In August 2023, Meta introduced “Advantage+ Audience”, an audience targeting option that uses artificial intelligence to determine the group of users who will be shown your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. While auditing Meta ad accounts, I notice that quite a few advertisers still use “Advantage+ Audience” inefficiently. My impression is that some of them use this audience without fully understanding how it works, while others avoid it as much as they can. “Advantage+ Audience” is a significant step forward compared with the original custom and core audience targeting methods. Even so, this audience option should not be used in every ad campaign.  It is important to weigh both the strengths and the weaknesses of this audience. In this post I will try to bring more clarity (although that is certainly not easy) on when you should use “Advantage+ Audience”, when to avoid it, and how it can affect your overall Meta advertising results.  

The basics

  When you create a new ad set, the default audience setting is “Advantage+ Audience” Meta Ads Manager ad set audience section with Advantage+ audience selected by default In theory, this choice should simplify the process of finding your target audience by letting Meta’s algorithm use artificial intelligence to automatically find your potential group of target users.  

Audience controls

  Although Meta’s algorithm has quite a lot of freedom when it builds the Advantage+ audience, there are a few control settings that let you set demographic limits. These settings are especially important for businesses that provide services only in certain cities or target different age groups. Advantage+ audience controls in Meta Ads Manager: location, minimum age and exclusions   Note that the Advantage+ audience controls consist of the following elements:   Location: people living in, or who have recently been in, the selected area Minimum age Exclude these custom audiences: excluding audiences that have already interacted with you (buyers, website visitors, etc.) Languages: only if the language is not typical for your chosen location   Unlike the traditional (original audience) settings, Advantage+ has no options for a maximum age or for selecting gender. This gives the algorithm more freedom when it builds the user group. In certain circumstances, restricting these settings can cause problems, but more on that a little later.  

Audience suggestions

  In theory, this suggestion option should help Meta’s algorithm build the profile of a potential customer. Take an example: a beauty salon is running ads, and the goal is new customer sign-ups. Some might find it perfectly reasonable to use a list of past customers as an audience suggestion, or to create “lookalike” audiences, in order to narrow the search for users, in the hope that this will save money and reach a very well-targeted audience. It is important to know that Meta’s algorithm does not give priority to audience suggestions and instead relies on 3 main data source channels:
  1. Website/app conversions;
  2. Website/app visitor behavior;
  3. User interactions with previous ads and organic content.
Providing too much information when choosing an audience can often prolong the algorithm’s learning process, and as a result you pay more for ad impressions and conversions. Another important factor Meta’s algorithm uses to find the target audience is the performance goal (chosen at the ad set level). You need to understand that this choice is what the overall effectiveness of the campaign will be measured against, so the performance goal you choose will strongly influence how your audience is assigned. I have personally run into a rather silly situation: an online store, relying on its overall website conversion rate, expected to generate sales by choosing a traffic goal rather than a sales goal. As a result, website traffic grew, the bounce rate went up, the conversion rate dropped, and in the end this ad campaign generated no sales at all. The most important thing is the quality of website traffic. Choosing the performance goal is precisely what tries to reflect that quality, in line with the advertising objectives we set.   Advantage+ audience settings in Meta Ads Manager showing audience controls and audience suggestion
Remember that Audience controls act as a hard limit that Meta will not exceed, whereas  Audience suggestion is only a suggestion. If you set the audience controls so that ads are shown only to users aged 20-40, users in other age groups will not see these ads; but if you set the maximum age as a suggestion, ads may also be shown to older users beyond the maximum age you set, because it is only a suggestion, not a rule.

Setting up the “Advantage+” audience

 

Setting up an Advantage+ audience in Meta Ads Manager with an optional audience suggestion

First, there are a few things to keep in mind.. 1. You can provide an audience suggestion, but it is optional. At some point you should experiment with both options: providing a suggestion and not providing one. 2. If you are not ready to use the Advantage+ audience, you don’t have to (at least for now). You can still use the old way of setting up audiences. 3. For audience suggestions you can provide your own custom audiences, lookalike audiences, an age range, gender and geolocation.
Audience suggestion options in Meta Ads Manager: custom audiences, lookalikes, age and location
Just don’t forget that these are not strict limits. Initially, “Meta” will give priority to these suggestions, but your ads can still reach people who would not otherwise meet the criteria. If you have a strict age limit, you must specify it in Audience Controls.
 

 “Advantage+ Audience” cannot be used in the following cases:

 
  • When you are advertising a “Special ad” category
  • In “Advantage+” shopping campaigns (Shopping)
  • In “Advantage+” app campaigns (App)
  • In retargeting campaigns using “Advantage+ Catalog”

When to use “Advantage+ Audience”?

 
In my opinion, the Advantage+ audience works best when optimizing for any type of conversion, especially purchases (when you are not running “Advantage+” sales campaigns). I would be careful about using it for campaigns optimized for link clicks, landing page views, video views or any type of engagement. As with any other audience, you should experiment and find out when it suits you best. If you had asked me a year ago what I thought about broad audiences (Broad) or any of the Advantage+ options, my answer would have been quite different from what it would be now.
 

How will we segment audiences in the future?

  This is the direction Meta’s ad delivery has been heading ever since “Detailed Targeting Expansion” (before it became “Advantage Detailed Targeting”). More automation. Less control. More AI-based learning. And ultimately, less transparency in reports and more trust in the algorithm. It’s only a hunch, but I assume that “Advantage+ Audience” will eventually replace “Advantage Detailed Targeting”, “Advantage Lookalike” and “Advantage Custom Audience” completely. There is simply no point in having them any more. They are too similar, and using them is likely to confuse more than help you achieve better results. We are getting closer and closer to a point where we will no longer provide any audience targeting settings and will simply use broad audiences. Although that may sound scary, the truth is that Meta has collected data based on our browsing habits, which allows its AI to serve ads fairly quickly and efficiently to the platform’s most interested users. We don’t necessarily need to provide an interest or exclude users who visited certain categories of a website, because the algorithm already knows which ads are likely to convert and engage different users with our ads and content. In short, audience optimization already happens in the creative, not in the audience option settings, so the more varied ad content you use, the greater the reach and the better the ad results will be.

Related reading