Audiences to Exclude From Your Facebook Campaigns

Renata Ekine September 11, 2020

Typically when we create a Facebook campaign we tend to focus on targeting the right audience and setting the right budget and bid strategy, and we forget about the most crucial success factor of them all! In this article I will be sharing with you the type of audiences you need to exclude from your Facebook campaigns.

By audience exclusion we refer to the process of “removing” part of your audience from your original target audience in order to create a smaller subset to display your ads to. This helps you narrow your audience to a highly relevant group of people, which in turn helps increase ad performance. Although Facebook’s algorithm is pretty good at displaying your ads to users who are more prone to converting (i.e. performing the action you optimise for), sometimes you’d like to have a bit more control and assist Facebook by excluding some audiences. By excluding audiences you help:

1. Refine your targeting and reach a highly relevant audience
2. Avoid ad fatigue and increase conversions and ad performance
3. Reduce ad costs due to not bidding against yourself (cost per conversion and cost per click)
4. Avoid issues with ad delivery due to overlap

To better illustrate the type of audiences you need to exclude, we need to have a pretty good look at the campaign structure.

Types Of Facebook Campaign

Typically we need to run 2 types of campaigns; Prospecting and Remarketing (or Retargeting).

Put simple, prospecting campaigns help reach people who are unaware of your brand while remarketing campaigns help reach people who are aware of your brand (people have visited your website, downloaded your app, etc.) and convince them to perform an action that matters to your business (conversion). Depending on the type of your business, e.g. e-commerce, services, etc. you will run a more simplified to a more complex variation of the Facebook campaign structure presented below.

Types Of Audience Exclusion

Audiences to exclude from your prospecting campaigns

Using the example above, let us assume that we are running 3 different types of Facebook ad sets for our prospecting/acquisition strategy:

1. An ad set targeting Interests (this can be one interest with a high audience volume)
2. An ad set targeting 3% LookAlike Audience based on the Purchase event ( this can be a 3% LA based on your CRM file)
3. An ad set targeting 1% LookAlike Audience based on the Purchase event

Here is the list of audiences you need to exclude:

1. Existing customers
2. Website visitors
3. People who have already installed your app (if you don’t have an app you can skip this audience)

These three audiences are the most crucial ones to exclude. By excluding them you allocate money only on new customer acquisition.

Additionally to those, there are a few more audiences you will need to exclude:

The 3% LookAlike Audience based on the Purchase event and the 1% LookAlike Audience based on the Purchase event. By not excluding these audiences from the interested-based ad set (#1) you risk showing your ads to a subset of your target audience multiple times (those who are in the interest-based ad set AND the LA-based ad set) and this might lead to audience annoyance. One thing to clarify is that technically, excluding both 1% and 3% lookalike audiences from the interest-based ad set isn’t really necessary. The reason behind it is that the 1%LA (#3) is already included in the 3%LA (#2). So, technically by excluding the 3%LA you also exclude the 1%LA. With that said, it is considered good practice to exclude both as a “non-audience overlap” tactic.

Audiences to exclude from your remarketing campaigns

The main goal of audience exclusion in your remarketing campaigns is to narrow your audience and show people a highly relevant message by customising the creative and messaging to get them to perform an action you care about.

Depending on how refined your Facebook ads remarketing strategy is the more remarketing campaigns you may need to run (this is highly dependant on the number of campaigns that target people depending on where they are in the funnel). For example, you’d want to narrow your audience to include only people who visited key pages ( if you are offering services), added products to their cart,visited products within a specific product category, or already purchased certain products. In such cases, you want to make sure that you make the necessary exclusions, i.e. exclude people who visited the cart page from your website visitors, etc.

Based on the image above, here are the audiences you need to exclude from your remarketing campaigns:

For an ad set that is targeting people that visited a specific landing page, you need to exclude existing customers as well as people who have performed view or add to cart actions.

Regarding the view or ATC 28d, you need to exclude additionally to existing customers view or ATC audiences that you are targeting in other ad sets such as the view or ATC 14d, etc.

If you are running Dynamic Product ads (aka DPAS) for your multi-product e-commerce store you can – additionally to your existing exclusion – remove products that were viewed, added to the cart or purchased by your target audience. This is ideal for your remarketing campaigns, if your audience is likely to purchase from you again, but not the same product they’ve recently bought.

How To Exclude Audiences In Your Facebook Campaigns

Excluding audiences is quite straightforward. In the INCLUDE section you add the audience you want to target while in the EXCLUDE section you exclude the desired custom audience, or an audience based on demographic, interests or behaviour information.

To make such exclusions, you should head to the audience section and adjust the available options accordingly. When making changes here, do take into consideration your product and the time needed until they need to buy it again.

Facebook Ads Audience Exclusion: what you should know

1. When working with Lookalike Audiences and using more than one in your campaigns it is always a good idea to exclude the lowest percentage (ex. 1%) from the highest one (3%) if you are planning on targeting the same one in another campaign. That way, you narrow your targeting to the right audience and avoid overlap.
2. Always exclude your existing clients from your acquisition and remarketing campaigns.
3. Always exclude your remarketing audiences from your prospecting campaigns. Be careful not to do the opposite as it will result in a smaller targeting audience and might drive costs up).
4. Always exclude audiences you target in other ad sets to avoid bidding against yourself.
5. Map out your campaign structure into an Excel file so you can have an overview of all the audiences you are targeting. This will make audience exclusion easier.

For more tips on how to run Facebook Ads -besides audience exclusion- be sure to check the free preview of the Successful Facebook Ads ebook over at Newsfeed.org.

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