How do Advantage Custom Audiences benefit brands?

Facebook recently rolled out Benefit custom audience, which uses automation and machine learning to expand advertisers’ targeting. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this feature has been around for a while, as Facebook has released several similar audience expansion tools as part of the Advantage product line in the course of 2022.

Advantage Custom Audience targets not only your pre-selected audience, but also people outside the parameters you’ve set, if it has the potential to improve your campaigns’ performance. In this sense, Advantage is similar to custom audience Benefit detailed targeting (previously detailed target expansion) and Advantage lookalikes (previously appearance extension), both of which expand your audience beyond your initial criteria if it can improve performance. However, at the time those features were unique to detailed targeting and lookalike audiences.

How does Advantage Custom Audience differ from similar features?

How and when Advantage Custom Audience is actually activated differs slightly from Advantage Detailed Targeting and Advantage Lookalikes. Because the latter two are purpose-specific, Advantage Custom Audience can be turned on regardless of your purpose.

What’s more, Advantage Custom Audience is turned on by default, and you can turn it off. This used to be the case with Advantage detailed targeting and Advantage appearance, but now you usually can’t turn off those two options. In other words, once you’ve entered a Custom...