Article

How to Approach Meta Ads Targeting Now: A Detailed Guide

Jon Loomer · Jon Loomer Digital Free Intermediate

A practical, opinionated playbook for what to actually set (and skip) in Ads Manager today, from someone who has been publicly testing Meta ads for over a decade.

  • Age, gender, detailed targeting, and lookalikes are now mostly treated as suggestions once Advantage+ Audience is on.
  • Loomer's default setup skips detailed targeting and lookalikes almost entirely and targets broad by country.
  • Restrictions should only be added when you can articulate why they're necessary, not by default.
Open on jonloomer.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. Should I use detailed interest targeting or go broad with Advantage+?

Read with it

  1. A free, no login spreadsheet template for running structured creative tests, useful before you can justify paying for a tool... GrowthFullStack Template How to automate your creative testing for free in Google Spreadsheets GrowthFullStack
  2. Straight from Meta: explains exactly how Advantage+ detailed targeting expands past your chosen interests, and where it does... Meta Business Help Center Article About Advantage+ Detailed Targeting Meta
  3. Documents Meta's own mid-2025 move to fold many interest categories into broader groupings, the exact policy shift pushing... Meta Business Help Center Article Updates to Detailed Targeting Meta
  4. Meta's own free training walks through setting up an Advantage+ Sales campaign end to end, worth doing before you touch Ads... Meta Blueprint Course Maximize Performance with Advantage+ Sales Campaigns Meta
  5. Broad and Advantage+ only work as well as the purchase signal you feed them, this is the reference for getting Pixel and... Meta for Developers Article Conversion Tracking (Meta Pixel Documentation) Meta
  6. Jon Loomer actually ran the A/B test rather than repeating platform talking points, so this is one of the few sources with... Jon Loomer Digital Article Test Results: Advantage+ Audience vs. Detailed Targeting and Lookalikes Jon Loomer
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →