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Should you exclude your customers from your ads?

Should you exclude your customers from your ads?

Cody Plofker
February 25, 2022

Good morning. I was hoping to get out a piece on brand vs performance marketing, but it's a longer one and I've had a crazy week so it will be coming next week. In the meantime, I wanted to share some interesting numbers on the Facebook side of things.

I know not everyone reading this is a media buyer, but I do think it's important for founders and operators to know so they can manage their internal teams or agency partners.

In the post iOS 14 era, a lot of media buying best practices have changed. Fortunately, they've actually changed for the better in my opinion. Things are much simpler now, you need less campaigns, less ad sets, and less fancy targeting. We don't get nearly as much data back and it takes much longer to get the data back we do get, so our approach has changed. We can't do nearly as much detailed targeting or daily optimizations because we're flying blind.

This has allowed us to focus way more on the important things like offers, creative, and landing pages.

I'm constantly testing the new "best practices" post iOS and if I find anything that's interesting, I'll share it here.

Quick disclaimer: There are no true best practices. What works in my account might not work in yours, so please focus on the principles of what I'm saying and always test to see what's working best for you.

Where I Keep Up With Best Practices

Imagine having access to the worlds best media buyers, who you can turn to every single time you have a question about your account structure, targeting, pixel set up, or retargeting approach. It's something that I truly think is worth thousands of dollars because the right info can make your business hundreds of thousands extra. Fortunately, you don't need to. I'm a member of Andrew Foxwell's Founder's Membership, and I'll never leave. Anytime I have a question about anything inside of our ad account, it's the first place I go. Where else can you get immediate replies from people like Andrew himself, Jake The Ad Nerd, Zach Stuck, Barry Hott, and others. Plus you get discounts on Andrew's courses, and lots of other cool resources like Motion and Kno. To join in on the fun, go here.

Should You Exclude Your Customers And Site Visitors?

One thing I've been testing is exclusions. A lot of people talk about not needing as many exclusions post iOS because Facebook can't even exclude as well anyways. I've heard from a few people that less exclusions was working better lately, but I was super skeptical. My biggest concern with this approach was that yeah sure ROAS looks better on platform, but it's because you're showing your ads to more existing customers.

So I tested it, because I'l all about account simplification and giving FB as much data as possible. I'll get to them in a second, but first a little backstory. Up until a month or so ago we were running with traditional exclusions; meaning we'd exclude everything lower in the funnel. So in Prospecting, we'd exclude site visitors, page engagers, purchasers, etc; One day last month I was in Triple Whale looking at TikTok and I noticed that TikTok was doing a really good job of bringing in net new customers. I am not sure if it's because we're just reaching a new audience on TikTok, but we're also excluding way less there. We're only excluding customers 180 days, and we had only about an 6% delta between cost per acquisition (CPA) and true new customer CPA (NCPA).

This got me thinking, so I checked in on our FB data in Triple Whale. I was pretty disheartened to see that we had up to a 32% delta between our CPA and NCPA. Meaning that even though our ROAS in platform was amazing, we weren't driving as many new customers as we thought. FB, even with all of the exclusions, was showing our ads to existing customers.

My next test was to text with only excluding Purchasers in the last 180 days, and to be honest the results shocked me...

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Exclusions Continued

Sorry about that cliffhanger. Ok but yeah, the results did shock me. The delta between our CPA and NCPA was down to 16% while only excluding purchasers from the last 180 days. I was chatting with my friend Brian Singer, and he put it eloquently: "It's almost like when you're telling FB to exclude prior purchasers, they're making a concerted effort to actually reach those people to pad the stats." I couldn't agree more, and after talking to a few people that used to be on the product team at FB, it makes a ton of sense.

When you launch a new ad set, FB will always go after a few existing customers to model out from. It's almost like each ad set is it's own lookalike. When you starve the machine of signal by hard excluding, it becomes ravenous and actually goes after more of your customers to get data. In this low signal post iOS era, you sometimes have to feed the machine as much signal as possible, even though it might sound counterintuitive or not best practice. The best practices have changed.

Next up, I'm going to test different purchaser exclusion windows, and maybe no exclusions. I'll test initially by launching new creative testing ad sets with different exclusions windows and compare the CPA to NCPA delta as the first round, and then launch new evergeen broad ad sets with different exclusions windows.

The New Best Practices

I wouldn't be surprised if one day soon we didn't even need exclusions or retargeting, and a full funnel approach was the best practice. I don't think we are there yet, but there might be a day where we are. Anyways, best practices have surely changed. I'm a big fan of keeping account structure very simple, and instead focusing nearly all of your time on creative and landing page testing and optimization. Speaking of landing pages, one of the best in the business is Wealth and his team from The CRO Company. Wealth is a brand owner himself, and they really understand how to create landing pages, including advertorials that really convert on FB. While a lot of landing page agencies get you pages, they spend most of their time on the optimization phase, which is where the magic happens. I highly recommend scheduling a time to chat with Wealth and his team.