Audiences and Targeting

Meta gives you three building blocks for targeting:

• Core (Saved) Audiences — built from demographics, interests, behaviors
• Custom Audiences — people who already interacted with you
• Lookalike Audiences — new people who resemble a source

Strong accounts blend all three across the funnel.

A Core Audience is defined by location, age, gender, languages, and detailed targeting (interests + behaviors).

Use AND / OR logic carefully: stacking interests with OR widens reach; the "Narrow Audience" option requires people to match a second condition (AND).

Advantage detailed targeting lets Meta show ads beyond your selected interests when it predicts better results.

For conversion campaigns this is often left on, because the algorithm finds buyers your manual interests miss. For strict niche or compliance cases, you may want tighter control.

Custom Audiences retarget people who already know you. Common sources:

• Website visitors (via pixel)
• Customer list (email/phone, hashed and uploaded)
• App activity
• Engagement (video viewers, lead forms, IG/FB profile)

These typically deliver the cheapest conversions.

Even without a website you can retarget engagement on Meta-owned surfaces.

Examples: people who watched 50%+ of a video, opened an Instant Form, visited your Instagram profile, or messaged your Page in the last 365 days.

These warm audiences are great for moving people from awareness to consideration.

A Lookalike Audience finds new people similar to a source (a Custom Audience). You pick a source and a size from 1% to 10% of the country's population.

A 1% lookalike is the closest match (best quality, smaller reach); higher percentages widen reach but dilute similarity.

Lookalike quality depends entirely on its source. Aim for a clean, high-value seed list.

• Best: recent purchasers, high-LTV customers
• Good: leads, add-to-carts
• Weak: all website traffic (noisy)

Sources with 1,000+ people generally produce stronger lookalikes.

Exclusions stop you from paying to reach the wrong people.

Common moves: exclude existing customers from acquisition campaigns, and exclude recent purchasers from retargeting so you do not chase someone who just bought.

Exclusions also reduce audience overlap between your own ad sets.

When two ad sets target overlapping people, they can bid against each other, raising costs (auction overlap).

Use the Audience Overlap tool in Audiences to check. If overlap is high (e.g. 30%+), consolidate the ad sets or add exclusions.

Modern Meta optimization often favors broad targeting (minimal interests, let the algorithm + pixel find buyers) for conversion campaigns with good signal.

Narrow targeting still helps for tiny niches, regulated products, or when data is sparse. Test both; let cost-per-result decide, not opinion.

Strong accounts assign audiences to funnel stages:

• Top (cold): Lookalikes and broad Core audiences
• Middle (warm): engagement and video-viewer Custom Audiences
• Bottom (hot): website visitors and add-to-cart retargeting

Exclude lower stages from upper ones so each message reaches the right temperature.

Check your grasp of lookalike sizing.

You can now build the three audience types: Core for cold reach, Custom for retargeting your own data, and Lookalikes to scale from a quality seed.

Use exclusions to avoid waste, watch overlap, and let cost-per-result decide broad vs. narrow. Next: turning these audiences into compelling creatives and choosing where they appear.