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Advantage+ Audience and best practices

Tomas Kubilius > Blog > Advantage+ Audience and best practices

Advantage+ Audience and best practices

In August 2023, Meta launched Advantage+ Audience, an audience segmentation option that uses artificial intelligence to identify the group of users to be targeted by Facebook and Instagram campaigns. In my audits of Meta's advertising accounts, I have noticed that many advertisers are still not using Advantage+ Audience effectively. My impression is that some of them are using this audience without fully understanding how it works, or avoiding it as much as possible.

"Advantage+ Audience is a significant step forward compared to the original custom and core audience segmentation methods. Nevertheless, this audience option should not be used in all advertising campaigns. 

It is important to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of this audience. In this post, I will try to bring more clarity (although it's not really that easy) on when you should use Advantage+ Audience, when you should avoid it, and how it can affect your overall Meta advertising results.

 

Basics

 

When creating a new ad set, the default audience setting is "Advantage+Audience"

In theory, this choice should improve the process of finding your target audience by allowing the Meta algorithm to automatically find your potential target audience using artificial intelligence.

 

Audience controls

 

Although the Meta algorithm has quite a lot of freedom in indexing the Advantage+ audience, there are some control settings that allow you to set demographic limits. These settings are particularly important for businesses that provide services only in certain cities or target different age groups.

 

Please note that Advatage+ Audience Control consists of the following elements:

 

Location - Place (people living in or recently visited)

Minimum age - Minimum age

Exclude these custom audiences - Exclude audiences of interacting users (Customers, website visitors etc.)

Languages - Language (if not specific to your chosen location)

 

Unlike the original audience settings, Advangtage+ does not have options for maximum age or different gender settings. This gives the algorithm more freedom in indexing the user group. Restricting these settings can be problematic in certain circumstances, but more on that later.

 

Audience suggestion

 

In theory, this bidding option should help the Meta algorithm in indexing the profile of a potential customer. Let's take an example: a beauty salon runs an advertisement, the purpose of the advertisement is to register new customers. It might seem quite rational to use a list of past clients as an audience suggestion or to create "look a like" audiences in order to narrow down the search for users, hoping that this will help to save money and reach a highly targeted audience. It is important to know that the Meta algorithm does not prioritise audience suggestions, but relies on 3 main data source channels:

  1. Website/application conversions;
  2. Website/app visitor behaviour;
  3. Consumer interaction with previous ads and organic content.

Excessive information in the audience selection process can often lengthen the algorithm's indexing process, resulting in higher pay-per-view and conversion rates.

Another important aspect on which the Meta algorithm finds the target audience is the performance goal (chosen at the adset level). It is important to understand that it is this choice that will be used to measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign, so which performance goal you choose will have a big impact on your audience attribution. Personally, I have come across a rather stupid situation: an online shop hoped to generate sales based on the overall conversion rate of the website by choosing a traffic target instead of sales. As a result, the website traffic increased, the bounce rate increased, the conversion rate decreased and, in the end, no sales were generated from this advertising campaign. The most important thing is the quality of the website traffic. It is the choice of a performance goal that tries to match that quality to the advertising objectives we have set.

 

Please note that Audience controls acts as a hard cap that Meta will not exceed, but  Audience suggestion is just a suggestion. If you have chosen in the audience control to show the ad only to users aged 20-40, users in other age groups will not see the ad, but if you have set the maximum age limit as a suggestion, ads may be shown to older users beyond the maximum age you have set, as this is only a suggestion and not a rule.

"Advantage+ audience definition

 

Firstly, there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. You can submit an audience proposal, but it is not mandatory. At some point you should experiment with both options: make an offer and don't.

2. If you are not ready to use Advantage+ audiences, you don't have to (at least for now). You can still use the old way of setting up your audience.

3. For audience suggestions, you can submit audiences of your own creation, Look a like audiences, age, gender and geolocation.

Just remember that these are not strict limits. Initially Meta will give priority to these offers, but your adverts may still reach people who would not qualify. If you have a strict age restriction, you must specify it in the Audience Controls.

 

 "Advantage+ Audience cannot be used in the following cases:

 

  • When you advertise in the "Special ad" category
  • "Advantage+ Shopping campaigns (Shopping)
  • "Advantage+ in app campaigns (App)
  • Retargeting campaigns using Advantage+ Catalog

When to use Advantage+ Audience ?

 

In my opinion, Advantage+ audiences work best for optimising any type of conversion, especially purchase (when there are no Advantage+ sales campaigns). I would be wary of using it for campaigns that are optimised 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 works best for you. If you had asked me a year ago what I thought of Broad or any of the Advantage+ options, I would have given a very different answer than I do now.

 

How will we segment audiences in the future?

 

This is the direction in which Meta ad targeting has been going since the Detailed Targeting Expansion (before it became Advantage Detailed Targeting). More automation. Less control. More artificial intelligence-based learning. And finally, less transparency in reporting and more trust in the algorithm.

It's just a hunch, but I assume that Advantage+ Audience will eventually replace Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike and Advantage Custom Audience completely. It just doesn't make sense to have them anymore. They are too similar and their use is more likely to confuse than to deliver better results.

We are getting closer and closer to no longer using any target audience settings, but just broad - a broad audience. While this may sound daunting, the truth is that Meta has accumulated data based on our browsing habits, which allows artificial intelligence to serve ads to the most interested users of the platform quite quickly and efficiently. We don't necessarily need to provide an interest or highlight users who have visited certain categories on the site, because the algorithm already knows which ads are likely to convert and engage different users with our ads and content. In short, audience optimisation is already taking place in the visuals rather than in the audience options settings, so the more different advertising content is used, the higher the reach and the better the results.

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