Page-Engagement Audience Build — Spec

The free warm-layer lever. Build it Week 1.

Why this exists

Under Special Ad Category (Financial Products), Meta restricts Pixel-seeded website retargeting audiences. The live audit confirms it: All Site Visitors (180D) and Visited Auto LP (180D) are sized at ~20 people each — effectively empty.

But the page-engagement audiences (on-Meta surfaces: FB Page, IG Account) ARE allowed under SAC. And the LG Military Ads account already has them, sized healthy, sitting unused.

Combined unique reach (estimated): ~1.0–1.3M people who have engaged with Military.com's FB or IG presence in the last 365 days. Currently targeted by zero ad sets.

This is the closest thing to a "warm audience" the account has under SAC. Building one ad set against it = real warm-layer presence in Week 1.

The build spec

Campaign placement

Add the new ad set to Auto SAC BAU (120240808864310498) — the existing OUTCOME_LEADS campaign with the highest budget cap ($19,800/day) and current pacing gap ($8.5K/day unused). The new ad set fits into the existing pacing headroom.

Do NOT create a new campaign — that triggers a fresh learning phase. Pile into an existing campaign that's already past learning.

Do NOT add to Max Val — until value pipe is fixed, Max Val is wasted spend.

Ad set definition

Creative attached

Start with the proven winners — DON'T test brand-new creative on a brand-new audience:

Two creatives is enough. The audience is warm; don't dilute signal.

What NOT to do

• ❌ Don't add TYFYS — Meta auction-ranking flagged it as "Below Average engagement" — fine for niche BAU but burns the warm audience's attention
• ❌ Don't add Odometer 05/15 — already fatiguing on the cold audience; pushing on warm wastes precious frequency
• ❌ Don't add Veteran-VO — correctly de-prioritized; don't relight on the warm audience
• ❌ Don't add ANY Max Val creative variant — the BAU campaign is OUTCOME_LEADS; Max Val creatives may behave differently here

Expected performance

Conservative assumption: warm audience converts at 20-30% lower CPL than cold (industry norm for engagement-seeded retargeting under SAC).

• Cold Auto BAU CPL: ~$22
• Warm (page-engagement) projected: $15-17 CPL
• At $1,500/day budget = ~90-100 additional leads/day
• 30-day incremental: ~2,700-3,000 leads at ~$45K spend

Comparison to current Max Val: the Max Val campaign produces 9,375 leads/30d at $341K spend = 312 leads/day at $36.44 CPL. The new warm ad set could produce 30% of Max Val's volume at less than 50% of Max Val's CPL.

Even if the warm-CPL assumption is wrong by 50% (CPL ends up at $22-25 instead of $15-17), the warm audience still delivers comparable volume to interest-targeting at break-even cost. Worth the test.

Suppression mechanics (critical for SAC)

Under Financial Products SAC, the standard exclusion levers (don't target age/gender/specific geos) are blocked. The legitimate suppression options are:

1. Customer-list exclusion — upload sold-leads, exclude them from prospecting
2. Lookalike-list-based exclusion — less precise but uses similar mechanism
3. ❌ Pixel-seeded suppression — blocked under SAC (same reason All Site Visitors is empty)

For the new ad set: - Include: the 4 page-engagement audiences (union) - Exclude: Custom_Recruiting-Leads_08-05-2025 (existing customer-list seed)

Once Mo refreshes the customer-list seed with Lauren's last-180-day sold-leads export, swap the exclusion to the refreshed audience. This prevents the warm ad set from re-targeting people who already converted.

What this requires

Decision rule for scaling

After 72 hours:

Why this is a free lever

• Zero new audience build cost — audiences already exist in the account, just unused
• Zero creative production cost — uses existing proven creative
• Marginal media cost — $1.5K/day is rounding error against the $28K/day account spend
• SAC-compliant — uses on-Meta engagement audiences, no Pixel retargeting
• Doesn't compete with existing ad sets for the same audience — the cold BAU ad sets target interest groups; this targets engaged users
• Doesn't trigger new learning phase — drops into an existing post-learning campaign

If it works: warm-layer signal Meta has been missing. Best case: scale to $3K-5K/day at $15-20 CPL = $50-100K/mo incremental at materially better CPL than cold.

If it doesn't work: pause it. Cost of trying: a few hundred dollars in media spend + 30 minutes of build time.

The asymmetry is huge. This is the kind of move that should ship Tuesday.

What to NOT do (the audience traps)

• ❌ Don't combine with Max Val — Max Val's broken value signal applies to any ad set inside the Max Val campaign. Engagement audience + broken value pipe = no benefit.
• ❌ Don't combine into the existing "Broad" ad set — that destroys the ability to measure warm-vs-cold separately. New ad set, clean comparison.
• ❌ Don't test more than 2-3 creatives initially — small audience (~1M reach max), don't burn frequency
• ❌ Don't add hour-of-day or day-of-week pacing in Week 1 — Meta needs continuous delivery to learn; constrain it later if needed
• ❌ Don't expect immediate results — Meta needs 50+ conversion events on the new ad set to optimize properly. At ~90 leads/day projected, that's ~12 hours of delivery. Don't kill the ad set in the first 24 hours.

What to say if Lauren pushes back

"We already have Broad and Custom ad sets targeting similar audiences."

Response: "Broad is cold prospecting; Custom is a different audience source. Neither targets people who have actively engaged with the Military.com FB or IG presence in the last year. That's a distinct warm signal Meta has but isn't being used. The ad set runs alongside, not in place of, what's working."

"What about audience overlap with the Custom_Recruiting-Leads LAL?"

Response: "Some overlap is fine — both are warmer-than-cold. Lookalikes target similar PEOPLE based on the seed; engagement targets people who have engaged with OUR specific brand. Conceptually distinct. We'll watch overlap reports in Week 2 and tighten exclusions if delivery overlaps materially."

"Why $1,500/day and not $500?"

Response: "Under $1,000/day Meta has a hard time exiting the learning phase. At $1,500 we give the algorithm enough events to optimize within 3-4 days. If CPL is bad, we throttle down — we don't bleed at $1,500/day."

What to say if Hassan asks

"There's an audience in the account that's been sitting unused — about a million people who follow Military.com's Facebook page or have engaged with our Instagram in the last year. Under the financial-products ad-category restrictions, we can't do website retargeting, but we CAN target on-Meta engagement. It's a warm layer we don't have today. I'm building one ad set at $1,500 a day this week to test it. Doesn't add to spend — fits into the BAU pacing gap. Expected CPL is 20-30% lower than cold. If it works, scale; if not, we paused nothing."

That's the pitch for a $1,500/day audience test that could be the most efficient lane in the account.