This warning is just wrong…

Ad set may get zero leads. We recommend trying the following to avoid getting zero leads: Expand your audience.

You may have seen something like it related to leads, conversions, or whatever else you may optimize for.

The Problem

The problem is that I saw this warning in an ad set where I was using Advantage+ Audience. While the custom audiences I used were small, that shouldn’t matter. These audience are only suggestions before Meta goes much broader.

That’s really the whole point of Advantage+ Audience. You don’t need to provide any suggestions at all. But, you can. The impact of those suggestions may be minimal since the audience will eventually be expanded.

There should never be an issue with your audience being “too small” unless you significantly restrict by location or age.

Results

And guess what? Not only did this ad set get leads, but it got more than 1,000 of them.

This ad set did extremely well. Clearly, the small audience suggestion does not negatively impact performance.

Ignore It

My guess is that this warning is a carryover from original audiences and it’s appearing here in error. It’s as if Meta’s system assumes that expansion doesn’t apply, which is the only reason it should appear.

The warning has no value and all it does is make advertisers think they did something wrong. I regularly hear from advertisers who don’t publish an ad set because this warning appears and they think they need to change something.

The main thing to understand is that this is a soft warning. If you’re using Advantage+ Audience, just ignore it and publish your ad set.

Hopefully someone from Meta will see this video and fix this bug.