The Case for Removing Audience Suggestions
Audience suggestions cause confusion because advertisers think they're tight constraints when they're not. Jon proposes how Meta could eliminate suggestions entirely while keeping audience controls like location and exclusions. The result would strip away the illusion of control, prevent mistakes based on false assumptions, and force advertisers to focus on what actually matters without pretending inputs do more than they do.
Here’s how Meta could remove audience suggestions.
A few weeks ago, I published an episode where I talked about how audience suggestions are more hassle than they’re worth. Advertisers often don’t realize their inputs are only suggestions. They’ll make suggestions by age range or gender and get mad when ads are shown outside of those groups. They’ll suggest custom audiences and think they’re remarketing when they’re not.
And now that detailed targeting and lookalike audiences are ONLY suggestions for most performance goals, it’s questionable how valuable detailed targeting and lookalikes are.
The biggest problem right now is the confusion that suggestions cause. Advertisers either think their suggestions are tight constraints or assume their suggestions do more than they actually do. It results in anger and frustration and conspiracy theories that end up spilling over to location targeting and exclusions.
Meta resects location targeting and exclusions. As audience controls, they’re never suggestions. But you’ll have a hard time convincing advertisers of that who are confused and frustrated by suggestions.
My proposal isn’t to remove all targeting inputs. Instead, we should remove audience suggestions so that we can stop pretending that they do anything.
Suggestions present the illusion of control. They give advertisers what they think is another lever, when there’s little evidence it makes an impact.
So here’s what I envision.
Think back to the old days of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. The setup back then was completely stripped down. You could define a location, but that was it.
The way this could work would be something in between those old Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and the current mess that we have now.
By default, provide only audience controls. These allow you to define your location and exclude custom audiences, if necessary. No suggestions related to age, gender, custom audiences, lookalike audiences, or detailed targeting. Fewer opportunities for confusion. And you’re usually better off not touching these things anyway.
But unlike the old Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, keep that button to “Further limit the reach of your ads.”
When clicked, you would turn Advantage+ off in exchange for access to some targeting restrictions. But these aren’t suggestions. We’ve eliminated them.
The only options available will be the options that we have now without suggestions. So if you can’t restrict by detailed targeting or lookalike audience, those fields are grayed out.
And right now, you can’t restrict by detailed targeting when using 11 performance goals. You can’t restrict by lookalike audience when using 9. And these are some of the most common and popular performance goals, so you’ll rarely be able to restrict by detailed targeting and lookalikes. And really, that’s a good thing, because you can’t restrict by those inputs now anyway!
When further limiting the reach of your ads, you’ll be able to restrict by age and gender, just as you can now. But the question is whether it’s necessary. When there’s a problem to be solved, you should use value rules instead. Listen to the episode about value rules for details.
And you’ll still be able to restrict by custom audience and do actual remarketing, not just suggestion remarketing. Once again, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend remarketing in most cases these days because Meta prioritizes those groups automatically. But it would still be available.
Here’s the bottom of the glass.
While this sounds like a dramatic change, it’s not. It simply stops pretending like you have control that you don’t.
If you previously had the ability to restrict by a certain audience type, you would still be able to do that. But the concept of a suggestion would be gone.
It would freak advertisers out who falsely believed those suggestions did more than they did. But it will also prevent them from making mistakes based on these false assumptions.
You’ll have fewer reasons to create multiple ad sets based on targeting. You’ll have a much clearer idea how your inputs impact campaign construction and results. And that’s a good thing.
The widespread confusion over how targeting works is a major source of frustration for me. I’m determined to help fix it.
To that end, I’ve published a free mini-course on Modern Targeting. It consists of eight lessons that walk you through what changed, how things work, and how you should approach targeting now.
Subscribe for free at jonloomer.com/targeting.