Meta Updates Audience Targeting Options for Advantage+ Catalog Ads

Here’s a quick, but potentially valuable note for users of Meta’s Advantage+ catalog ads.

As part of Meta’s broader push towards its automated ad targeting elements, it’s removing the “Audience Types” option for Advantage+ catalog ads with the sales objective.

But advertisers will still be able to retarget ads, and/or find prospective customers using catalog custom audiences.

As you can see in this example, Meta’s Advantage+ catalog ads are designed to highlight the most relevant products to display to each user, based on their interests, intent and actions.

As per Meta:

“Advantage+ catalog ads look like other single image, carousel or collection ads, but the products shown are dynamically displayed for each person using events data from your Meta Pixel or app SDK. You can run them using the sales, app promotion, engagement, leads and traffic objectives.”

The additional personalization helps to maximize performance, by ensuring that the products displayed are more relevant to each individual.

And up till now, you’ve been able to target these ads based on different audience types within the campaign setup, but now, Meta’s removing this option, and limiting your target choices.

Though you will still be able to create catalog custom audiences.

“A catalog custom audience is based on people who have interacted with products from a certain product set in your catalog. You can create custom audiences and use them to include or exclude some people from seeing your ads.”

So you will still be able to retarget shoppers who have shown an interest in your products, you just won’t have this as an option within the basic catalog ads setup.

It’s a more advanced targeting option, and as noted, Meta’s nudging advertisers away from custom audiences like this either way, as its own automated targeting tools are often producing better results. But if you want to retain a level of control over your ad targeting, you’ll have to create your own custom audiences for your catalog ad sets.

Advertisers will need to have the Meta Pixel or app SDK installed on their website (or in their app) to utilize this element, and it will be a more advanced process. But it’s worth noting that while audiences are being removed, you do have targeting alternatives.

You can learn more about Meta’s Advantage+ catalog ads here.