How Meta Could Improve Advantage+ Audience

I use Advantage+ Audience in most cases right now, but there are always exceptions.

Let’s discuss…

The Exceptions

While it’s great for purchases, there is potential for issues with any other optimization.

A prime example is businesses that serve customers who are predominantly women. While this tends to work out when optimizing for purchases, the algorithm will spend your budget on men who are willing to click and engage — if that’s the action you were wanting (optimizing for link clicks, landing page views, ThruPlay, or post engagement).

This can even be an issue for leads. If your business serves clients who are in a specific age group, that tends to work out when you optimize for purchases. But, that won’t stop people from an age group you don’t serve from completing your form.

The important point here is whether people outside of your target demographic are likely to perform the action you are optimizing for — and if that action will be low-quality because they don’t fit that target. This will throw off the algorithm for top of the funnel optimization.

Why it’s a Problem

The reason that this is an issue when you use Advantage+ Audience is that age maximum and gender are suggestions.

They aren’t tight constraints. You can’t prevent your ads from being shown to people outside of those demographic suggestions. If people perform the action you want, Meta assumes it helps you.

Audience Controls do not include age maximum or gender.

If results go off the rails because of this, you’ll need to switch to original audiences. There you can control age maximum and gender.

Sill Need Original Audiences?

Honestly, if Meta just changed this so that age maximum and gender were audience controls, there would be very few reasons to use original audiences. Since audiences expand anyway when optimizing for conversions, link clicks, and landing page views, optimization would behave similarly with these common controls.

The one remaining issue with eliminating original audiences would be remarketing. You are unable to isolate a remarketing audience when using Advantage+ Audience (custom audiences are suggestions).

Of course, remarketing does happen naturally now, but there are times when remarketing ad sets that don’t expand can be useful. Meta would need to come up with a solution for this, too.

I do believe that Meta will eliminate original audiences eventually, but these are a couple of major sticking points before that were to happen. Even as someone who uses it often, I know there are times when it has weaknesses that are solved with original audiences.

If you could restrict by age and gender, would you use Advantage+ Audience more?

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