Choosing Between Advantage+ Audience and Original Audiences: A Guide

Advantage+ Audience is Meta's AI-powered targeting option designed to help advertisers by automatically finding the ideal audience for their ads. It uses pixel activity, conversion history, and ad engagement to identify potential customers. Advertisers can provide targeting suggestions, which Meta will prioritize before potentially expanding the audience to optimize for the advertiser's performance goal.

In Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, advertisers have limited ability to exclude locations or customize age targeting directly within the ad set. However, Audience Controls within the Ad Account Settings allow for these adjustments to be made account-wide, affecting all Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. This means that while you cannot make these changes for individual campaigns, you can set preferences that will apply across all campaigns of this type.

You should consider using Original Audiences when you need more control over who sees your ads, especially in the following scenarios:

1. Top of Funnel Optimization: If your performance goal is to optimize for top-of-funnel actions like link clicks, landing page views, or post engagement, Original Audiences allow you to set more specific targeting guardrails.

2. Remarketing: When you want to target ads exclusively to a custom audience with a unique message meant only for them, Original Audiences will enable you to isolate that group and ensure only they see your ads.

The shift towards algorithmic targeting in Meta ad targeting has been driven by several factors:

• Regulatory pressure: Concerns about the misuse of targeting capabilities to manipulate elections or discriminate against certain groups have led to increased scrutiny and regulation.

• Loss of reliable data: Changes in tracking permissions have reduced the amount of data available for targeting, necessitating more sophisticated AI-driven methods.

• Investment in AI and machine learning: Meta has invested in AI and machine learning technologies that can potentially identify ideal audiences more effectively than manual targeting.

Advantage+ Audience works by allowing advertisers to set limited restrictions on who can see their ads, such as selected locations, minimum age, languages, and excluded custom audiences. Advertisers can provide Audience Suggestions, which are not mandatory and are considered by Meta as initial priorities before potentially expanding the audience. Meta's algorithm will then attempt to show ads to anyone likely to perform the desired action, as defined by the performance goal, while adhering to the set Audience Controls.