Meta has spent the last few years nudging advertisers away from manual targeting toward Advantage+ and broad audiences. The advice online is a mess of overreactions in both directions. Here is the practical version.
What Advantage+ actually is
Advantage+ is Meta letting its algorithm decide who sees your ads, with minimal manual audience input from you. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) apply the same idea to full campaign structure. Broad targeting is the manual-campaign version: you set little or no interest targeting and let delivery find buyers.
Why it works now
It comes back to signal. Meta's machine learning improved to the point where, given enough budget and creative, it finds buyers you would never have picked by hand. Manual interest stacking now often limits that reach. So handing targeting to the algorithm is not laziness, it is matching your inputs to how the system actually works in 2026.
Where people go wrong
- Treating broad as "set and forget." Broad targeting shifts your job, it does not remove it. Your work is now creative volume, structure and exclusions, not audiences.
- Forgetting customer exclusions. On broad prospecting, exclude your existing customers so you are not paying to re-acquire buyers. Set Advantage+ Shopping to a 0% existing-customer cap when you want pure prospecting.
- Starving it of creative. Broad plus a handful of ads fails, because the algorithm has freedom but nothing to learn from. Broad rewards volume more than narrow ever did.
- Panicking through learning. Broad campaigns need conversions to stabilise. Tweaking daily resets that.
How to run it
Go broad on targeting. Exclude existing customers on prospecting campaigns. Consolidate budget so ad sets exit the learning phase. Feed it a high volume of distinct creative, because that is now the algorithm's main raw material. Keep a middle and bottom of funnel that answers real buyer questions, and let the top of funnel run broad. This is the structure we use across accounts, and the detail is in our Meta ads guide.
The bottom line
Broad targeting and Advantage+ are the right default now, but only inside a system: strong creative at volume, correct exclusions, consolidated budgets and patience through learning. The tools did not remove strategy. They moved it from the audience tab to the creative and the structure, which is exactly where the leverage now lives.