How Much Does Meta Expand Your Audience?
One common point of confusion for Meta advertisers is Meta’s expansion of ad targeting. In some cases, advertisers don’t realize it’s possible at all (but is). In others, it’s completely unclear how much an audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. MoreClick word to read full description was expanded.
To make things worse, Meta has added new targeting features related to audience expansion that sound similar but are different in subtle ways.
The concept of targeting expansion began with Advantage Detailed TargetingWhen turned on, Meta can expand your audience to reach people beyond the Detailed Targeting (interests and behaviors) that you selected, but only if that expansion is expected to lead to better results. Location, age, gender, and exclusions are hard constraints, and the expanded audience will continue to follow those rules. MoreClick word to read full description (originally Detailed Targeting Expansion). That same approach was applied to Lookalike Audiences (Advantage LookalikeWhen turned on, Meta can expand your audience if it believes you can get better results by doing so. That expansion will be achieved by increasing the percentage of your lookalike audience, using the original custom audience for training. MoreClick word to read full description) and even custom audiences (Advantage Custom AudienceWhen turned on, Meta has the ability to expand targeting beyond your selected custom audience. The location, age, gender, and exclusions that you input will continue to be used as hard constraints. MoreClick word to read full description).