Another Useful Meta Ads Feature Removed

I have to vent about Meta again.

I did a focus group for Meta on Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) like a year before it came out and they didn't have a way to control for existing customers.

I adamantly and explicitly said "I and any decent advertiser I know would never use this product if we couldn't control, exclude, or report on audiences like existing customers specifically."

I told them they were completely out of touch and that while I'm confident there are advertisers who benefit from readvertising to their existing customers and that OBVIOUSLY META'S MACRO DATA OF TARGETING EXISTING CUSTOMERS WOULD LOOK LIKE IT GETS MORE EFFICIENT CONVERSIONS that doesn't mean it drives more actual incremental value.

When ASC rolled out with the existing customer cap option, I was thrilled.

The new change to remove this existing customer control function is an atrocity from a completely out of touch team that only cares about Meta's revenue and not about their advertisers businesses at all.

By removing this limit function they're making their easiest tool for advertisers more evil.

Yes, it will still be possible to exclude visitors from targeting and hopefully that will still get most/all of the other benefits of ASC, but I don't know.

What I do know is that new and uninformed advertisers will hear about and read about the advantages of using ASC but might not understand the downsides of letting the system target existing customers.

Targeting existing customers by default inflates apparent ad performance and misleads advertisers to believe they're doing better than they actually are, leading them to spend more on Meta.

Spending money to advertise to your existing customers is not inherently bad, but for many advertisers it can be a huge waste.

Even if targeting existing customers is beneficial for your business, in many cases, it's still not beneficial for you to lump those existing customers in with new customers from a reporting, optimization, or creative standpoint.

You're probably better off targeting them separately and using different messaging and offers than what you're offering new customers.

Do you really want to offer the same discount to first time customers and your existing customers?

So few advertisers use the existing customer audience segment anyway and even fewer know how to look at the audience segments breakdowns, but the solution isn't to remove this tool because people aren't using it (or because removing it makes Meta more money).

Whenever Meta finds an underutilized function or tool in their system (because they have the data for it), their default solution is to axe it and move on.

The better solution is to better educate advertisers in the platform so they are better informed about how to make the tools work best for their business.

For such a complicated and important advertising platform, there is insufficient in-platform education for newer and inexperienced advertisers. Most advertisers don't know half of the settings that they can use to benefit their business. And Meta likes it that way.

Please keep in mind that any ad platform is incentivized to make it look like their ads caused sales for your business so you can justify throwing more money into the platform.

It's at its best when you're making money and they're making money.

Buuuut they don't care if the sales are incremental. They don't care if the ad actually drove someone to buy that they weren't going to buy otherwise. They're happy to take credit for a sale that was likely to happen regardless.

As long as their system can say "this person took this action after clicking or seeing an ad" they don't care who, why, or how, they take credit and it makes advertisers spend more money.

Advertisers have to be vigilant and not blindly let the systems take control.

For anyone reading this, please go to your Meta rep and explain how this negatively impacts your business.