ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

💨 While AAA can be hugely powerful, they also have had some critical limitations

⚙️ Facebook is changing AAA to give more control to advertisers

📷 Three changes to AAA we found in the wild: Age targeting, Audience exclusion, & City targeting

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

We’ve talked about some of the challenges with Facebook’s AAA campaigns before. If you havent done so, please check out our earlier episodes:

5 reasons why Facebook’s Automated App Ads arent ready for prime time yet

How to win with Facebook’s Automated App Ads(AAA) – with Gina Kwong(Senior UA Manager at EA)

The TLDR of those episodes was that while AAA can be hugely powerful, they also have had some critical limitations on account of the lack of control they offer to advertisers. In fact, even in our second episode with Gina Kwong about how to win with AAA, she acknowledges that the lack of control can be a serious challenge while managing risk.

Well: a lot of that is changing. Facebook is rolling out some much awaited features that should mitigate at least some of the risks with Automated App Ads(AAA). Here are these 3 changes that we spotted in the wild:

1. You can exclude users of specific age groups.

This frankly is a huge deal – a number of apps that we work with found that AAA campaigns used to give users under 18, and there was no way to exclude them. Now, if your older users are more likely to monetize, you can just target them.

Again, to be clear, the functionality is somewhat limited – as you’ll see from the screenshot below – so while you can target users over 30, you cant target users between 35 and 45; or users over 40. But this is still huge progress over what was happening before.

2. You can exclude custom audiences.

Again: a huge deal in addressing a very common frustration with the earlier AAA campaigns – that they used to give new and existing users; and there was no way to exclude existing users in campaigns; oftentimes AAA campaigns would give a lot of users who had already installed apps – and that was frustrating.

Now with custom audience exclusion, you can exclude everyone that’s opened the app in the last 180 days or so, or all installers, and all purchasers. 

3. You can geotarget specific states and cities within countries.

Another common frustration was that AAA campaigns only allowed targeting at the country level – not at the state or city level. For many verticals we’ve worked with, such as dating or food delivery, that was incredibly frustrating – and rendered AAA practically unusable. Now Facebook does allow us to target cities and states – which is a huge huge relief for advertisers.

For what it’s worth, this feature is mentioned in Facebook’s documentation – but we do not see an option to select this in our accounts yet. But since this has been publicly announced, we do expect this to be available soon.

What about iOS 14 or ATT? The good news is that the first and third(age and local targeting) are based off Facebook’s first party data – and arent impacted by ATT or iOS 14. Custom audience exclusion is going to be impacted by ATT – so this is going to make a bigger difference on Android than on iOS.

How do you make these changes? Go into your Business Manager -> Apps -> Advertising Settings -> Edit

You should see options for selecting the age range and custom audience exclusions in there – and hopefully you should see city/geo exclusions soon too.

All the best!

**

Before we go, a quick reminder. 

On August 18th, we will be participating in a webinar hosted by Singular titled “State of iOS UA: Stats, Trends and Strategy”. 

We’ve come quite some way from April 2021 when Apple pulled the trigger. What do the latest stats look like? How are folks adapting? Join us and our friends from Liftoff, Singular and AdColony in this webinar where we share first hand experiences of what is changing, what is working and what isnt.

This is Wednesday August 18th at 10am PT/1pm ET/7pm CET – here’s a link to register. We’re excited to share our insights in this conversation, and hope you’ll join us.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!