Audiences and Targeting
Targeting decides who's eligible to see your ad. Meta offers several audience types, and in recent years it has leaned toward automated audience selection guided by what you give it. This guide explains each option and how they work together.
On This Page
Core Audiences
Core audiences are built from Meta's own data: location, age, gender, languages and detailed targeting based on interests, behaviors and demographics. Meta has removed many detailed targeting options over the years, including sensitive categories in 2022, so the lists you'll find in older guides may no longer exist.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are built from your own sources. Website custom audiences use Pixel and Conversions API data, while customer list audiences use contact data you upload, matched to Meta accounts. Engagement audiences use interactions with your Page, Instagram account, videos, lead forms or shopping experiences. You'll use them most often for retargeting and for exclusions.
Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience contains people who look like a source audience, such as your customer list or past purchasers. You choose a source and a size, expressed as a percentage of a country's population. Meta now folds lookalike logic into Advantage+ audience by default, but you can still build manual lookalikes.
Advantage+ Audience
Advantage+ audience is Meta's automated option. You give it audience suggestions, such as a custom audience or interests, and Meta uses them as a starting point while expanding to other people it predicts will respond. For many accounts this has become the default recommendation, with manual constraints kept for cases where there's a clear reason.
Exclusions and Overlap
Excluding existing customers from prospecting campaigns, and recent converters from retargeting, keeps your spend focused. When audiences overlap between ad sets they can end up competing against each other in the auction, which Meta's audience overlap tool can diagnose.
Special Ad Categories
Ads about credit, employment, housing and social, electoral or political issues have to be declared as a special ad category. That limits your targeting options and, for some categories, changes how audiences are built.
Putting This to Work
Most businesses now get better results by giving Meta good creative and clean conversion data than by hand-picking interests. Your customer list and website visitors are the most valuable targeting inputs you own.
In Practice
A wellness retreat uploads its list of past guests as a customer list, excludes them from prospecting and uses them as the seed for new audiences. Cost per discovery call drops because the ads reach people who resemble previous guests.
If your ads fall into a special ad category you have to declare it. Skipping that can get ads rejected or your account restricted.
Key Terms
- Custom audience
- An audience built from your own data sources.
- Lookalike audience
- People similar to a source audience you choose.
- Advantage+ audience
- Meta's automated audience option guided by advertiser suggestions.
- Audience overlap
- The share of people who appear in two audiences.
Key Facts
- Customer list audiences depend on match rates, so complete, well-formatted data gives you larger audiences.
- Audience sizes shown in Ads Manager are estimates.
Sources
- Meta Business Help Center www.facebook.com
- Ads Guide, Meta for Business www.facebook.com
- Meta Advertising Standards transparency.meta.com
- Meta Blueprint courses www.facebook.com
- Advertising and marketing guidance, Federal Trade Commission www.ftc.gov
- Pew Research Center, social media use www.pewresearch.org
- including sensitive categories in 2022 www.bloomberg.com
Have Our Team Handle This
Our team runs this every day. Request a free proposal and we will plan it for your business, or see the Meta Ads service.