Why Broad Targeting on Meta now outperforms interest stacking and what that means for how you brief your Media Buyer
If you briefed a Meta media buyer in 2019 to set up a prospecting campaign, the brief would have included a detailed interest targeting spec. Age range: 28–45. Interests: fitness, health supplements, nutrition, yoga. Behaviours: online shoppers, engaged buyers. Exclude: existing customers.
That brief, applied today, would likely produce worse results than the same media buyer using broad targeting with no interest specification at all.
This is not a theoretical claim. It is the consistent finding across enough accounts — our own and those we audit — to state with confidence: for most DTC brands at Grow stage and beyond, broad targeting or Advantage+ audience outperforms detailed interest stacking on Meta prospecting campaigns.
Understanding why changes how you think about audience strategy, campaign structure, and what you should be asking your media buyer to focus on.
WHAT CHANGED
Meta’s advertising algorithm has had access to an enormous training dataset — billions of conversion events from hundreds of millions of advertisers — and has used it to become very good at predicting which users will convert for which types of products, even without explicit targeting instructions.
In 2019, the algorithm needed the guidance that interest targeting provided. It could not reliably identify buyers for a niche supplement brand from a cold start. Interest stacking — combining fitness + supplements + health foods + online shopping behaviour — gave it the starting population to work from.
In 2026, the algorithm knows enough about conversion patterns to find buyers more efficiently than manually defined interest audiences in most cases. When you add precise interest targeting, you are not helping it — you are constraining it. You are saying “only look here” when it would find buyers in places you would not have thought to look.
The evidence from the accounts we manage: switching prospecting campaigns from detailed interest targeting to Advantage+ audience (or broad targeting with only age and geography) typically reduces CPA by 10–25% within the first 4–6 weeks, after the initial learning phase adjustment.
WHAT THIS DOES NOT MEAN
It does not mean audience targeting is irrelevant on Meta. Three things still matter significantly.
First: audience exclusions still matter. Excluding existing customers from prospecting prevents spend on people who already know your brand. Excluding recent buyers from re-engagement prospecting prevents retargeting your most loyal customers as if they are cold. These exclusions should be meticulous.
Second: audience signals for Advantage+ still matter. Providing Meta with a customer email list and a website visitor audience as signals — not as targeting constraints, but as starting points for the algorithm — consistently improves performance versus providing no signals. You are not telling Meta “only show ads to these people.” You are telling Meta “start by learning from what these people have in common.”
Third: for very new accounts without significant Pixel history, some audience guidance may still help. Broad targeting works best when the algorithm has sufficient conversion data to learn from. Accounts with fewer than 50 conversions per month may benefit from some audience narrowing while conversion volume builds.
THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATION FOR HOW YOU BRIEF A MEDIA BUYER
If your current Meta brief specifies a detailed interest targeting stack, consider changing it to this:
Prospecting campaigns: Advantage+ audience or broad targeting. Age and geography restrictions only. Exclude existing customers via customer list upload. Provide customer list as audience signal.
The freed creative brief is now more important than the freed targeting brief. If the algorithm is finding the audience, the creative is the primary determinant of who within that broad audience engages with the ad. This is where the strategic brief should now live: not “who to reach” but “what to say to stop them scrolling.”