Social Media

How Advantage+ Audience Works

September 01, 2023 by Jessica

Meta first introduced Advantage Regulars when it spoken AI-powered ad tools in May of 2023. It will sound eerily similar to the other Advantage regulars expansion products. There are some important differences.

Let’s take a detailed squint at what Advantage Regulars is, how it works, how to set it up, and my expectations for the future of Meta ads targeting.

What Is Advantage Audience?

You have wangle to Advantage Regulars if you see this in the ad set…

Advantage Audience is a targeting setting that allows Meta to use AI to determine the regulars that will see your ads. To determine this, Meta’s systems are constantly learning from your pixel data, conversions history, and people who have engaged with your previous ads and content.

You can segregate to either trust Meta to find your target regulars for you without any input or you can provide some inputs as regulars suggestions. Your suggestions can include:

Custom Audiences
Lookalike Audiences
Age Range
Gender
Detailed Targeting

Meta will prioritize reaching people who match these suggestions surpassing expanding to people increasingly broadly.

Meta provides some inveigling stats regarding the effectiveness of Advantage Audience.

While I don’t superintendency a whole lot well-nigh a 28% lower Cost Per Click or Landing Page View (that doesn’t midpoint a lower Cost Per Action), the 13% lower Cost Per Product Catalog Sale and 7% lower Cost Per Website Conversion are worth notice and potentially significant.

Audience Controls

Audience Controls are tight constraints, rather than suggestions, that Meta must respect when choosing your Advantage Audience. This includes:

Locations
Minimum Age
Excluded Custom Audiences
Languages

This works much like the Audience Controls for Advantage Shopping. You may only ship to customers in unrepealable countries or states. Your product may not be misogynist to people under a unrepealable age. Or your product may not be relevant to those who once bought it.

These controls are necessary in those cases.

When You Can’t or Shouldn’t Use It

Advantage Regulars is not misogynist for the pursuit situations:

When promoting a Special Ad Category
Advantage Shopping Campaigns
Advantage App Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns using Advantage Catalog

Meta once utilizes AI to generate your audiences for Advantage Shopping and Advantage App Campaigns.

Meta moreover recommends that you don’t use Advantage Regulars often when remarketing.

Set Up Regulars Controls

When you click to Show Increasingly Options within Regulars Controls, you’ll see minimum age, excluded custom audiences, and languages.

These are the tight constraints that Meta must follow when finding your audience. So, plane when finding people vastitude your suggestions, these rules will apply.

Here are a few things to consider…

1. Location. First, you will need to select countries or states if you can only ship to unrepealable locations. But you should moreover consider including only unrepealable countries here, too, depending on your optimization. Unless you optimize for a purchase, you can expect your ads to be delivered primarily to the cheapest countries. By default, Meta will include your home country here.

2. Minimum Age. There’s really no reason to include anything here unless there’s a legal reason to set a minimum age. Ignore the age of your “typical” customer. Meta will sort this out.

3. Excluded Custom Audience. Use this only when necessary. For example, you’re promoting a product that can only be purchased once.

4. Languages. Meta recommends leaving this zippo unless you want to show your ads to people in a language that isn’t worldwide to a location.

Set Up Advantage Audience

First, a couple of things to alimony in mind here…

1. You can provide an regulars suggestion, but it’s optional. At some point, you should experiment with both approaches: Providing a suggestion and not.

2. You can switch when to original regulars options. If you’re not ready for this, know that it’s not forced on you (yet, at least). You can still go when to the old ways of targeting.

But you can provide custom audiences, lookalike audiences, an age range, gender, and detailed targeting as suggestions.

Just alimony in mind that these are not tight constraints. Meta will prioritize these suggestions initially, but your ads can still reach people who wouldn’t qualify. If you have a tight constraint on age, you need to provide it in Regulars Controls.

How Is This Different?

If you’re tumbled by how this is variegated than simply using Advantage Custom Audience, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Detailed Targeting, I totally understand. This stuff is eerily similar.

In both cases, Meta prioritizes the initial regulars — at least, at first. In both cases, Meta can expand the regulars to reach people vastitude that group.

Here are the main differences, the way I understand it…

1. Age and Gender. When you use Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, or Advantage Custom Audience, Meta uses age and gender as tight constraints. The expanded regulars will respect those settings. That isn’t necessarily the specimen with Advantage Audience.

While you can set a minimum age when setting up Advantage Regulars using Regulars Controls, the age range that you provide is a mere suggestion. The same goes for gender. You may think only women superintendency well-nigh your product, but Meta can reach men if it’s unswayable it will help you get largest results.

This may sound crazy, but it’s a matter of trusting the AI. Meta is learning from your data and results. You shouldn’t expect your ads to suddenly get shown to men if only women purchase.

2. Extent of Expansion. Meta unquestionably calls this out specifically when talking well-nigh the benefits of Advantage Audience.

Advantage Regulars provides the “broadest possible regulars to search within.” Meta plane says that this limitation prevents those other options from stuff increasingly effective. That inability to go as wholesale limits the AI.

This moreover goes when to one of my original issues with Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Custom Audience. We’ve never known how much Meta unquestionably expands our regulars when these are turned on. There’s not a way to see results wrenched lanugo by people you targeted versus those who were part of the expanded audience.

The result was that most advertisers unsupportable that Meta was significantly expanding our audiences. But that may not have been the case.

Versus Going Broad

Going broad with targeting (removing all interests, behaviors, custom audiences, and other targeting) has increased in popularity among advertisers. How is this different?

You could set up an ad set using wholesale targeting without any inputs. You could moreover use Advantage Regulars without any targeting suggestions. My understanding is that your ads will be delivered differently in each case.

Or at least slightly differently. We’ve heard well-nigh the power of wholesale targeting, but Advantage Regulars is flipside level of AI targeting power. It’s similar to how the targeting power for purchases is greater for Advantage Shopping Campaigns than simply going wholesale when optimizing for purchases.

At least, this is how Meta advertises it. Feel self-ruling to test!

When To Use It

Like any strategy, you should experiment and find when it works weightier for you. If you had asked me a year ago what I thought well-nigh wholesale targeting or any of the regulars expansion products, I’d requite you a much variegated wordplay than I would now. Don’t seem that this is a bad idea.

In my opinion, this is weightier when optimizing for any type of conversion, expressly a purchase (when not running Advantage Shopping Campaigns). I’d be wary of using it for top-of-the-funnel campaigns that optimize for link clicks, landing page views, video views, or any type of engagement, but we should still experiment.

The reason I’d be hesitant to use this for surface level engagement is that the algorithm will just work harder to get you those unseemly actions. And those unseemly deportment are often not high-quality actions. And the algorithm won’t care.

That brings up a whole variegated philosophical discussion and a potential solution if Meta overly wants one. They could provide optimization options for high-quality traffic and engagement to prevent this potential issue.

The Future of Targeting

This is the direction Meta ads targeting has been going overly since the launch of Detailed Targeting Expansion (before it became Advantage Detailed Targeting). Increasingly automation. Less control. Increasingly AI-powered learning. And ultimately, less transparency in reporting and increasingly trust in the algorithm.

This is just a hunch, but I seem that Advantage Regulars will sooner completely replace Advantage Detailed Targeting, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Custom Audience. There’s simply no value in having them anymore. They are too similar, and keeping them will only misplace advertisers.

We’re getting much closer to a time when we won’t provide any targeting at all. While that may sound scary, the truth is that Meta once has our targeting in the form of historical data. We don’t necessarily need to provide anything considering the algorithm once knows who has converted on our website and is engaging with our ads and content.