Audiences: broad, custom, lookalike, Advantage+
The "WHO" lever - and the one undergoing the biggest change in the platform's history. Old-school media buying was 80% audience craft. Modern Meta has quietly taken most of that away from you.
1The three raw materials
2Warm vs Cold — the distinction that organizes everything
A classic account splits prospecting (cold) from retargeting (warm) into different campaigns - they perform and cost very differently and you want to see them separately.
3The big shift: broad + Advantage+ Audience
Because the auction's machine learning (Day 2) is now so good at finding the right person from the creative and the optimization event alone, broad targeting often beats hand-built audiences. The targeting box becomes advisory, not a fence.
Advantage+ Audience is Meta's expression of this: you provide an "audience suggestion" as a HINT, and Meta is free to go beyond it if it finds better buyers elsewhere.
Why broad works now: the targeting is effectively done by the optimization event + the creative. Your ad about running shoes, optimized for Purchase, gets shown to likely shoe-buyers even without "interested in running." The creative IS the targeting.
Narrow audiences = fishing in one small hand-picked pond you're sure has fish. Broad + Advantage+ = casting a wide net across the whole lake, trusting a smart sonar (the algorithm) to steer your net to the schools. As the sonar got better, the wide net started out-catching the small pond - because you were probably wrong about which pond was best, and you were cutting yourself off from fish you never imagined.
(1) Obsessing over perfect interest stacks while ignoring creative - backwards in modern Meta (the Day 1 asymmetry). (2) Going so narrow the audience can't produce ~50 events/week (Learning Limited). (3) Distrusting broad because "it feels like no targeting." (4) Forgetting exclusions, so they pay to retarget people who already bought. Your job: redirect energy from audience-fiddling to creative, and give broad a fair test.
Recap - 30 seconds
- Three raw materials: core/interest, custom (your data, warm), lookalikes (resemble a seed).
- Warm = retargeting; Cold = prospecting. Usually split into separate campaigns.
- Modern shift: broad + Advantage+ Audience often beats hand-built - creative + optimization event do the targeting.
- Advantage+ treats your audience input as a hint, not a fence.
- Spend energy on creative, not interest-stacking; always set exclusions.