A few years ago success on Facebook and Instagram depended heavily on how precisely you picked interests. Today Meta's algorithm learns from events and creative signals and often finds buyers better than manual setup. Does that mean audiences no longer matter? No — but their role has changed. Here is how we approach targeting in Meta Ads.
In short: with good events and enough budget, broad targeting often wins. Lookalikes and interests help at launch, on small budgets and in niche B2B. The main lever now is creative: it effectively "chooses" the audience.
Three audience approaches
| Approach | How it works | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Broad targeting | Only location, age, language — the algorithm does the rest | Enough conversions, a clear mass-market product |
| Lookalike | People similar to your customers from an uploaded list or events | A quality customer base, little account history |
| Interests and behaviours | Manually chosen topics and characteristics | Narrow niche, small budget, testing hypotheses |
Why broad targeting often wins
- The algorithm sees far more signals than manual settings expose.
- A large audience lowers delivery costs and speeds up learning.
- The creative attracts the right people itself: a video about bookkeeping for clinics will be watched by clinic owners.
When to narrow the audience
- The budget is too small to learn on a broad audience.
- A B2B product with a narrow target group and high ticket.
- A new account with no conversion history.
- Retargeting: site visitors, engaged users, abandoned carts.
How we structure campaigns
- Verify events — without correct conversions broad targeting does not work.
- Run an audience test — broad vs lookalike on the same creative.
- Test creatives within the winning audience: different angles, formats, opening seconds.
- Add retargeting with a separate message for warm audiences.
- Scale the budget gradually without breaking learning.
Frequently asked questions
How many conversions does broad targeting need?
Aim for a few dozen optimisation events per week per ad set. With fewer, optimise for a more frequent event or consolidate ad sets.
Should I exclude existing customers?
For acquisition, yes — it saves budget. For upsell and repeat sales, the opposite: target them in a separate campaign.
If targeting is broad, what do I optimise?
Creatives and the landing page. See our article on a creative testing system and our website development service for conversion-focused landing pages.
Need a Meta campaign structure that scales? Send a request on the Meta Ads page and we will verify events and run audience and creative tests. For return-on-spend measurement we add analytics.