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by Elliot Drake
I made a mistake…
The good news is that you can benefit from my mistake by not doing what I did.
We have hundreds of saved audiences that we use for boosting posts at Content Factory. This saves us a ton of time when we run promotions since we can select our audiences from a list, but you must be careful.
Here’s what happened.
I was promoting a video for an upcoming workshop.
The workshop was in San Diego, so we wanted to promote it to one of our favorite saved audiences. The original audience was of fans of Social Media Examiner and Digital Marketer. That audience includes fans in a few countries, so we wanted to change the target location to a 50-mile radius around San Diego.
When I boosted a post promoting the workshop, I edited the audience to target just the local San Diego area.
Pretty standard… right?
I thought everything was fine but…
I ended up editing the audience for 101 other boosted posts.
This audience, as you can see, had 1.9 million people in it – I created it and named it myself. Now with San Diego only, there’s only a few thousand.
So now those other 101 campaigns that were using the original audience were showing only to people in San Diego. These posts were then not only not reaching the right audience, but burning out the tiny San Diego audience.
For a short time, there were a lot of people not seeing our messages – exactly at the time we had some high authority coverage and products to sell.
This was definitely an honest mistake, which is why we have #MAA and #CID to catch them early. Mistakes will inevitably happen which is why we want everyone to keep learning, doing, and teaching.
This is also why we teach people not to create or edit audiences from within a boosted post. We like to have all out targeting set within Ads Manager, named properly, and following #GCT.
The moral of the story
Once you have selected a saved audience and changed the location (or age, interests, ect.), the changes you make will propagate to all other ad sets using the same audience.
Always create different saved audiences for your boosted posts, especially if you change the location.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.