Is Audience Targeting Still Important for Meta Ads?
The last few years have seen a lot of changes in the world of Meta ads, but none may be bigger than the diminished emphasis on audience targeting that came with Advantage Shopping Campaigns (ASCs). One of the things that made Meta ads attractive to a lot of us for years was the ability to hyper target your audience. There was a time when being able to layer different interests and demographics to really hone in on a very specific customer was part of Meta’s magic.
Several years ago however, Meta began advising people to “go broad” as much as possible – aka use no targeting except for (optionally) age and gender. However, most of the usual targeting options remained, and many people ignored this directive.
If you clicked on this blog, you’re probably a high-level Meta advertiser, brand owner running your own ads, marketing agency, or creative strategist trying to better understand audience targeting, and we’ve got THE place for you to learn more, continue growing, and sharpen your marketing skills.
Then came ASC
Then Meta rolled out ASC, a different campaign type that took audience targeting (and many other manual choices) out of the user’s control. You could still run what we called “BAU” campaigns (business as usual) but by default when one created a campaign it was an ASC.
There were some limitations to ASCs other than a lack of audience targeting: you couldn’t have more than one ad set per campaign and you couldn’t use exclusions (you could put a budget cap on how much you spent on existing customers but there was no option to limit re-targeting). However, ASCs were widely adopted and it was generally a good idea to run a mix of both ASC and BAU.
The Great Melding
Meta recently melded the two together into a new campaign type, confusingly enough, also initialed ASC (this time Advantage Sales Campaign). You are no longer given a choice between the two. The interface is very similar to the original Advantage Shopping Campaigns, however you can now have multiple ad sets per campaign, you can use exclusions and, most relevant for this post, you can do some form of audience targeting.
Your targeting is just a suggestion, and Meta reserves the right to go beyond your suggested targeting to get conversions.
Audience Controls vs Audience Suggestions
In the Audiences section of the new interface there are Audience Controls and Audience Suggestions. Audience controls are not suggestions, Meta will abide by them, but they are used not so much to target people as to limit who you are targeting. Available controls include Geography, Minimum Age (by default 18, you can set it as high as 25), Audience Exclusions (where you can exclude your existing customers, which we always recommend you do), and then finally Languages.
Below Audience Controls are Audience Suggestions. This is where you can do what passes for targeting these days - recommend audience suggestions such as interests, demographics and custom audiences.
But, should you? The answer, as with most things Meta, is … it depends.
To Suggest or Not To Suggest… That is the Question
Generally we still recommend using as light a touch as possible on targeting, which for the most part means going broad. However, there are some use cases when using audience suggestions is advisable:
New Accounts with Little to No Data
If the ad account and pixel are new and/or have little data on them then using audience suggestions to give Meta a little helping hand can be beneficial. We’d recommend, however, simultaneously testing broad targeting.
Accounts Where Broad Has Not Been Effective
While many accounts will perform better without audience suggestions, we still see accounts where broad audiences have not performed well, or not performed as well as suggested audiences.
That said, if you feel that “Broad hasn’t worked” in your account the first thing we’d recommend is to try different creatives and landing pages. Those remain much bigger levers of success on Meta.
But if you have done this already, or you can see in the account that head to head, with the same ads and landing pages, campaigns with Audience Suggestions have outperformed broad campaigns, lean into it and continue using them. We still very much see this in accounts we audit and manage.
What (Who) To Target
When using the audience suggestions feature, we recommend sticking to Demographics, Interests and Behaviors, stacking them together if using more than one (avoid layering them as this will make the suggested audience too specific), and making sure whatever you choose results in a large audience – we recommend ensuring your audience is at least 10 million people, at the low end. Tip: You can click on Show Estimated Audience Size in the Audience Definition module just to the right of the main Audiences module.
And What (Who) Not To
We do NOT recommend using Lookalikes. Due to iOS privacy issues, Lookalikes have generally had more limited value than they used to.
We also don’t typically recommend dedicated re-targeting campaigns, but if you want to re-target website visitors, engagers or customers this is where you can do it, using the “Custom audience inclusions” field.
So what now?
The world of Meta advertising has evolved dramatically, and audience targeting has shifted from a precise scalpel to more of a gentle nudge. While the days of hyper-specific audience layering are largely behind us, strategic audience suggestions still have their place—particularly for new accounts or when broad targeting isn't delivering results. The key is to start broad, test thoroughly, and only add audience suggestions when the data supports it. Focus your energy on what still moves the needle most: compelling creative and optimized landing pages. Meta's algorithm has become remarkably sophisticated at finding your customers; sometimes (but not always) the best strategy is simply getting out of its way.
The next best thing that we recommend for what next in terms of audience targeting is to stay up-to-date ALWAYS with the best ad buyers in the advertising industry, with over 550+ marketers from 30+ countries worldwide. We’d love to have you. Learn more at the link below.