Meta's Advantage Detailed Targeting feature, announced in January, allows Meta to expand your audience beyond your selected interests and behaviors if it predicts better results. This expansion respects hard constraints like location, age, gender, and exclusions. Initially, this feature was optional for Original Audiences but mandatory when optimizing for link clicks or landing page views.
Conversions optimization already forces audience expansion and uses Advantage Lookalike to increase the percentage of your lookalike audience. This isn't the case for link clicks or landing page views, despite initial confusion.
The rollout began in March, but its availability varies across ad accounts. The rationale behind forced expansion for conversions is clear: the algorithm seeks as many conversions as possible within your budget. Audience expansion aids this search without inflating numbers with low-quality purchases.
However, for link clicks and landing page views, forced expansion may lead to low-quality traffic due to accidental clicks, bots, and click fraud. The Audience Network placement is particularly notorious for this issue, but removing it doesn't eliminate the problem. The algorithm prioritizes quantity over quality, making controlled targeting crucial to limit low-quality clicks.
Overall, forced expansion for link clicks and landing page views is likely to result in more cheap, low-quality clicks, making these performance goals less effective.
