OUCH: Be Careful When You Edit Audiences or This Will Happen!

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.