Meta's Advantage+ Audiences quietly killing manual targeting performance lately?

I've been comparing campaigns over the last couple of months, and something feels different.

Manual interest targeting used to consistently outperform broad targeting for me, but lately Advantage+ Audiences seem to be getting the better results more often. I'm not sure if it's just account-specific or if Meta has shifted something behind the scenes.

For those actively spending on Meta Ads:

• Are you still using manual interests, or have you switched almost entirely to Advantage+?
• Have you noticed any major differences in CPA, ROAS, or scaling?
• Is manual targeting still worth testing, or is Meta slowly forcing everyone toward automation?

Would love to hear from people managing decent budgets rather than small test accounts.

Advantage+ has improved a lot recently. I still test interests, but broad usually wins when the account has enough data.

I think Meta has improved its algorithm a lot, broad and Advantage+ can find better users now, but manual targeting is still useful for testing.

I have been seeing something similar. Broad and Advantage+ Audiences seem to be getting stronger more consistently, especially once the account has enough conversion history for Meta to work with, while manual interests can sometimes feel like they are restricting delivery too much.

I still think manual targeting is worth testing, but more as a benchmark or for very specific niches rather than automatically making it the default.

What kind of conversion volume are you getting per week on these campaigns? I ask because Advantage+ usually has more room to work when Meta is receiving a steady stream of conversion signals.

Also, are you seeing the Advantage+ improvement mainly in lower CPA, or is ROAS improving as well? I ask because cheaper conversions do not always mean the traffic quality or revenue is actually better.

32OZ said:

I've been comparing campaigns over the last couple of months, and something feels different.

Manual interest targeting used to consistently outperform broad targeting for me, but lately Advantage+ Audiences seem to be getting the better results more often. I'm not sure if it's just account-specific or if Meta has shifted something behind the scenes.

For those actively spending on Meta Ads:

• Are you still using manual interests, or have you switched almost entirely to Advantage+?
• Have you noticed any major differences in CPA, ROAS, or scaling?
• Is manual targeting still worth testing, or is Meta slowly forcing everyone toward automation?

Would love to hear from people managing decent budgets rather than small test accounts.

Click to expand...

Manual interests still work, but Advantage+ has been giving me cheaper CPA recently, specially once the campaign gets enough data.

You will get cheaper results, but it's not always the best choice.

Meta also introduced Value rules, so if you still want to take advantage of the cheaper results yet don't want to waste your budget on for example:
Audience network & Instagram

You can make a value rule and put a 90% decrease on those placements.

You can find this under
- Advertising Settings
- Value Rules

See the screenshot below



You can include ages as well etc, works like a charm.

Just do play close attention to your campaigns, if you are not using value results and still have audience network selected it could be that you wont spend much more there in the first weeks but it could all of the sudden change and you could be wasting a bunch of money on it.

Audience network to me has proven to just be really bad traffic.

Hope this helps

I’ve seen something similar. Advantage+ seems to perform better once there’s enough conversion data, especially for scaling. I still test manual interests for new campaigns, but lately I’ve been relying more on broad/Advantage+ and letting Meta find the buyers. CPA and ROAS can vary a lot by account, though.

Yeah, seeing the same thing lately. Broad + Advantage+ is giving the algorithm more room to find cheaper conversions, while interests feel more limited now.

I was pretty heavy on manual interests before, but results kinda changed over time. Now I usually start broad and let Advantage+ do its thing, then test interests only if I see a reason to.

Manual interests still work sometimes, but broad + Advantage+ seems easier to scale now.

Yeah I’ve seen this too the advantage plus often works better for scaling but you should still test manual interests and compare the CPA and ROAS.