Meta’s New Engaged Customers Targeting: A Breakdown

Meta recently released new audience insights and targeting options in their Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC+). The new option, ‘Engaged Customers,’ allows advertisers to target people who have ‘shown interest’ in your products or services, but haven’t yet converted.

There are very few levers to pull with these automation-focused campaigns, but this is an exciting new one! 

In this post, I’ll explain the benefits of the new feature – and how we plan to use it for our clients’ Meta campaigns.

Our approach to ASC+’s new Engaged Customers targeting

Before this release, Meta advertisers had the option to target just “new” and “existing” users, and this new segment is a potentially fertile middle ground: users who have engaged/shown interest in the brand/products but not converted yet.

Before you do any bidding, I would recommend first analyzing the breakdown of audience segmentation in campaign reporting (yay for new insights!) to get a feel for the proportion of traffic in existing ASC campaigns – in other words, the ratio of new vs. engaged vs. existing users. Based on that data, evaluate your next steps and strategy.

At JDM, we tend to use ASC+ for mostly new customers and use general conversion campaigns for retargeting since we have more control over the users we hit with the latter campaign type.

If the percent of traffic for engaged ASC+ users is significant, I’d consider creating an audience off of those users and retargeting them - maybe even include a special offer if possible. Since this feature is new, and we’re all going to be in test mode, I highly recommend excluding existing customers from this audience to make sure it’s a clean test of just ‘engaged users.’

The benefits Engaged Customers targeting might present for advertisers

The new targeting segment will make it very simple and easy for advertisers to re-engage users who have shown at least some level of explicit interest or intent. It could also eliminate the need to create multiple retargeting audiences (site visitors, specific pages, add to cart, engagers, video viewers, etc.).

The segment – and the accompanying data – will also give more insight into how each bucket of users performs. We already know that in general, cold audiences tend to convert at a lower rate than existing customers. 

But how does performance differ for people who have had some interaction but not yet made the leap to convert? Data from this audience segment’s behaviors will give us some insight here – and will also allow us to test different messaging and understand what resonates with people at each stage. 

The difference between regular retargeting and Engaged Customers targeting

Of course, we’re still in a world of automation and black boxes, and Meta doesn’t make it insanely clear who exactly these users are. Because of that, it’s hard to say how targeting Engaged Customers differs from regular retargeting, but my assumption is that it’s more of a catch-all of users who have shown interest in your brand, products, or services in any way. 

Where regular retargeting gives plenty of clarity on the behaviors of the users you’re reaching – they have visited your site, or engaged with your ads, or watched your videos, or follow you on Facebook or Instagram, etc. – my assumption is this new segment would include all of the above. Again, this reflects Meta’s (and other major platforms’) current strategy of pushing automation, consolidation, and simplification vs. oversegmenting.

Next steps

This is one of the more promising releases we’ve seen from Advantage+ campaigns, so I recommend you make a priority to test it (as described above, keep it clean) to see how the segment performs. 

If you’d like to hear what we’re seeing in early tests, or you have questions about ASC or Meta advertising in general, drop us a line!