Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is the set of criteria (demographics, interests, behaviors, or data-based matches) used to decide who sees an ad.

Targeting has gotten broader and more automated across every major platform since 2021–2023, driven by privacy changes (iOS 14.5, cookie deprecation) and the maturity of machine-learning-driven optimization. Meta's Advantage+ and Google's Performance Max both push advertisers toward supplying good input signals (audiences, creative, conversion data) and letting the algorithm find people, rather than manually building narrow interest-based segments the way advertisers did a decade ago.

The practical shift: targeting strategy today is increasingly about which signals you feed the algorithm (first-party data, custom audiences, lookalikes, value-based bidding data) rather than which checkboxes you tick in an interest picker.