Dynamic ads with broad audience targeting is a Facebook solution available for a product, hotel and destination catalogs. Instead of defining dynamic retargeting rules, broad audience allows finding the users most likely to be interested in your products and selects the most relevant products to be shown to them in ads.

ℹ️ Note: Facebook product recommendations are catalog-specific. This means that you should be running the broad audience dynamic ads campaign with the same product catalog that you're using for your retargeting campaigns.

Facebook decides which products to show for each user automatically. Over time, Facebook's algorithms will learn about customers' preferences and your products — it is also good to include data on category, brand, gender, and so on, in your catalog settings to help Facebook with this. To possibly improve results, you can also create product sets to use only a part of the products from the feed in the campaign.

To use dynamic ads with broad audience in Smartly.io:

1. Create a dynamic ads campaign, or edit an existing campaign
2. On the Audience tab, select Broad Audience

You can add dynamic exclusion rules, for example excluding people who have purchased a product from a certain product set within a specific timeframe.

Click Show native targeting options to show the rest of the targeting options such as geographic targeting. Note that it's not recommended to narrow the audience too much.

Best practices

• Use broad targeting to leave more room for Facebook algorithms to find the most valuable audiences for you. Limit your use of native targeting to lookalikes, age, and gender, or geographic targeting. Avoid interest and connection targeting.
• Even though you’re able to target non-retargeting audiences, don’t exclude all your website visitors from these campaigns. This helps Facebook get you more delivery and ultimately better performance.
• Split your catalog to product sets by category if you want put more effort and use a category-specific static card to introduce new users to your brand. Think about what categories need different cards: not all.
• Don’t use product sets with only a few products. Leave room for Facebook algorithms to find the best-performing ones. Also, don't split two categories that could be bought together; you are just limiting Facebook's abilities by that.
• Exclude people who have purchased in the past 30 days
• To determine you should replace some your existing prospecting campaign with dynamic ads with broad audience, do a split test between your existing prospecting campaign and dynamic ads with broad audience campaign. For more information, see Split tests.

FAQ

What is the difference between dynamic ads for prospecting and Smartly.io Automated Ads?

In dynamic ads for prospecting, you have a dynamic creative that changes automatically based on Facebook's knowledge to which user it is shown. It shows as just one ad, but it looks different to each user. Automated Ads campaigns, in Facebook's perspective, are just regular campaigns with lots of ads that Smartly.io creates for you in an automatic fashion.

With dynamic ads with broad audiences, you can use a much bigger variety of products from the feed because of the dynamic creative, whereas with Automated Ads you'll need to limit the number of products (= ads) to some dozens. However, with Automated Ads, you have more control over targeting, bidding, and budgeting, such as splitting the campaign by category for bidding purposes or using Feed-based Targeting. You also have more flexibility with the creative: you can, for example, choose how many products to use per carousel, insert static cards in the middle of product cards, and use a different image template for each card.

How does Facebook decide who sees which products outside of the retargeting audience?

Facebook will automatically attempt to find people interested in products from your product catalog. This is done by automatically analyzing the characteristics and behaviors of people on and off Facebook, including people who browse your website. They then use these actions along with other data known about the person from Facebook to predict which products these people, and other people like them, might be interested in. Kind of like a special flavor of lookalike audiences but for products.

What products are going to be shown?

Facebook will show the most relevant products from your catalog in a carousel format. For example, someone interested in home gardening may begin to see relevant ads about lawn mowers or garden items from your catalog. Similarly, women with an interest in fashion may see dresses and accessories from your fashion catalog. This is done automatically.