What Is Meta Advantage+ Audience and When to Use It in 2026

Looking to find high-intent audiences that actually convert?

With Meta’s Advantage+ Audience, the dream is not far from reality. 

Advantage+ Audience (formerly broad targeting or expanded targeting) is part of the Advantage+ campaign suite. It is a single-step campaign solution that leverages AI to target relevant audiences. By combining your expertise with this feature, you can strive to generate high click-through rates and ROAS (return on ad spend). 

But is Advantage+ Audience good for your campaigns? Based on Meta’s claims, using Advantage+ Audience across different objectives has seen:

1. 14.8% lower cost per result for awareness objective
2. 9.7% lower cost per result for traffic, engagement, and leads objectives
3. 7.2% lower cost per result for sales and app promotion objectives

Note: The cost per result is the average cost obtained from a desired outcome, such as a sale, click, or lead. It is mostly used as a marketing metric.

A profitable approach that produces desirable results. This guide will walk you through the A-Z of Meta Advantage+ Audiences. 

Let’s begin!

What is Advantage+ Audience? 

As mentioned above, Advantage+ Audience uses AI automation to target relevant audiences across Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram. It leverages Meta’s machine learning algorithm, which helps in identifying and reaching high-intent customers.

The algorithm fosters ad optimization and overall performance. It finds the target audience based on the following factors:

• Pixel events 
• Past conversion history
• Previous engagement with your ads and store 

Meta then sends targeted ads to these ideal audiences using data from the ways mentioned above.

This feature removes the hassle of manual guesswork by relying on data extracted by Advantage+. It provides insights into your audience’s interests and matches them with your brand’s niche. 

This feature appears in two different versions:

1. Advantage+ Audience: This appears independently at the ad set level. Meta can expand the audience beyond the selected interets or demographics.
   
2. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: In this, Advantage+ implements audience targeting, with limited to no manual control.

How does Advantage+ Audience Target Customers? 

Learning the know-how of this feature is essential for advertisers. It gives you an idea of how targeting works so that you can improve your ad reach strategy. 

Let’s understand this better:

1. AI-driven Targeting Capabilities

Meta’s Advantage+ focuses on delivery automation, meaning it displays your ads to those users who are highly likely to engage with your campaign. 

This is determined by machine learning algorithms that analyze users based on their clicks, past engagements, and conversions (pixel tracking) on the platform (both on Facebook and Instagram).

2. Using Audience Controls & Audience Suggestions

You can apply Audience Controls and Audience Suggestions. Let’s understand them better in detail:

• Audience Controls: This feature places a limitation on who can or cannot view your ads. It adjusts the audiences based on locations, minimum age, custom audiences, and languages.  This applies to the following:
  – Custom audiences (website visitors, email lists, app users)
  – Lookalike audiences
  – Core targeting (age, gender, location, interests, behaviors)
  – Exclusions (e.g., people who already converted)
  
  For instance, if you are selling newborn baby products, you will target new parents between the ages of 25 and 40. So, you set the audience control to target parents aged 25 to 40 years old within a 20-mile radius of your location. You also exclude parents who have toddlers 1 year or older. This way, you define the audience based on your requirements.

• Audience Suggestions: Audience suggestions are essentially signals that help Meta’s AI understand and learn who your ads should reach. In this, you guide the AI by suggesting how your ideal customer should be, so that Meta can start finding individuals with the matching persona. Meta lets you provide audience suggestions, which are:
  
  – Custom audiences
  – Interests
  – Demographics
  – Geographic focus
  
  For example, if you sell baby products and suggest “new parents” as your audience, Meta will expand the reach to include expecting parents or caregivers with similar behaviors if it finds them more likely to buy.

Keep in mind that Audience Suggestions are not shown beyond Audience Controls.

If You Use Both in Different Campaigns:

• Manual campaign: Your audience control applies strictly.
• Advantage+ campaign: Meta has freedom to go beyond your input.

If You Use Both in the Same Campaign:

• In Advantage+ campaigns, audience suggestions inform targeting, but Meta can go outside them.
• Your audience controls won’t hard-limit reach unless you’re in a manual campaign type.

3. Reaching the Target Audience

Meta Advantage+ Audience analyzes the combination of accumulated data and your input to provide the most suitable audience for your ad campaign.

It does not create an audience list like in custom and lookalike audiences; instead, Meta’s AI understands the audience type you want based on the provided information. It adjusts and makes changes in real-time as the AI learns. 

Then, based on the audience suggestions and controls (if provided), your campaigns will be displayed to relevant users. 

When it works with other Advantage+ tools, it helps optimize your target audience more effectively. 

When Should You Use Advantage+ Audience? 

Before we dive into what types of campaigns are ideal for automation, it is important to understand the differences between Advantage+ and original audiences. 

You must have observed that the option “Switch to original audiences” appears when running Traffic and Engagement campaigns. It basically reverts to the previous manual setup, which does not include the Advantage+ settings.

What is it? Let’s explore Advantage+ Audience vs Original Audience in detail.

Advantage+ Audience vs Original Audience: Key Differences

While Advantage+ is predominantly AI-based, original audiences are the core audiences you create manually. 

They fill in age, location, gender, detailed targeting, and languages. However, it still lets you activate certain Advantage+ audience-related features. 

For example, you can activate Advantage+ detailed targeting if you opt for “Reach people beyond your detailed targeting selections when it’s likely to improve performance.”

Now, let’s look at the main differences between the Advantage+ Audience vs Original Audience: 

	Advantage+ Audience	Original Audiences
Targeting	It uses AI to find the ideal audience in real-time, based on pixel data, past ad interactions, and conversion information.	You manually set it, and Meta analyzes and finds the right targeting audience. .
Audience Suggestions	They are a part of the Advantage+ Audience.	This is optional.
Displaying Restrictions	Audience suggestions in Advantage+ Audiences are not restrictive. Meta uses them as guidance to inform delivery, but your ads can still be shown to people outside of the suggested audience if the system predicts better performance.	It will not display ads to users outside of the inputs you provide.
Ad Expansion	Meta first sorts audience suggestions and then goes broader. Audience controls control this expansion (depends on the performance goal). When audience control is not applied, the algorithm has more freedom to find audience based on the available data and predictions.	The answer is–it depends. Your ad objective and performance goal play a vital role.

When Should You Apply Advantage+ Audience?

This Advantage+ feature suits conversion-based campaigns, such as campaigns seeking purchases. Original audiences are suitable for targeting a specific audience, and are ideal for top-of-the-funnel campaigns, such as generating impressions, page views, etc. 

You will notice that Advantage+ Audience is automatically active when running Leads, App promotions, or Sales campaigns. This is because these ad objectives are ideal for conversions. 

While it is not limited to conversion-based performance goals, you can apply it in Awareness, Engagement, and Traffic campaigns, where automation is not set to default. 

This feature will not work for retargeting campaigns using Advantage+ catalogs. 

Meta recommends experimenting with it with different campaigns, except the remarketing campaign. However, it is best to stick to conversion campaigns and only apply it to other campaigns when necessary, such as tracking link clicks, based on your performance goal.

How To Use Advantage+ Audience?

It’s time to delve into the setup process and implement Advantage+ Audience Facebook to your advantage. 

For this, we will explain the different ways you can execute it based on your ad objective. Let’s dive in: 

General Ad Creation Setup 

1. On Meta Ads Manager, go to +Create > Ad Objective and select the objective based on your requirements:

2. Click continue. Provide campaign name, select the buying type between auction and reservation, set budget strategy for ads, and choose special ad categories if applicable.
   
   Click Next. In the next section, give the ad set a name, and choose the conversion location: 

Include Meta Partnership ads in your Advantage+ campaigns to boost partnership and brand visibility. Learn more.

The conversion location is where you want the desired conversion to happen. You inform Meta that you want your ads to appear at this designated place (such as websites, instant forms, etc.).

Next, choose a conversion event to inform Meta what action you want your target audience to take. The conversion event depends on Meta Pixel, so ensure you have selected the correct one. 

• Then, set dynamic creative, budget & schedule, and performance goals.
  
  Remember that performance goals (formerly called optimisation goals) play an important role. Each ad objective has different performance goals.
  
  It helps tell the ad delivery system to provide the best possible outcome as efficiently as possible. So, if you opt for “maximise number of conversions,” the ad delivery system will look for an audience that is highly likely to convert. 

Now, we will navigate how to implement Advantage+ Audience for different ad objectives.

For Implementing Awareness & Consideration-based Ad Objectives

Before we continue, we would like to highlight that some advertisers may see different layouts of ad set level. That being said, most of the steps and concepts we have explained apply to all the layouts. 

• Locate “Audience” after setting the performance goals.
  
  If you selected “Recommended Advantage+ settings,” then this is how it will look (even in the manual setup, you can switch to Advantage+ Audience any time, as it is a single-step campaign solution): 

• You can include or exclude locations to display your ads in the Audience controls section.

You can add locations in bulk. This way, you can control which countries you want to include or exclude from your ad campaigns. 

• Right under it, you’ll see “Show more options.” Click to reveal other control options. In that, you will find:

Minimum Age: The minimum age is 18 and extends to other age groups.

Exclude custom audiences: To analyze and search, look for existing custom audiences that you wish to exclude from Advantage+ Audience. 

Languages: You can control which specific languages you wish to display your ads in. This limits the audience and only displays to selected people based on the chosen language(s).

• Next, scroll down to the Advantage+ Audience. There, you can add an “Audience suggestion.”
  
  In audience suggestions, you guide Meta AI to find audiences more likely to respond.
  
  Note: Audience suggestions are not shown beyond Audience control. Meta will only use your audience suggestions within the limits you set in your audience controls, not expand targeting beyond those boundaries.

• You will find custom audiences in the suggestions. This is to suggest to AI what groups to target or how you want the target audience to look.
  
  You can further add more audiences to the list, such as lookalike audiences. 

Need ideas? Or want to know how your competitors are executing their campaigns? You can get all that in the Meta Ads Library. Kickstart ideation or analyze how you can improve your advertising strategy!

• Next, add the age and gender groups you want to target. 

• With detailed targeting, you get a vast list of options. For example, for an engagement campaign, you want to target parents for your newly launched baby wear.
  
  This is how you can navigate:
  
  Detailed targeting > Demographics > Parents > All Parents > Parents (up to 12 months).
  
  You can tailor it further by adding interests and behaviours. 
  
• Lastly, save your audience. 

For Implementing Conversion-based Ad Campaigns

The steps explained above are similar to these three ad objectives with a few tweaks: 

• When you reach the ad set level, scroll down to the “Audience.”
  
• In that, Advantage+ is already on. 

• Under Controls > Show more controls, you can include or exclude locations, set minimum age, Custom audience exclusion, and select languages you want to display your ad in.
  
• In Suggest an audience, you include custom audiences and lookalike audiences, as many as you want to improve targeting. 

• Select age range, gender, and detailed targeting. 

In some instances, you will observe that Advantage+ custom audiences, Advantage+ lookalike audience, and Advantage+ detailed targeting appear to improve your campaign performance. You can opt for them to improve campaign performance.

• Once done, save your audience.

And that’s how you implement Advantage+ Audiences to your campaigns.

Next, add Advantage+ placements, Advantage+ creative, etc, and get your campaign ready at the ad level. 

Benefits of Using Advantage+ Audience

With Advantage+ Audience, there are several benefits an advertiser can witness while running ad campaigns: 

1. Automation for Accuracy: You do not have to manually look for ideal customers and add them to your targeting audience. AI automation boosts your productivity by finding and analyzing your audience for you.
   
2. Improved targeting: By providing more insights through audience control and suggestions, you can enhance targeting and get better and more accurate results. Even if you do not provide suggestions, Meta’s AI will still target users likely to engage and convert.
   
3. Single-step campaign solution: As a single-step campaign solution, you can either independently add it or combine it with other Advantage+ features like budget and placements to execute a complete Advantage+ ad campaign (end-to-end campaign solution, such as an Advantage+ Sales campaign). 

4. Save Time & Boost Productivity: Advantage+ audience handles a lot of the targeting work for you by combining your custom audience info with smart automation. But you still stay in control of important details like age or location, making campaign setup faster and easier.

 Conclusion

To summarize, Advantage+ Audience optimizes the campaign’s targeting capabilities and provides the best possible outcome with Meta AI’s searching ability. 

Let’s wrap up with a few key takeaways, 

1. Advantage+ Audience is more like a guide that informs Meta AI of what kind of users to target for your ad campaigns. It does not create an audience list but analyzes and looks for high-intent customers in real-time.
   
2. It is a single-step campaign solution that can be independently incorporated into campaigns. Advantage+ Audience relies on pixel events, previous conversions, and engagement on the platform.
   
3. It is ideal for conversion-based campaigns, which focus on generating purchases and setting a conversion-oriented performance goal. However, it can also be used for other campaign types. 

With that, it’s time to harness the power of AI automation and begin targeting relevant audiences today!

More Meta Blogs To Boost Your Marketing Efforts:  How To Use Meta Business Suite? A Step-by-Step Guide How to run Facebook ads for Shopify? 2 Simple Ways The Best Facebook Ads Apps For Shopify Facebook Pixel Code 14 Best-Performing Meta Ads Examples

FAQs

What is the Advantage+ Audience exclusion?
This can mean two things: Depending on the campaign type, you can opt out of using Advantage+ Audience or exclude custom audiences and locations using Audience controls.

Is Meta Advantage+ worth it?
The answer depends on your goals. Many advertisers on various platforms have found Advantage+ Audience helpful. For example, The Hill House Home used it and targeted women between 18-34 years. They witnessed a 76% decrease in cost per link click. 

What is the difference between the Advantage+ audience and the original audience?
Advantage+ Audiences uses AI automation to find relevant audiences with extra options, like Audience control and Audience suggestions, while original audiences consist of manually set-up audiences that do not use AI. 

How to turn off Advantage+ Audience?
Switch to the original audience to return to manual setup. For Sales, Leads, and App promotions, Advantage+ Audience stays on.

How do I segment audiences using Advantage+ Audience tools?
While AI does most of the job, you can add signals such as detailed targeting by adjusting demographics, interests, and behaviours. You can also add multiple lookalike and custom audiences to provide more insight into your audience type you wish to target.

Can I use Advantage+ Audience for Instagram?
Yes, all Advantage+ solutions, including Advantage+ Audience, can be used to create targeted ads on Instagram. You can create such ads on the Ads Manager for both Facebook and Instagram.

Is broad targeting good for the Advantage+ Audience?
It’s not always true that broad targeting is best for Advantage+ Audience. Broad targeting in Advantage+ Audience works well when Meta has enough data from past conversions or pixel activity to understand who is likely to buy. It allows the algorithm to optimize freely and find the best customers. However, if your account is new or your product targets a specific niche, broad targeting can waste budget because Meta lacks data to guide delivery. In that case, using audience controls like age, location, or interests helps improve relevance until the system learns more.

Should I use Audience suggestions?
Although it is optional, we recommend applying it so that you can tailor your audience targeting with more precision, with AI bringing in better results based on your input. While Advantage+ Audience is able to track relevant audiences based on pixel tracking, past conversions, and engagement on the platform, it is not a bad idea to take it a step further with extra suggestions. 

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