The Audience Expander, also known as Detailed Targeting Expansion, is a Facebook Ads optimization designed to maximize your campaigns by reaching a broader audience than the one you originally defined. It allows you to go after more conversions beyond the audience base you set up yourself.
Two scenarios are possible:
â You leave it off: you tell the Facebook algorithm that you only want to target the audience you previously defined, and nothing else. The algorithm is given no flexibility.
â Alternatively, you choose to turn it on: this means you give the algorithm some freedom. It will then target people outside your defined audience who might potentially be interested.
Note that once the option is activated, the audience size can increase significantly, by a factor of 5 or even 10 based on our observations, if your original targeting was already sizable.
Example using the interest "Entrepreneurship":
- Without Audience Expander
- With Audience Expander
This optimization can be very useful, for example, for your evergreen campaigns that need a regular audience refresh, or for localized ad campaigns with a small initial audience.
Where to find this feature?
The Audience Expander is an option available within your ad set settings. This option is only available for detailed targeting and not for gender, age, or location audiences. It appears as a checkbox as shown below.
Go to your Ad Set > Audiences > Detailed Targeting
Click Edit and the checkbox will appear.
When should you question using it?
It might seem like a good idea to always leave this option on, which is why Facebook has been checking it by default recently. However, there are several situations where this option will not benefit you. Here is a breakdown.
- Retargeting and Lookalike Audiences: these two audience types are among your most reliable ones, those you trust in terms of quality and engagement. Turning on Audience Expander would only dilute their quality by pulling in people you have no control over. For Lookalike audiences, prefer expanding the similarity percentages instead:
For example, if you have created a 1% Lookalike audience and most of it has already been reached, it is better to move to a 2% Lookalike rather than using the Audience Expander optimization on the 1%.
Note that Facebook has released a new optimization called Lookalike Expansion that applies to campaigns with a Conversions or App Installs objective. Similar to Audience Expander, it lets the algorithm seek new conversion opportunities outside your Lookalike audience, unless that audience consists solely of a customer list.
- Launching a new audience: there are actually two schools of thought here:
- You may believe that Audience Expander will help you generate more conversions quickly, allowing your algorithm to learn faster.
- Or you may feel that you risk wasting money early on while the algorithm searches for the right target, and would rather enable the option only after an initial learning phase.
At datashake, our general recommendation is not to activate it at the time of audience launch. We prefer to wait until your campaign has accumulated a solid number of conversions, the algorithm has a clear picture of your target, and machine learning has had time to do its work before enabling it. We believe the expansion will be more effective and relevant at that point.
That said, both approaches depend heavily on the campaign budget. If your budget is substantial, enabling audience expansion from the start is a perfectly viable option.
- Limited budget: this follows on from the previous point. If you only have a small budget for your campaign, enabling Audience Expander is not recommended. It would only spread your budget across a larger audience, causing it to be spent faster and less precisely. The learning phase would also take longer.
To wrap up, Audience Expander is an excellent optimization for always-on campaigns. However, it does not apply to every campaign type and requires a critical look at your budget, audience size, and conversion objective.
Want help managing your Facebook Ads, or your digital marketing strategy more broadly? Feel free to reach out!
By Ronan Lecointre
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