What you will learn
- Compare broad, custom, and lookalike audiences
- Explain how Meta Pixel and Conversions API record website actions
- Plan a retargeting audience for people who showed interest
Meta offers several ways to choose an audience. You can set location, age, gender, and detailed targeting based on interests and behaviour. Increasingly, Meta's Advantage+ audience works well when you give it light guidance and let its system find responsive people, because it learns from who actually engages and converts. Stacking many narrow interests can make ads more expensive without improving results.
Custom audiences are built from your own data: website visitors, people who watched your videos or messaged your page, Instagram accounts that engaged with you, and customer lists you upload. Lookalike audiences ask Meta to find new people similar to a source audience, such as past buyers. A clothing brand selling on its own site might target a lookalike of previous customers and retarget recent product page visitors separately.
Website audiences and conversion optimisation depend on tracking. The Meta Pixel is a piece of code on your site that records actions such as page views, add to cart, and purchases in the browser. Conversions API sends the same events from your server, which helps when browsers or ad blockers stop the Pixel from firing. Using both, with deduplication set up, gives Meta more complete and reliable data.