For months now, Meta has been pushing automation to advertisers, like the ability to automatically “optimize” creative in order to fit different placements or increase its appeal. This and other automated features are grouped under Meta Advantage, a library of AI-powered tools meant to help advertisers, “Get the best results with fewer, more efficient campaigns,” and, “Save time and effort to free you up for strategic, big picture work”.
Now, Meta has introduced Advantage+ audience targeting for its paid social ads, another AI-powered product that is meant to help advertisers create optimized campaigns. Let’s talk about how it works, and whether it could be useful to your own business goals.
Meta claims that its ad technology “automatically finds your audience. If you share an audience suggestion, [it will] prioritize audiences matching this profile before searching more widely.”
In other words, you can simply upload your campaign, and let Meta figure out who to serve it to. Of course, you can still use Audience Controls to set crucial age, language, and location criteria. And if you would like to provide an Audience Suggestion, you can select custom audiences, detailed interest target audiences, and more to help Meta understand the kinds of users you want to reach.
Accessing Advantage+ Audience Targeting is easy. When you create a campaign, you’ll eventually reach the ad set page, where you will see that the Advantage+ audience option is already pre-selected. From there, you can follow the prompts to tailor the audience controls and suggestions to your liking.
However, if you would prefer to ensure that your ads reach a specific audience, there’s a prompt under the Advantage+ audience information that will allow you to switch to the original audience options.
The obvious answer is that this all depends on your business objective. Advantage+ audience targeting is useful when you want certain results, and you are willing to let Meta figure out which audience achieves those results. It’s a little less useful when you know a certain audience will be interested in your ads, and you want to target them directly.
There’s a fine balance, of course. Get too narrow in your targeting and you may find that you don’t generate enough leads. But get too broad, and many of those leads may not convert in the end.
It’s up to you (and/or your ad agency) to test what works for your business. We wouldn’t recommend retiring your old audiences all at once, especially if they’ve been doing well. Instead, try A/B testing different audiences alongside an Advantage+ audience, and see how the results differ.
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Relevance Advisors is here to help your business thrive. Interested in learning more about Meta Advantage, or Advantage+ Audience Targeting for your Paid Social ads? Contact us today for a free consultation, or sign up for our newsletter to receive marketing tips and tricks, as well as information on digital marketing trends. We hope to hear from you soon!
