If you’re using Advantage+ Audience, you can set an age minimum, but no higher than 25.
You can also provide age range suggestions for minimums and maximums.
But since they’re suggestions, Meta can and will show your ads to people outside of your suggestions. Otherwise, you can set an age minimum and maximum that Meta respects if you turn Advantage+ Audience off.
But should you? It depends…
Is it a Problem?
If you’re optimizing for purchases, this shouldn’t be necessary. If reaching people outside of your suggested age range doesn’t lead to purchases, the algorithm learns and minimal budget will be spent there.
The problem can be when optimizing for anything else (link clicks, landing page views, ThruPlay views, and even leads). If Meta can find people outside of that range to perform the action you want, they’ll do it.
Example
I ran into this exact problem. I was running ads to a lead magnet and Meta was spending a high percentage of my budget on people over 65. Why? Because those leads were extremely cheap, so the algorithm was doing what it’s intended to do.
While I don’t have a problem spending some money on that age group, I certainly don’t want to spend as much as was getting spent. I was also seeing these were low-quality leads. So I set an audience suggestion of 25 to 54.
The result? Meta completely ignored the suggestion and continued targeting people over 65 at a higher rate. I had no choice but to turn Advantage+ Audience off to control this.
How to Monitor
But don’t assume that just because I had this problem that you will. I had a call with a client recently who was using Advantage+ Audience for leads, and they were not experiencing this same problem. It doesn’t happen in all cases.
You can set a strict age range, but make sure it’s necessary. You can confirm this by using the breakdown by age to see if it’s a problem.
If Meta is spending significantly on an age group you either can’t serve or is providing low-quality results, it’s a sign that you may need to restrict the age range.
For more on when you should break from Meta’s defaults, read my recent blog post as a guide.
