Those who have struggled most with changes to Meta advertising during the past few years underestimate the impact of the performance goal. There is so much focus on the lack of control around targeting that many miss what’s right in front of them.

Your initial targeting inputs have some impact. Your pixel data, conversion history, and prior engagement contribute to who sees your ads, too. But in most cases, this initial 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 will be expanded. When that happens, it’s the performance goalThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More that drives it.

That’s why nothing may matter more related to who sees your ads, especially in this new Advantage+ world. The performance goal is the central focus of ad delivery.

Read the definition of any performance goal to understand this.

To maximize the number of 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:

We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to take a specific action on your website.

There’s no easier way to define your potential audience. This is what’s directing the algorithm. It’s trying to get you more of that action that you want, which in this case is a conversion.

That’s why you shouldn’t get cute when picking a performance goal. Set it for the action that you want. If you set it for link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More, a different group of people will see your ads — those who like to click.

Don’t overlook this important step. Even more than your targeting inputs, this is what determines who will see your ads. It helps the algorithm sort through your targeting inputs and everyone else beyond them when determining your audience.