Are Audience Suggestions Necessary? – Jon Loomer Digital
When using Advantage+ Audience, you have the option of providing targeting inputs. These targeting suggestions help guide Meta’s AI, which prioritizes people who meet those suggestions before going broad.
But, if you don’t provide suggestions, Meta uses historical data as a guide. Things like:
- Past conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More
- Pixel data
- Interactions with previous ads
In other words, Advantage+ AudienceMeta’s AI-powered targeting option. Meta will attempt to find your audience for you based on pixel activity, conversion history, and ad engagement. You can also provide targeting suggestions that Meta will initially prioritize before going broader. More will prioritize what is essentially a remarketing audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More before going broader. So, in theory, you really don’t need to provide a targeting suggestion.
I get that this is a challenging spot for advertisers. The urge is to provide some kind of inputs there. It makes us feel like we’re doing something and have control over the results. But remember that leaving it empty doesn’t mean that it’s completely untargeted. It’s basically a general remarketing audience that can go broader.
The primary situation I might provide audience suggestions is if I were optimizing for top-of-the-funnel actions. This is problematic anyway due to quality concerns, but some guidance may prevent it from going completely off the rails. Otherwise, Meta probably won’t use the same activity to optimize for engagement as conversions.
Personally, I still provide some basic remarketing suggestions as a starting point, even when optimizing for conversions. This is due to habit more than anything. It’s a tough habit to break.
How about you?