Advantage audience expansion is one of Meta’s greatest mysteries. What does it actually mean when you provide targeting input to an original audience and enable Advantage audience expansion?
Is the audience always growing? Just sometimes? Does it expand a lot or a little?
We can begin to answer these questions, thanks Audience segments for sales campaigns.
my test
Using the original audience, I provided a custom audience that exactly matched the audience defined in the ad account settings, and then enabled Advantage Custom Audience.
After spending about $273, I broke it down by audience and here’s how the spend was divided…
My engaged audience and existing customers spent a total of $72.05, which is the same as the custom audience I provided for targeting. This means Meta spends approximately 26% of its budget on these custom audiences and the rest on expansion.
many factors
There are many factors that contribute to this. The size of the remarketing audience and the amount spent will definitely affect these results. Even so, it’s nice to gain such visibility.
It would be interesting to get a better sense of expansion when using AdvantageDetailed Targeting or Advantage Lookalike, but currently this is not possible. You can see how much budget is dedicated to audience segments, but we currently don’t know how much is spent on initial detailed targeting or lookalike audiences, and how much is spent on expansion.
That’s part of what makes this test so interesting. It helps us discover something we’ve never seen before and gives us a better understanding of how this and other algorithmic positioning features work.
I tested this distro against Advantage+ Audience both with and without recommendations, and the results were fascinating. Read all about it here.
