Should you ever turn on the Audience Network placement?
It has a bad reputation, and for good reason. Audience NetworkAudience Network is a network of mobile apps that have been approved to monetize their apps with ads. This is how you can show your Meta ads to people while they are away from the Meta family of apps. Audience Network and associated groups are among your placement selection options in the ad set. More is notorious for driving low-quality traffic due to accidental clicks and click fraud.
But while you should definitely remove it when optimizing for link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More and landing page viewsLanding Page View is a Facebook ads metric that represents when people land on your destination URL after clicking a link in your ad. More, you should probably keep it on when optimizing for a conversion.
Why? The problem when optimizing for a link click or landing page view is that the algorithm prefers AudienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More Network due to the high volume of cheap clicks. Those cheap clicks aren’t beneficial when optimizing for conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More.
When optimizing for a conversion, the algorithm cares about one thing: Did a conversion happen? If it’s not happening as a result of clicks from Audience Network, money won’t be spent there.
I also wrote about this issue here: