For a long time, Facebook Ads targeting meant picking a comparable-author interest from a drop-down and calling it done. Vince Flynn readers here, Lee Child there. Twelve interests, three saved audiences, an evening spent researching who Amazon says reads similar books.

That's been a waste of time for a few years now.

Meta has been de-emphasizing interest targeting since 2022. Advantage+ Audiences accelerated the shift.

In many ad accounts today (not all, but many), any interests you add are treated as a suggestion rather than a rule. The algorithm uses them as a nudge toward who might want your book, but also shows your ad to people well outside that group anyway.

Add Lee Child as an interest and Meta may still serve your ad to fantasy readers, romance readers, or people who have not touched a thriller in years, because it decided they were a better bet than the audience you specified.

The reason is worth understanding, because it changes how you should be spending your time.

What is actually doing the targeting

Your ad is doing the targeting.

That's not a metaphor. Facebook has around two billion daily users.

When you launch a Traffic ad, the algorithm reads your image, your headline, and your primary text, works out who among those billions is most likely to click through, and starts showing the ad to those people. When they click, it learns and shows the ad to more people of the same type. When they scroll past, it tries someone else.

The image is signal. The headline is signal. The primary text is signal. All three feed into the same question the algorithm is trying to answer: who is this ad for?

Which means every choice you make in the creative is a targeting choice, whether you meant it that way or not.

The three things you actually still set

There are three targeting decisions still worth making:

→ Location
→ Age
→ Gender

That's your input.

For example, you set the targeting to USA, women, aged 35 to 65+.

In many ad accounts today, age and gender have softened into suggestions as well, the same way interests have.

Set your ad set to women aged 35 to 65 and you may still find your ad served to men, or to readers in their twenties, because Meta decided they were a better bet than the audience you asked for.

In other accounts, the boundary of gender and age targeting still holds firm. Meta has not rolled this out across every ad account yet, so you have to look at your own account to see what your situation currently is.

Whichever way your account behaves though, the pattern is the same. Your settings give the algorithm a starting point. The ad itself does the finding.

That's why the creative matters so much more than the audience settings.

Different ads catch different pockets of readers

Here's the part that changes how you build your ad account.

Your ideal reader is not one person. It's many pockets of people, and each pocket responds to a slightly different signal.

Some readers stop scrolling for a beautifully created character portrait. Others scroll straight past characters and stop for a moody landscape.

Some tap through on a short, punchy hook of two lines. Others read the whole primary text and only tap when the fifth paragraph has earned it.

Some are video people. Others are static-image people. Some want to see the book cover. Others want to see the world the book lives in.

None of those readers is right or wrong. They're all your reader. But no single ad reaches all of them.

If you have one "winning" ad running and nothing else in the mix, you're only catching the pocket that particular ad speaks to. The other pockets are still out there, scrolling past you, because nothing you have put in front of them is aimed at them.

What this changes about how you run ads

Two things.

First, stop researching interests. That evening you were about to spend hunting comparable authors, spend it on creative instead. A new image. A different angle in the primary text. A short version and a long version of the same idea. That's where the leverage moved.

Second, aim for variety, not just a winner. A healthy author ad account has multiple ads running in parallel, each fishing for a different pocket of the same reader. Character image with short copy. Landscape image with long copy. A short video with a question hook. A static image with a reader-quote hook.

When one ad tails off (as they all do, eventually), you've got others still out there working for you.

The deeper point

The old game of ads was picking the right audience. The new game is building the right ad, or better still, building the right set of ads.

Meta will do the finding. Your job is to set your demographic inputs, then give the algorithm enough different images, headlines, and versions of your primary text that different pockets of your ideal reader can find their way in.

Set the location, age, and gender. Then put your energy where it counts, into the creative. Let the algorithm do the rest.

That's it for this week. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
Matt