Facebook Audience Targeting: Broad, Interest and Lookalike Audiences Compared

Audience choice is where many advertisers spend too much time. The platform has changed, so old rules like "narrow it down as much as possible" no longer always apply.

Broad audiences

A broad audience sets only basics such as country and age range, and lets Meta's delivery system find buyers from your creative and your conversion data. It works well when you have good tracking, enough budget and ads that clearly speak to your buyer. The ad itself does the targeting.

Best for: products with wide appeal and accounts with solid conversion history.

Interest and behaviour targeting

You choose interests, such as skincare or project management software, and behaviours, such as small business owners. This gives you more control, which helps when budgets are small or the market is niche. The downside is that interest data is imperfect and can limit how many people you reach.

Best for: niche products, new accounts with little data, and testing different customer groups.

Custom audiences

These use your own data:

Website visitors, from the Pixel.
People who watched your videos or engaged with your page.
Customer lists, such as email addresses.

Custom audiences are the base for retargeting, where you remind people who already showed interest.

Lookalike audiences

Meta finds people similar to a source audience, such as your best customers. A lookalike built from purchasers usually beats one built from all visitors. Quality of the source matters more than size.

Best for: scaling once you have a few hundred real customers or conversions.

How to start

Begin with one broad and one interest-based ad set, using the same creative.
Let both gather enough data before judging.
Add retargeting for warm visitors separately.
Build lookalikes from customers once you have enough of them.

Keep audiences from overlapping

If two ad sets target almost the same people, you compete against yourself and raise your own costs. Exclude existing customers from prospecting campaigns, and exclude recent buyers from retargeting.

What matters more than targeting

Creative and offer. A strong message to a decent audience beats a weak one to a perfect audience nearly every time.

Summary

Start simple, test broad against interest, retarget warm visitors, and use lookalikes once you have good customer data.

Not sure which structure suits your business? Message us on WhatsApp and we will suggest a starting setup based on your product and budget.