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Tools / Bucket 4

Audience and targeting

Custom audiences, lookalikes, retargeting. How AI finds audiences for you, and when to override it.

Tools and platforms

/Meta Advantage+ audiences

Meta's AI-driven targeting. Upload customer lists, build lookalikes, or go broad and let the algorithm find buyers. The trend is towards broader targeting with AI doing the segmentation.

business.facebook.com →
/Google Performance Max audiences

Google's equivalent. Combines search intent, display behaviour, YouTube viewing, and shopping signals. Strong for intent-based audiences where someone is actively looking.

ads.google.com →
/Customer data platforms (CDPs)

Tools like Segment or mParticle that unify customer data across touchpoints. Feed clean data into ad platforms for better targeting. The quality of your first-party data determines the quality of your lookalikes.

/Retargeting pixels

Small code on your website that tracks visitors. Use it to show ads to people who visited but did not buy. Effective but easy to overdo (nobody likes being followed around the internet for 30 days).

What AI does vs what you do

AI handles
  • Find patterns across thousands of signals
  • Automated audience expansion and optimisation
  • Real-time bid adjustment based on user signals
  • Lookalike modelling from seed audiences
  • Budget shifting toward responsive segments
You decide
  • Choose the right objective (form fills vs purchases vs CAC)
  • Judge audience quality vs breadth tradeoff
  • Set meaningful exclusions (existing customers, wrong geography)
  • Diagnose when metrics look good but sales do not follow
  • Decide whether the algorithm is finding buyers or just clickers

Skills to develop

/Audience signal quality judgment
/Broad vs narrow targeting tradeoffs
/Constraint setting and exclusion strategy
/Objective alignment (optimise for what matters, not what is easy to measure)
/Problem diagnosis when platform metrics diverge from business results
/First-party data strategy

The AI will optimise for whatever you tell it to measure. If you measure form fills, you get form fillers. If you measure purchases, you get buyers. Your job is pointing it at the right objective.

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