Meta has recently announced Advantage Detailed Targeting will now be available across all objectives and optimisations. This comes as part of the launch of Facebook Marketing API v19.0 on 23rd January 2024.
What’s Happening?
In their blog post, Meta explained that Advantage Detailed Targeting would be available for “campaigns that are optimised for Impressions, Video Views, Reach, Engagement or Ad Recall Lift”. Campaigns optimised for Leads will have Advantage Detailed Targeting enabled automatically with the option to opt-out. Campaigns optimised for Link Clicks and Landing Page Views will be toggled on with no opt-out.
What is Advantage Detailed Targeting?
Advantage Detailed Targeting is a tool within Meta’s Advantage suite powered by AI and machine learning. It allows you to reach audiences outside of your detailed targeting choices in cases where it could boost performance. However, it doesn’t impact your location, age or gender targeting options or exclusions.
What Changes Do Marketers and Developers Need to Make?
If you’re using Meta’s Marketing API, you’ll need to update your code before April 22nd 2024. You can find all the details for API v19.0 here.
Why Does It Matter?
As with the recent removal of more detailed targeting options, this seems to be another move from Meta towards AI-powered, algorithmic audience targeting and away from granular, manually selected detailed targeting. Opening up detailed targeting for more campaign types will likely encourage more marketers to delve into using Meta’s Advantage suite if they haven’t already.
What Does This Mean for Meta Ads?
The availability of Advantage Detailed Targeting will likely benefit campaigns that had previously been unable to use it, broadening their reach to audiences with a higher chance of conversion. However, this increasing emphasis on detailed targeting being controlled by Meta’s AI-powered algorithm may signal the future erosion of marketers’ control over their audience targeting.
What’s the Difference Between Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage+ Audience?
Advantage+ Audience differs from Advantage Detailed Targeting by picking your audience for you using AI, based on your suggestions, rather than expanding on manually selected detailed targeting options. Basically, Advantage+ takes the detailed targeting out of your hands, while Advantage Detailed Targeting expands on your choices.
Should I Be Using Advantage Detailed Targeting?
Chances are that it is already enabled on campaigns and ad sets that you’re currently running. As Meta explains, “Advantage detailed targeting is automatically enabled for new, duplicated and draft campaigns, and when using some objectives.” So for most of your campaign setups, it’s not something you need to worry about turning on manually. Depending on the campaign objective, you might not have a choice.
In the cases where you can disable Advantage Detailed Targeting, it isn’t necessarily in your best interest to do so. However, there will be exceptions. For example, if your product or messaging is only applicable to a very specific audience, you’ll want to do your best to avoid showing those ads to anyone else.
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