What happened to this?

Back in January, Meta announced that Advantage Detailed TargetingWhen turned on, Meta can expand your audience to reach people beyond the Detailed Targeting (interests and behaviors) that you selected, but only if that expansion is expected to lead to better results. Location, age, gender, and exclusions are hard constraints, and the expanded audience will continue to follow those rules. More would be turned on and locked when optimizing for link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More or 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. Otherwise, you had the option of turning it on or off when using Original Audiences.

Expansion and 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

This change mimics what we see when optimizing for conversions where it forces you to allow 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 expansion.

In the case of optimizing for conversions, Advantage LookalikeWhen turned on, Meta can expand your audience if it believes you can get better results by doing so. That expansion will be achieved by increasing the percentage of your lookalike audience, using the original custom audience for training. More is also forced. It appears that won’t be the case when optimizing for link clicks or landing page views (I mistakenly said it would be in this video).

Does it Make Sense?

This rollout seemed to start in March. Do you have it yet? While I have it for some ad accounts, I don’t for all of them.

This was a curious change from the start. While forcing expansion makes plenty of sense for conversions, you’d think it just makes it more likely you’ll get low-quality clicks when optimizing for link clicks or landing page views. Let’s talk about why…

When optimizing for conversions, the algorithm is focused on getting you as many conversions as possible within your budgetA budget is an amount you’re willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More. There aren’t weaknesses in placements or sources of low-quality purchases that would inflate your numbers. If the algorithm can’t find you purchases, it will keep searching. Expanding your audience can help with that search.

But, this is different when optimizing for link clicks and landing page views. Low-quality traffic due to accidental clicks, bots, click fraud, and people who will click on anything is absolutely a problem. While the Audience Network placement is most notorious for this issue, it’s not eliminated if you remove that placementA placement is a location where your ad is shown. Examples include Facebook’s mobile Feed, Messenger, Instagram feed, Audience Network, right-hand column, and more. More.

The algorithm only cares about getting you clicks, with no concern for quality. Being able to control your targeting can help limit this problem, even if it won’t eliminate it. Allowing the audience to show your ads to anyone, however, will undoubtedly lead to lots of cheap and low-quality clicks.

I wouldn’t recommend these performance goals anyway, but this update would make them even worse.

My two cents, at least.