Discover Advantage+ Targeting
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Ads management tools such as Meta have launched machine learning features over the past few years to automate processes and give marketers the best results possible.
Advantage+ Targeting is one of the features that followed the rollout of AI tools such as Advantage+ Creative in 2023. This audience targeting feature lets marketers utilise Meta’s advanced AI to find the right audience for their campaign.
Advantage+ Targeting is just one of many of Meta’s AI features available on Meta Ads Manager. They’ve introduced many products, from campaign optimisation to Advantage+ Catalog ads, and will most likely continue to develop these further over the coming years.
What is Advantage+ and is it worth using?
The purpose of Meta’s Advantage+ Suite is to optimise campaigns and performance while reducing the amount of manual work required to set up and maintain them. To put it simply, you’re handing the controls over to Meta to decide what works best for your campaigns.
This is all achievable thanks to Meta’s machine-learning algorithms which can learn and adapt for each account. But remember: Something that may work for one of your clients, may not work for another, and Meta takes this into account.
But, is the Advantage+ Suite worth using? 100% yes.
Our advice is to at least try out their features. Meta has been known to reward accounts for using its tools which could potentially lead to high performance. Trust that Meta knows more than we do and test test test!
Advantage+ Targeting overview
So when it comes to Advantage+ Targeting, what does that mean? We’ve established that Advantage+ covers the variety of AI features Meta implements to optimise performance, but let’s get to know its audience targeting features.
Meta first introduced Advantage+ Audience when it announced AI-powered ad tools in May, 2023, and has since introduced many more features.
The way Meta describes Advantage+ Targeting is…
“You can rely on Meta’s AI to find your audience or add specific information about the people you want to reach as an Audience suggestion. Meta prioritises audiences matching your suggestions, before searching more broadly.
You can still limit where ads should be delivered, e.g. excluding ages or locations, by setting Audience controls.
Advantage+ audience creates the broadest possible audience to search within, giving Meta’s AI lots of flexibility.
In comparison, Meta’s original audience options, including Advantage options (Advantage detailed targeting, Advantage custom audience and Advantage lookalike), can limit the potential of Meta’s AI which can be less effective.”
To put it into more simple terms, here’s what Jon Loomer says…
“Advantage+ Audience is a targeting setting that allows Meta to use AI to determine the audience that will see your ads.”
When to use Advantage+ Targeting effectively
Meta recommends experimenting with Advantage+ Targeting and seeing what works for you. As I previously mentioned, every account is different and what may work for one account may not be as effective for another.
Meta constantly learns from your pixel data, conversion history and previous users who’ve engaged with or clicked on your content to serve your ads to the best people possible. As a marketer, you can either choose to trust Meta and let it run with what it believes is best, or offer a few audience suggestions which can include:
- Custom audiences
- Lookalike audiences
- Age range
- Gender
- Detailed Targeting
If you choose to provide a few audience suggestions, Meta will focus on targeting users who match these descriptions before expanding to broader audiences. However, as Meta outlined, this could impact performance and be less effective.
In my experience, targeting expansion doesn’t hurt to try out; it may even help increase your results. This is what Meta says about utilising Advantage+ Targeting for higher performance:
“When tested by Meta against other audience options, Advantage+ audience has typically improved performance on campaigns using all objectives.
We saw:
- 13% lower median cost per product catalog sale
- 7% lower median cost per website conversions
- 28% lower average cost per click, lead, or landing page view”
The only problem with letting Meta take the wheel is that we have no idea whether our audience was actually expanded, how much it was expanded by, or how performance was impacted by this.
But if there’s anything you should take away from this, it’s to at least give Meta a chance to test.
We can help
At Embryo, we pride ourselves on staying up-to-date on the latest tools and industry updates within the paid social and wider social media world. This understanding of the industry is one of the many reasons we’re an award-winning paid social team. To learn more about us and how we can help your business get in touch today!
