which aren’t expected to be adopted globally – so it's important to note that it doesn’t affect any of the major English-language markets for books.
• the price alone means that uptake is expected to be minimal, even within the EU.
• I happen to live in the EU and I’ve seen Facebook’s “selling” of this – which is so half–hearted that it’s abundantly clear to me that Facebook is only doing this to tick a box for lawmakers and won’t be pushing it hard to users. As you can see in the screenshot below, which greeted me when I logged into Facebook this week, the marketing is super tepid. And once I clicked through this menu, it was never mentioned again. It's the opposite of a hard sell - really not worth worrying about from an advertiser perspective.

Those are the three big fears about Facebook Ads which I’ve seen circulating recently. But let’s zoom in on the issue of Advantage Targeting and Advantage Placements becoming the default in Facebook Ads – as that is causing the most angst.

Understandably so, as those two things can ruin your ads’ performance, turning winning campaigns into total losers.

If you missed the fuss over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of chatter about how Facebook is forcing authors to use various settings on their ads now which tank performance.

These fears are justified, to an extent. If you are not proactive in the ad creation process, Facebook is now making a lot of problematic stuff the default now – and hiding how you can change it back.

I have various workarounds to deal with this, but let’s break it down and give you a little video guide too, because it’s complicated... and important.

Facebook Hearts AI

I have previously covered ten different ways that Meta is using machine learning and algorithms and AI with Facebook Ads – encouraging advertisers to give up lots of control to its ever smarter systems. (Part 1 here, Part 2 here.)

The problem is that the machines can be pretty dumb when it comes to optimizing the kinds of ads that authors typically run – i.e. ads for books, Traffic campaigns pointing at Amazon or Apple or whoever.

I won’t repeat what I said back then, but if you need a refresher on all this Facebook Advantage stuff that Meta is pushing so heavily, which bits you should absolutely trust, which you should turn off, and which you should build guardrails around, then catch up above.

Anyway, what’s happening now is Meta is taking an axe to our guardrails. Or so it seems.

I’m happy to report that you can still switch off Advantage Targeting and Advantage Placements, although you might have to do a bit of digging to find the necessary settings.

I strongly recommend you do that, because letting Facebook decide where your ads are shown and who sees them simply doesn’t work for the kind of ads authors typically find success with.

You can review the above-linked pair of newsletters on Facebook and AI for a full list of things you might want to monitor, but here today we will focus on the two most important: Advantage Placements and Advantage Targeting.

I made a quick video guide to show the various ways you can still switch these off - because part of the confusion right now is that different people are seeing different things. Luckily, I have several ad accounts and can give you the skinny on several different workarounds for you.

​Watch it here.

I recorded that video just for you guys, because I was getting so many questions about it, but I’ll have a more comprehensive video up on YouTube soon – an update of my ad creation guide – once Facebook stops bloody tinkering.

But for those who prefer boring old words, or who otherwise can't watch a video right now, here's a quick text guide too.

Advantage Placements

This is arguably the most important to have under manual control. I strongly recommend delving into the settings to find the option to turn on full manual control of Placements.

I also recommend only serving your ads to Facebook News feed – at least until you know what you are doing. As in, you can make profitable ads, and are comfortable split testing things like new placements to measure their effectiveness cleanly.

In case you can’t find the option to revert to full manual control, at the very least, make sure you turn off the Audience Network. Facebook might warn you that this will increase the cost of your ads. Ignore those warnings. It’s true, but misleading. The Audience Network is junk traffic, especially for the kinds of ads authors run; some clicks are cheap for a reason.

For the exact visual steps, it's best to watch the video guide above but, generally speaking, if you hover your mouse over the area a small blue EDIT link will appear and then you can get in and manually manage this setting as before.

OK, that’s control yanked back over where your ads show in cyberspace. Now let’s do the same for who sees them.

Advantage Targeting

Once again here, Facebook hands you a shovel and makes you dig around for something that should be front-and-center.

No conspiracy, as such, just them pushing this Advantage nonsense really hard. If they could put half the effort into making it work properly I’d be a happy camper, but here we are.

You have two tasks here, equally important:

• find the buried interest targeting interface – which FB goes to greater and greater lengths to hide
• turn off Advantage Detail Targeting if you have that option.

I don't agree with the view that these changes are fine and dandy – I think that's driven by people who use Facebook Ads very differently to how authors typically do.

I went into this in more detail in previous emails, but the short version is if you are sending readers to Amazon or some other site you don’t control, then the AI won’t get enough info to work properly for you. So don’t let it decide who sees your ads or where they are shown; Meta is not ready to self-drive this particular vehicle.

They might take this control away from us in the future – I’d personally rate that as likely over the short/medium term. But today we have the power, and we should use it.

And if you are talking to reps at Facebook – lots of them are reaching out to anyone spending money right now – then please stop them from delivering their script and instead use the time to tell them how terrible these change is for authors, and anyone else using Traffic campaigns pointing at third-party sites. (And if you think that’s pointless, it has worked before...)

We’ll talk about the future again, but for now enjoy these workarounds and taking back control of your Facebook ad campaigns.

Hope this was helpful!

Dave

P.S. Packing music this week is William Onyeabor with Body & Soul.