Advantage audience expansion is one of Meta’s biggest mysteries. When you provide targeting inputs with original audiences and Advantage audience expansion is on, what does that actually mean?
Does the audience always expand? Only sometimes? Does it expand a lot or a little?
We can start to answer these questions thanks to audience segments with sales campaigns.
My Test
Using original audiences, I provided custom audiences that exactly match my audience segments that are defined in ad account settings and then turned on Advantage Custom Audience.
After spending about $273, I ran a breakdown by audience segments, and here is how spend was distributed…
A total of $72.05 was spent on my Engaged Audience and Existing Customers, which are the same custom audiences I provided for targeting. That means that Meta spent about 26 percent of my budget on those custom audiences and the rest on expansion.
Lots of Factors
There are lots of factors that will contribute to this. How big that remarketing audience is and the amount spent will certainly impact these results. Even so, it’s nice to get this visibility.
It would be interesting to get a better sense of expansion when using Advantage Detailed Targeting or Advantage Lookalike, but that isn’t possible at this time. You could see how much of your budget is dedicated to your audience segments, but we won’t currently know how much was spent on the initial detailed targeting or lookalike audiences and how much was spent on expansion.
That’s part of what makes this test so interesting. It helps us uncover something we’ve never seen before that can give us a better understanding of how this and other algorithmic targeting features work.
I tested this distribution for Advantage+ Audience with and without suggestions, too, and the results have been fascinating. Read all about it here.
