I’ve mentioned before that I stopped using Facebook ads in October since the Advantage+ system (their AI targeting technology) was giving me headaches.<\/p>\n
For a brief summary of my experiences with Facebook ads: I started using them in 2019, did really well with them in 2020, then Facebook randomly started banning ad accounts during the craziness of summer 2020, got my account reinstated, used them less frequently more and more until October 2025 when I stopped with them altogether because Advantage+ made targeting so hard.<\/p>\n
Since then, I’ve relied mostly on Amazon Ads and Bookbub Ads to good results.<\/p>\n
However, I’ve also read various blog posts from people who have been struggling with the Advantage+ system and investigating it thoroughly, and they uncovered something interesting that isn’t mentioned at all in Facebook’s documentation.<\/p>\n
Specifically, that Advantage+ uses the text content of your ad to target it.<\/p>\n
Like, under the old system, it didn’t work that way at all. You would select “interests” that match your ad, usually popular authors in the fantasy genre like J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and so forth, and then write the text of the ad and supply an image, which is usually called a “creative.” The creative was like 80% of a successful Facebook ad.<\/p>\n
The Advantage+ system, by contrasts, targets according to the text in the ad. So while you still need a good creative, you need to be precise in the ad text. So, for example, you need to write something like this:<\/p>\n
“Fans of The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Mistborn, and Game of Thrones will love this free epic fantasy available for Kindle readers!”<\/p>\n
I found the arguments in the blog posts persuasive, so I decided to give it a try.<\/p>\n
The results are on the better side of okay-ish. I didn’t lose any money. Like, the results were definitely better than I expected, though the ad typically only has a shelf life of 6 to 10 days before it stops working.<\/p>\n
That said, the old system was still better because the interests were more granular and I could assign them precisely. Like, I used to be able to advertise to FROSTBORN, CLOAK MAGE, THE GHOSTS, and DEMONSOULED all at the same time because I could target so granularly. There’s absolutely no way I could do that now because the Advantage+ system is a black box. It basically boils down to “trust us, the AI will figure it out” when it very obviously can’t. So while for the moment I will have one Facebook ad in the rotation (until Meta changes something and everything breaks) there’s no way I’ll run as many Facebook ads as I did in 2020 when I sometimes had eight different Facebook ads going at once.<\/p>\n
Apparently in the last three years Meta spent around $130 billion on AI, and what they got for that money is an ad targeting system that frequently doesn’t work, and when it does work, doesn’t work as well as the old system did.<\/p>\n
Spending unfathomable sums of money to replace a system that worked pretty well with one that intermittently doesn’t work, and then when it does function doesn’t work as well as the previous system, seems to be a pretty good summary of the AI “revolution” so far!<\/p>\n
-JM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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