Advantage Targeting: How Meta Audience Expansion Products Work

Meta started rolling out Advantage targeting in 2021, allowing the ads algorithm to expand your chosen targeted audience in certain situations. How and when expansion works is still often misunderstood.

It makes sense why. This topic has been a moving target.

In just two years, of course, three different Advantage targeting products with expansion capabilities have rolled out (and a confusing fourth on the horizon). It doesn’t help that the names and rules for how they’re used have evolved during that time.

Let’s clear up the confusion now…

Advantage Detailed Targeting

Originally announced as Detailed Targeting Expansion, Advantage Detailed Targeting was the first audience expansion product available.

When Advantage Detailed Targeting is turned on, Meta will “dynamically expand the audience to reflect where we’re seeing better performance and we may expand your audience further to include similar opportunities.”

This expansion applies only to the Detailed Targeting (interests and behaviors) that you enter, and expansion will not impact restrictions you apply related to location, age, gender, or exclusions.

In the example above, there is a checkbox that allows the advertiser the option of turning it on and off. But it is automatically on (and can’t be turned off) when optimizing for any type of conversion, value, app event, or app install.

In these cases, it will look like this (no checkbox)…

Advantage Lookalike

Advantage Lookalike (originally Lookalike Expansion) came next.

While the audience expansion concept is the same as Advantage Detailed Targeting, the execution is slightly different. Using the Custom Audience that you based your lookalike audience on as a guide, Meta’s system will expand beyond the percentage you selected for your lookalike audience if it’s determined you can get better results by doing so.

Advantage Lookalike is automatically turned on for all conversion, value, and app promotion optimizations. In these cases, it looks like this…

As with Advantage Detailed Targeting, the restrictions (location, age, and gender) and exclusions you set will still apply. Advantage Lookalike isn’t available for Special Ad Categories like housing, credit, employment, politics, and social issues.

Advantage Custom Audience

Next came Advantage Custom Audience.

Once again, Advantage Custom Audience allows Meta to dynamically expand your audience and move beyond your selected custom audience if it’s believed that doing so can improve performance.

This feature will be turned on automatically regardless of optimization when a custom audience is selected. However, unlike the other two options, the checkbox remains and this option can be turned off.

This is probably good as advertisers may want to limit their targeting to a specific custom audience in some cases. But, be aware that this may be turned on — I’ve been burned by this in the past when I thought I was reaching a hyper-targeted group.

Advantage Audience

If you weren’t confused yet, it’s going to start getting confusing now…

If you select both a custom audience and lookalike audience while optimizing for a conversion or other action that won’t allow you to turn off Advantage Lookalike, it will look like this…

But if you optimize for an action like a link click or landing page view (among others) where you have the ability to turn both Advantage Custom Audience and Advantage Lookalike on or off, the name changes to Advantage Audience.

There’s no new functionality here. You just can’t individually turn Advantage Custom Audience and Advantage Lookalike on or off. It’s a group selection.

Advantage+ Audience??

And now it’s going to get ridiculous.

Yes, it looks like I just listed Advantage Audience twice. But, this time I’m actually listing Advantage+ Audience (emphasis on the “+”). This is a new tool that, as far as I can tell, is different from Advantage Audience.

In a May 11, 2023 announcement about new AI-powered ads tools, Meta provided details about Advantage+ Audience.

If you’re struggling, you’re not alone. Let’s recap…

Advantage Audience: When using both a custom audience and lookalike audience, an option to turn on both Advantage Custom Audience and Advantage Lookalike. This allows Meta to target beyond your selected custom audience and lookalike audience if it will lead to better performance.

Advantage+ Audience: Inputs such as age, gender, and detailed targeting (maybe more?) to be used as suggestions but not as a hard constraint to targeting. This doesn’t really fit the definition of the other Advantage targeting expansion products.

These are quite clearly two different things. What appears to be going on is that Advantage Audience isn’t really a feature. It’s just short-hand for combining two features. Meta documentation doesn’t mention it anywhere. But Advantage+ Audience actually is a feature, and it doesn’t appear to actually be part of Advantage expansion.

Make sense? I know. It’s oh, so confusing.

Meta is really bad at this.

There are so many tools with “Advantage” in the name. Some include a “+” and some don’t. I still haven’t figured out why. Are they more awesome? Is it just lazy branding? No one is quite sure.

Should You Use Advantage Targeting?

Okay, back on topic. Let’s focus on the three actual features relevant to this post:

• Advantage Detailed Targeting
• Advantage Lookalike
• Advantage Custom Audience

I was initially pretty terrified of these features. I put in certain targeting and I want to use that targeting! But with time, it’s grown on me. Expansion is that middle ground between hard constraint targeting and going broad.

The way these features are defined, targeting expansion can’t hurt you. It can only help you. The audience may not be expanded it all. But if it is, it’s because that expansion can get you better results.

The problem? We have no idea whether your audience was actually expanded, how much it was expanded, or how performance was impacted by that expansion.

There should be a pretty simple solution to this. Meta should add a breakdown for audience expansion that adds rows to your report for your intended audience and the expanded audience. Without that, we’re left guessing regarding whether this is actually beneficial.

More transparency could also give advertisers more confidence in these products.

Your Turn

What’s your experience been with Advantage targeting expansion products?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Advantage Targeting: How Meta Audience Expansion Products Work appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.