Should You Be Using Exclusions in Meta Ads?

Hey {{ First Name | Founder }},

One of the questions I get asked all the time is:

"Should I be using exclusions in my Meta campaigns?"

And as with most things in advertising, the answer is: It depends.

There is no one-size-fits-all exclusion strategy.

The right approach depends on:

Before we get into strategy, let's quickly cover what exclusions actually are.

Exclusions are simply audiences that you tell Meta not to show your ads to.

These audiences are usually built from:

You can then exclude these audiences from campaigns or ad sets to influence who Meta goes after.

The important thing to understand is that exclusions are not inherently good or bad.

They're just a tool.

The question is: what are you trying to make Meta do?

For most eCommerce brands getting started with Meta, I generally recommend excluding recent purchasers.

A simple:

is often enough.

Why?

Because if someone bought last week, there's a reasonable chance they're not your next customer.

This helps stop Meta spending money showing ads to people who have literally just checked out.

As brands mature, I often see a different problem emerge.

Meta becomes very good at finding easy conversions.

Sometimes a little too good.

You'll launch a campaign thinking you're prospecting for new customers, but when you dig into the data you discover a huge proportion of sales are actually coming from existing customers.

Meta isn't doing anything wrong.

It's just finding the easiest path to a conversion.

If your goal is revenue, that's fine.

If your goal is customer acquisition, that's a problem.

This is where exclusions become more aggressive.

You might exclude:

The stricter you get, the harder you're forcing Meta to work up the funnel and find genuinely new people.

We've had brands where Meta was almost exclusively targeting existing customers, and the only way to force it into prospecting mode was to put heavy exclusions in place.

Did performance look worse initially? Absolutely.

Did we acquire more new customers? Also yes.

And that's what mattered.

Most people think exclusions are only audience-based.

But there's another lever you can pull: Attribution Settings.

One thing I always look at is the split between click-through and view-through conversions.

If a large percentage of your attributed sales are coming from view-through conversions, that's often a signal that Meta is leaning heavily into warm audiences.

People who already know your brand.

People who were probably going to buy anyway.

In those situations, switching from a broader attribution model to 7-day click can sometimes help force Meta towards people who actually click and engage with your ads.

In effect, you're making it harder for Meta to claim credit for simply showing an ad to someone who was already close to purchasing.

The mistake I see brands make is searching for the "correct" exclusion setup.

There isn't one.

The real question is: What outcome are you trying to achieve?

If you want:

The best Meta advertisers aren't blindly following account structures.

They're using tools like exclusions to shape the behaviour they want from the algorithm.

And sometimes that means making Meta's job harder in the short term to get better business outcomes in the long term.

What's your current setup - are you excluding recent purchasers, all-time customers, or nobody at all?

If this all feels a little overwhelming, that's completely normal. You don't have to figure it all out on your own.

Supporting eComm biz owners through these challenges is exactly what I do inside Ecomm Rockets.

If you'd like to learn more, book a quick 15-minute call with me and we can chat about where you're at and how we can help: https://calendly.com/jessiehealy/coffee_with_jessie

Jessie x