What to Do When Meta Forces Advantage Targeting and Broad Audiences on Your Account

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Are you getting hurt by Advantage Targeting or Advantage Audiences or Advantage Detailed Targeting and wondering what to do?

In certain accounts just recently and potentially to all accounts soon enough, Advantage Targeting seems to be a default now.

Historically over these last couple months while this has been being tested internally by Meta, we have seen the option on the ad set level to revert back to original audience options which of course has given us the ability to do targeted interest stacks, targeted lookalike audiences, even warm audiences.

In some instances these are now by default being expanded to essentially broad targeting.

So if you have one of these accounts that has had this unfortunate feature rolled out to you, here’s what you need to do as a best set of practices in order to still continue the results rolling in and being able to scale and avoid getting destroyed.

If you’re new here, my name is Jeremy Haynes. All we talk about on this site is handing down lessons from the million-dollar a month earners that we’ve worked with over the years, which have been 40 currently and handing them down to you.

We’re really excited by the way, we have two new deals that we’ve taken on that have already started scaling aggressively so hopefully I’ll have the 41st and the 42nd here soon enough to be able to hand down some lessons from them as well to you.

If your business is already generating $100k+ per month, My Inner Circle is where you break through to the next level. Inside, I’ll help you identify and solve the bottlenecks holding you back so you can scale faster and with more clarity.

Without further ado, if you’re already following along, I’ve got another great piece for you. Let’s dive in.

What Is Meta Advantage Targeting and Why Is It Defaulting to Broad Audiences

So in recent, I’d say the most recent like two-ish months from the time I’m creating this, we have seen a handful of accounts both that we actively manage and across our Inner Circle members and student accounts that have gotten defaulted to audience, I should say Advantage Audience Targeting.

And on the ad set level when you’re doing interest stack targeting it’s defaulted to Advantage Detailed Targeting which essentially just means broad.

That is one of the most important things to understand and to remember. You are being defaulted to broad whenever you see the word Advantage whatever.

So good and bad, right? There’s advantages and there’s disadvantages, no pun intended, to Advantage whatever it is.

And we’re going to go through them.

Why Forced Broad Targeting Hurts Small Niche Audiences and Proven Interest Stacks

So first of all, some of the disadvantages which are very evident if you have extremely targeted niches, right?

Like we have some businesses that we work with that without exaggeration their target audience is like 10,000 to upwards of 30,000 people.

You’re going to get pretty hurt if you have to do broad targeting for that specific offer and niche due to the fact that you are going to reach far beyond the obvious and targeted demographic at the 10 to 30-ish thousand people.

In some instances the disadvantages could just be you have a proven interest stack or a proven lookalike stack or some proven warm audience stack that you’ve historically used and now you no longer have the option to exclusively target that.

And so you’ve kind of had your account defaulted to broad.

If that’s the case, a lot of what we’re going to talk about here is going to help you tremendously to overcome those issues, maintain profitability and continue having a strong ROAS.

Some of the other clear disadvantages, and this one’s really important to understand, it doesn’t necessarily feel good when you are in the process of scaling, you’re getting great results and then all of a sudden you get hurt by Meta, right?

But as an advertiser you’ve likely had that happen many different instances over the years.

Whether it’s a good old account ban, a personal advertising access ban, some random ads that have been absolutely cranking randomly getting disapproved or all of a sudden stop working, or you know a mix of whatever specific scaling strategy and tactics you’ve been deploying all of a sudden no longer being effective.

Why You Need to Adapt to Meta Changes Instead of Getting Discouraged and Quitting

The game that we’ve learned time and time again over the last decade that we’ve been advertising is adaptation is key.

It’s a very, you know, relatively short-sighted game that we play here as advertisers and marketers where tactics change, strategies change, the algorithms that we work with change, the design and the UI of the platforms change.

You know that seems to be the one constant is change.

So we don’t ever look at these things as bad or catastrophic or just let them immediately discourage us like some advertisers and marketers do.

We just immediately start testing things that can overcome these different challenges that are presented to us and work our way through it just like any good business would rather than just getting hurt.

Long story short, let’s dive into some of the best practices and some of the advantages of Advantage whatever.

Why Pixel Conditioning Matters More Than Ever with Forced Broad Targeting

For starters, broad targeting isn’t necessarily awful but one of the number one things that we have found matters more than anything else nowadays when you are doing broad targeting is pixel conditioning best practices.

We have an entire piece here on my site dedicated to pixel conditioning that I would encourage you to go and check out after this.

Pixel conditioning matters a ton.

Long story short with pixel conditioning just to do a too long didn’t read version, look, the people that you allow to come back and hit the pixel are the people that the algorithm is probable to go after next.

It has been extremely different than how it historically has been when it comes to pixel conditioning.

And one of the things that I point out in that piece that I’m telling you to go read after this and that I cover at length there is it doesn’t take as much data as what it historically has.

A lot of the times I meet advertisers and marketers that have extremely outdated practices that are just no longer things that are actually real on the platforms.

But to be fair to them at one point they were, they just have outdated software and haven’t updated themselves yet and what they think about things.

Here’s an example of one of those outdated thoughts.

Historically the way that pixel conditioning worked is it usually took like somewhere in the 20 to upwards of 50 range in terms of result volume to really start to see the effects of pixel conditioning take place.

Meaning before you’d see this AI, this algorithm behind the scenes start to just bias heavily towards a very specific demographic that’s coming into that results column in the platform that you’re working with, it would take about 20 to 50 of those results before that inherent process would really start to dominate.

Sometimes even in the low hundreds of results before it really start to bias towards a specific demographic.

Without exaggeration nowadays we are seeing just the literal first to five total results that hit that result column wildly and heavily dictate who that algorithm is probable to go after next. Research on machine learning systems demonstrates that initial conversion data significantly influences algorithmic learning patterns, with early results establishing baseline targeting preferences that compound over time.

So it is no longer you have to have like dozens, it is literally the first few that you allow to hit that pixel are who determines or I should say how it determines who to go after next.

So kind of keep that in mind.

How to Use Customer Data to Condition Your Pixel with the Right People Immediately

There is a few specific ways and one of those ways in particular we’ve only shared in our Inner Circle group.

And we did that by the way not out of you know neglect for our other student communities, some things we just have to kind of test and see if they work first prior to rolling them out to our wider student groups that we have that we don’t have as much involvement with.

But this specific tactic was a way to use customer audiences and customer data to condition your pixel with the right people immediately upon a campaign launching.

I’ll only give you a broad hint in terms of how it works and I’ll keep this as a tactic within our paid communities.

The Facebook Ad Library allows you to see ads and obviously when somebody goes to a page even if it’s a straight up cold campaign, cold campaigns have a lot of retargeting that is inherently done.

So if coincidentally some of your existing customers go and click on the page that you’re driving traffic to and you also allow them to click on one of the confirmation pages as an example where the standard event you’re optimizing your campaigns for are firing off, and then coincidentally some natural retargeting would happen anyway within those same campaigns that would then serve ads to the people that already hit the confirmation page, it would technically count as a conversion.

And the people who had already purchased from you, which if they’re the right people would then hit the results column and count as a result which would then heavily bias the algorithm towards that type of person.

But you know, do with that what you will.

Anyway, long story short, the first couple people that hit the pixel in that results column matter a ton. It immediately doubles down on that individual.

How to Gate Who Hits Your Pixel Results Column Using Qualifying Questions

So you have to get good at a few things.

Number one, you have to get really good at gating who’s allowed to touch the results column.

Give or take what you’re selling or what you are trying to get people to apply for or opt into dictates how you’re going to go about this in terms of a best practice.

I’ll give you a few examples. We’ll do an opt-in funnel, we’ll do a call funnel and then in addition to that we’ll do something that’s optimized for purchases.

Let’s start with the opt-in funnel.

If I’m doing something, let’s say getting people to opt into a webinar or opting into a free challenge or opting into a lead magnet, just one simple qualifying question is all it takes for me to add a little bit of a gate about who I allow to come back and hit the results column.

Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a qualifying question by the way.

Just in case you’re unaware, a qualifying question would be some kind of question, something that signals if they’re the right person or the wrong person.

The wrong person we typically joke and call poor quality leads. Obviously the right people we want to allow to go back and hit the pixel.

That one qualifying question can act as conditional logic where you still allow the right person and the wrong person to opt in, but based on their answer you route the right person to a confirmation page that’s pixeled and you route the wrong person to a confirmation page that is not pixeled with the standard event you are optimizing the campaign for.

AKA the wrong person will never see the pixel and won’t actually hit that results column. Very important to consider.

In addition to that you can also send validated data back.

So one recent issue that’s come up across almost all different campaign types no matter what you’re optimizing for is poor quality fake leads. According to Meta’s ad quality guidelines, low-quality leads and invalid traffic remain significant challenges for advertisers, requiring strict data validation and filtering practices to maintain campaign effectiveness.

So I’ll give you a good one inside of my business as an education company and a marketing agency, we get a significant amount of people who try to come through and secret shop our offers.

We have an internal mechanism that we have one of our EAs use to send back real people to the pixel and we do not send secret shoppers or the high quantity of fake leads with just dummy data that get input into our applications back to our pixel.

Because if we did that we would just get a bunch more ineffective secret shoppers trying to go through our funnels that would bias our pixel towards more ineffective people like that.

You see, in comparison we want more of the smart people like you reading this to actually go through our funnels and our offers.

For when our pixel biases towards one demographic over the other, we do not want the ineffective people. We want the smart people who are our ideal target customers and our ideal target clients to actually come through our offers.

And again, pixel conditioning is one of the number one things I’m sitting here emphasizing to start this piece because it dictates more than anything else who the pixel goes after next.

How to Use Conditional Logic in Call Funnels to Send Only Qualified Leads to Pixel

Let’s talk about a call funnel.

Call funnels obviously have a few more questions in most instances, especially depending on if you’re executing it with the best practices that we consistently talk about on this site across many different pieces.

All right, we talk about using conditional logic and it’s the same thing as the qualifying question with the opt-in offer.

Based on the answer types that we get and that signaling if they’re the right type of person or not, we’re more than willing to still capture the person’s data, route them to maybe a setter instead of a closer if they’re the wrong person.

But the wrong person is getting routed to a set of confirmation pages that do not get pixeled for the standard event we’re optimizing the campaign for.

They can still get pixeled but not with the standard event that we’re going to send back to the pixel. The right people are the people that we want to consistently send back.

And again, you could just send back validated data, real data in addition to all of the conditional logic based questions vetting out the right people from the wrong people.

Very important to consider.

How to Filter Purchase Campaigns to Only Send High AOV Buyers Back to Pixel

One of my favorite things to do is with purchase campaigns.

So just recently we created a piece on the site where I was highlighting a case study of a client who ran a challenge funnel that did $3.4 million in the challenge and in addition to that was at a 1.9x profit on the front end for the ticket sales.

Well I had people that were buying an early bird price but I also had two upsells that would have a higher average order value.

So one thing that I did, I was optimizing for purchases right? I could send back everybody who purchased the early bird ticket sales, the VIPs, the people who bought one upsell versus two upsells.

One of the campaigns that I spent the most money on that helped dramatically increase the probability of getting to that 1.9x ROAS on the front end for a challenge where most people will lose money marketing their challenges, we didn’t lose money, we were profitable going into it.

That 3.4 million did not count any of the revenue by the way for the 1.9x profitability that we achieved on the front end of spending $292,000.

To be clear, I sent back not the people who just bought the early bird pricing. I sent back the VIP buyers and I sent back the people who bought the early bird plus at least one of the upsells and obviously I sent back anybody who bought both upsells too whether they bought an early bird ticket price or a VIP price.

So the only people I did not send back were the people who bought the early bird price by itself.

And why would I do that? I want a higher quantity of people who are probable to buy VIP or a few of the upsells. It’s that simple.

I can still manually attribute with all kinds of different tools and softwares to be clear, including just as simple as a CRM and a unique funnel, the revenue that comes from that set of campaigns.

Still easily, I’m not going to see clean data inside of the advertising dashboard from the traffic channel because that data is going to exclusively show me the quantity of people that purchased assuming it’s accurate and the price per purchase and some of the average order value statistics for the value of those buyers that were sent back to it intentionally.

I have to look at my third-party analytic tools and softwares to be able to calculate the true cost per purchase and the true quantity of purchases because I’m withholding the cheaper buyers from ever seeing the pixel in the first place.

Now I want to be clear, I say this, we do the same thing with high ticket ecom buyers all the time.

We have high ticket ecom clients. They might sell, I’ll give you a great one, you got a person who sells hyperbaric chambers.

One of the best things that I told this person to do, I was like look, you got hyperbaric chambers as low as like $10K to $15K, this person has hyperbaric chambers that are literally $100K.

Find a price point for what your desired average order value is out of a customer and only send the people who purchase back to the pixel who are above that average order value.

You can still send back the buyers who were below that maybe to a custom conversion as an example or maybe to a different standard event like add to cart or initiate checkout to condition that up for that type of demographic so you can later run cyclic campaigns.

Which we talk about at length inside of my Inner Circle offer where we do twice a month one-on-one calls, weekly group calls, quarterly in-person masterminds and a group chat full of rich people trying to get a lot richer.

We also talk about it inside of my Master Internet Marketing program where we have seven full weeks, great length, each one of these classes are three to five hours a piece plus there are dozens of different individual homework content pieces to consume in between each one of the live classes.

We also have worksheets to help you retain a lot of the information that you’re going to go through and consume there.

There’s also a community full of people where I’m active in as well as our new Jeremy AI is active in that you can tag and ask any questions to in real time as well as a couple hundred person community currently where you also are alongside great people that are all exposed to the same information and applying it to their different niches and industries.

Both great offers, both links are available. I would encourage you checking them out.

Now I digress.

Why Your Ad Messaging Controls Targeting More Than Audience Selection with Broad

The point I’m trying to make with all this is you have a lot of opportunities that become available to you to avoid getting hurt just based on pixel conditioning alone.

So it’s not a doomsday scenario if your account gets automatically defaulted to this Advantage Audience stuff or this Advantage Detailed Targeting option.

Let’s talk about some of the other best practices.

You have to be really good with messaging.

I’ve been saying this for years inside of both of those paid programs I just mentioned as an example where all those students had an edge far sooner than you just reading this for free now learning stuff like this.

Messaging, messaging has controlled the targeting for far longer than what you’ve likely been aware of.

So what you say on the ad in your primary text, your body copy, your headlines, in the content itself, some of you aren’t even privy to the fact that they’ll obviously know exactly what you say on your landing pages, in your VSLs.

You know they know everything about what you’re talking about. That’s obviously how they flag you for compliance issues when those things come up.

But what they mainly use it for is understanding what you are selling, what you’re trying to get people to do, tie that in with your standard event you’re optimizing the campaign for.

And the reason, one of the main intentions behind them defaulting you to essentially just broad targeting is they think that they could get a lot more conversions for you because they have an extremely powerful, almost alien level technology that can take all this stuff that you say on your ads and on the page and the destinations that you drive your traffic to or the forms that you use in lead forms.

They take all of that, they whittle it down to here’s what this person’s talking about, tie that in with their standard event, here’s the actual target demographic that we think is probable to convert on this person’s offer.

That’s all it comes down to.

So you have to get really good with messaging. You have to learn to be very articulate.

People who use very simple terminology and verbiage and vocabulary typically have harder times leveraging this.

You have to be able to articulate yourself for who it is for at length.

Because the better you are at doing that, the higher the probability is that you get your ads in front of that type of person when you’re defaulted to broad targeting.

Even if you just take the lesson of what I’m describing now and you intentionally do broad targeting, that would be the best practice of it.

It’s not hard but again you have to be extremely articulate about who it is for.

You don’t have to talk as much about who it’s not for even though it does well at interpreting that too. That could in theory convolute who it goes after to more of the wrong people too.

I like to heavily bias and actively attempt to identify with the people I want my ads to serve to in all of my messaging. We are extremely clear about that.

How One Simple Sentence Dropped Cost Per Call from $200 to $40

One super simple example of this is we recently launched a client. They have an offer where the person who’s going to buy it has to have $70,000 liquid to invest into the offer and the opportunity once they invest into the offer or access to $70,000 in capital.

Even just using the word capital by the way instead of cash or money signals who we are probable to be getting in front of as an example of that.

But allow me to be clear when I say this example.

We initially launched with a set of ads that were just articulating what the offer was, articulating why it makes sense to invest into, just general best practices like features, benefits, you know talking about again just why it makes sense to buy.

Didn’t get the best target demographic and we were in an account like this.

As soon as we switched, every single ad, we filmed 20 ads like this, every single ad starts off with “Hey, if you have $70,000 liquid or access to $70,000 in capital” and then it would go into the hook.

Every single ad literally starts off with that.

I am not exaggerating when I say overnight, a cost per call went from the mid $200s all the way down to about $90-ish on the best days, in the $40s for a qualified person with a high credit score that actually has that amount of working capital. Meta’s advertising best practices emphasize that specific audience qualification in ad creative significantly improves lead quality and reduces cost per result by filtering out unqualified prospects before they convert.

And all it started with was just a simple sentence at the very beginning of every single ad.

We pulled that trick off time and time again throughout the last I’d say about four years in particular marketing to offers that are of higher ticket value.

But I want to be really clear when I say this, sometimes it’s all it takes, just very simple messaging.

We reiterate that same exact starting intro of the ads on the landing page as well in the sub headline. We also talk about it within the VSL. We also talk about it in the application itself.

We also follow conditioning practices for our pixel that gate who goes back to the pixel of course and all of that compounds in our favor.

Very important to consider.

Why You Need to Master Cold Paid Advertising When Warm Targeting Gets Forced to Broad

Now last thing I’m going to add in before I withhold the other best practices exclusively for our paid students and our paid Inner Circle members, which you can become a part of by checking out the links available, I will add in one more thing.

I’ll put you on game to one last thing and then we’ll continue on to another piece that you can go and consume on a different topic after this.

You need to understand that the strategies of what becomes best to do when you have to by default do broad targeting also just dramatically change what actual strategies are available for you to execute on.

You don’t have the ability to do things where you target extremely tight audiences or where you exclusively target your warm audiences.

So one thing that you have to master is essentially cold paid advertising.

A lot of people that have struggled most with this specific set of issues are really good at doing warm audience targeting.

They’ve gotten exceptionally exceptional results off of their organic audiences historically and then when they’ve introduced paid they’ve just retargeted those organic audiences that they built up and continue to build up.

These people struggle the most because they’re only used to selling to that type of demographic.

And all of a sudden when they wake up one day and they look at their account and they’re seeing results start to slip and they finally go to the ad set level and they see they’re like “Oh my goodness, Advantage Audiences is on by default now and I can’t find a way to get it off in this entire business manager.”

Or “Oh my goodness, on the ad level when I’m doing my targeting my interest stacks now by default say Advantage Detailed Targeting is turned on. There is no option anymore to switch back to original audiences. Oh my goodness, there is no option to uncheck that box that says reach more people beyond this audience.”

And all of a sudden you’re essentially just by default doing cold targeting.

The strategies change.

The thing is when it comes to cold targeting and some of the best practices of that, and by the way we have entire pieces on this site dedicated to how to master cold paid advertising, I would encourage you to go check that out because I talk about it at length.

Usually what people struggle with the most when they do cold paid advertising is the leads come through too early in the sales process for them to actually close and they’re terrible at nurturing them to the point where they’re more probable to close.

What Is the Difference Between Organic Warm and Cold Leads in Sales Cycles

So keep in mind, usually when you get an organic lead they’re pretty far along in the process. That’s why it’s really easy to close them because there’s such a small tiny little gap to be able to get the person to actually get money from them.

With a warm lead again, they’re really not that far off. They’re a little bit further off than an organic audience. You might still have to nurture them a little bit further but it’s not that bad. Marketing data consistently shows that warm and retargeted audiences demonstrate significantly higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles compared to cold prospecting, often performing 8-10x better in high-ticket sales scenarios.

A fresh cold lead, I mean there is a dramatic difference in how far away they are from a conversion in most instances.

You have to get really good at learning how to communicate to in-market demographics that actively identify “I have this person’s problem, I want that solution, I need it right now.”

You have to get really good with in-market demographic communication, messaging mastery and things like this.

In addition to that you have to get really good at nurture.

You have to learn how to effectively from the moment they see a confirmation page to the emails that follow up to the salesperson best practices that have to be deployed for the manual outreach, for even just how the first call in a sales process typically goes.

It’s more of an education call rather than a sales call for the nurture assets like the additional funnels you might have to work in and use.

And lastly and this is most important, just sometimes financial modeling.

The difference between cold audiences, warm audiences and organic audiences, you sometimes might just have to charge a little more money too to make it effective to be able to continue doing it.

There are little tweaks that are necessary, no longer optional, necessary to figure out and master in order to really exploit how good this opportunity truly is.

It’s going to burn some of you. You’re going to lose money if you’re not good at these things and it’s not like it’s an option to do one or the other.

You really have to get good at those three things and a few more key things that like I said I’m going to withhold for my paid students exclusively.

But I will say this, messaging, pixel conditioning, and just cold audience targeting best practices, you do those three things well and again not one or the other, all three, you have a really high probability to not only continue doing extremely well but believe it or not to actually widen the total audience that you’re going to be exceptionally well at selling to if you master those three different variables.

If you fail to implement those three specific things, you’re going to have a really bad time.

We don’t know with certainty whether Facebook, Meta, Instagram or any other platform for that matter is just going to by default roll this out to every account.

But we’ve seen it in about 20% to maybe 30-ish percent of our total accounts so far and that includes to be clear accounts we’re actively working in, consulting clients, Inner Circle members, Master Internet Marketing students.

We’ve seen this across the board.

And I just can’t stress it enough, if they choose to roll this out, getting good at it now would make you extremely well equipped in the instance that it becomes the new default bias and structure that they use.

So that’s all I have for you here today. Thank you so much for reading. It’s been a true pleasure. I hope you got value out of it.

Be sure to follow along if you are not already. Check out the links available by the way.

We have a great site, we’ve got awesome education company product offers available including the Inner Circle, Master Internet Marketing, we’ve got our agency link for those of you who are already making a couple hundred grand a month and might be qualified to do our agency services.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here.

We look forward to the opportunity to help you more either way. Go get richer in the meantime and regardless check out some of my other pieces on the site. They’re all really good.

Talk soon.

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