Advantage Plus Audiences Explained (And How to Use Them Like a Pro)

In this Tea Talk episode, Aaron and Matt break down what Meta’s Advantage Plus audiences actually are, how they work, and what home and garden brands should be doing to get the best results from this new audience targeting system.

What Are Advantage Plus Audiences?

• Meta’s AI-powered audience targeting, built to automate and improve campaign performance.
• Instead of tightly defined interests and manual audience selection, you provide Meta with broad “signals” (such as interests, lookalikes, or first-party data).
• Meta’s machine learning then finds the best audience based on performance and creative.
• Designed to let the platform’s AI do most of the targeting work for you.

How Do They Differ from Manual Targeting?

• Old method: Manually create ad sets with specific interests and demographics, then test results.
• Advantage Plus: Give Meta a starting point, but allow the AI to go broader if it finds better performance elsewhere.
• Works best when you focus more energy on your creative, not your audience selection.
• Allows the creative to do the “heavy lifting” of attracting the right people.

Who Should Use Advantage Plus Audiences?

• Suitable for both small businesses and large brands as a foundational approach.
• Particularly effective for prospecting and cold audiences.
• Manual targeting is still useful for highly specific campaigns, such as retargeting previous website visitors or cart abandoners.
• Works for a wide range of budgets, but the more you spend, the faster you’ll see results.

How to Use Them Effectively

• Feed Meta strong signals: interests, lookalike audiences, first-party data like email lists or previous purchasers.
• Let the AI optimise targeting, but focus your efforts on producing a variety of strong creatives.
• Use broader, top-of-funnel messaging to appeal to new audiences, then use manual retargeting for specific offers or messages further down the funnel.

Best Practices for Creative

• Test a variety of creatives: videos, still images, testimonials, reviews, educational and promotional content.
• Ensure your creative makes it clear who it’s for and why they should care.
• The bigger the budget, the more creatives you need and the faster you should cycle through new versions.
• For small budgets, 3–5 creatives in rotation is typical. Larger budgets should refresh creative weekly.
• Move “winning” creatives into scaling campaigns with more budget, and keep testing new creative ideas.

Timeline and Optimisation

• Allow at least 2,000 impressions per creative before judging performance.
• For budgets of £10,000+ per month, cycle new creatives weekly and scale successful ones.
• Use a mix of testing (ad set budget) and scaling (campaign budget optimisation) campaigns.
• Regularly refresh creative to avoid ad fatigue and keep results strong.

Key Takeaways

• Advantage Plus audiences are designed to let Meta’s AI optimise your audience, but creative is now the most important lever for success.
• Success relies on understanding your audience, speaking to their needs, and consistently producing relevant creative.
• First-party data, such as customer email lists, can further improve audience quality by acting as additional signals for Meta.
• Results can be significant, Matt’s recent audit found a 75% lower cost per acquisition using Advantage Plus versus manual targeting.

Conclusion

Meta’s Advantage Plus audiences are a powerful way to modernise your Facebook and Instagram ad strategy.

By trusting the AI to find your audience and investing more effort in creative, brands can reach more of the right people, improve results, and reduce wasted spend.

The main lesson: stop overthinking targeting, and start overthinking your creative.

___

👋 Never miss an update. Sign up to T.E.A Break, our weekly newsletter.

👉 See our case studies to discover how we grow brands online.

👉 Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

👉 Follow our Grow with Evergreen podcast on Spotify, YouTube & Apple Podcasts.

👉 Download our new Home and Garden sector paid media report