What Is Advantage+ Audience?

If you haven’t noticed yet, Facebook is encouraging us to go broader when targeting cold audiences to let the algorithm find the people you’re looking for. {Cue sad trumpet music 🎺} 

I’m not a huge fan of Advantage+ audience at the moment. I especially don’t love it for new advertisers who don’t have a lot of pixel data (with little or no pixel data, Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t know WHO to look for).

So where do you see this feature?

When you go into the ad set of a campaign, you’ll see something that looks like this…

Facebook now defaults to Advantage+ audience (broad targeting). If you don’t do anything to change these sections, your ad will run to a completely open audience of people within the United States… and that’s it!

Whomp whomp… 😕

Yes! you can add additional countries if you select “Show more options” under Audience Controls. Yes! you can add in an age range or targeting interests if you select “Audience suggestion (optional)”, but these are only SUGGESTIONS. 

📢 I REPEAT…

Facebook will only use these as SUGGESTIONS. 

And with the testing I’ve done using this feature… I don’t love it. 

For some advertisers; those who have run ads for several years and have a lot of data on their pixel, this targeting option might make sense. But for most of my followers, who are new to Facebook advertising, it doesn’t. So, I encourage you to switch back to original audience options (while it’s still there!). Because yes, I think it will be going away….. eventually. 

To switch back to the OG audience section, you’ll click on the blue link that says ‘Switch to original audience options’  and you’ll be brought back to the original audience section which looks like the image below. There, you’ll be able to select specific interests that your audience follows, select an exact age range and genders you want to target.

When new features like this are rolled out, things generally don’t work great at first. It takes time to get the “kinks” out, but I do believe that the Advantage + audience feature will improve AND become the new norm - but I don’t think we’re there yet. 

So for now, if you are new to Facebook advertising I would switch back to the original audience section so you have a little more control over who will see your ads.. But by all means, test it! If you’ve been running ads for a while and have some data on your pixel, then you should definitely try it out!