About Advantage lookalike

The original 11 ad objectives in Meta Ads Manager have been simplified into 6 to better align with your business goals. All the same functionality is available through additional settings. Starting from January 2024, you can no longer create, duplicate or import campaigns, ad sets and ads previously created with the original objectives. As soon as you transition from original to simplified objectives, make sure that you pause the campaigns, ad sets and ads that use original objectives to avoid running identical campaigns in parallel. Learn more about this update to the ad objectives.

Meta Advantage lookalike (previously known as lookalike expansion) can help improve your campaign performance by allowing our system to deliver ads to people outside your defined lookalike audience if it's likely to improve performance. (Our system implements Advantage lookalike when it determines that doing so could improve performance).

Note: When your audience is expanded through Advantage products, the estimated audience size will not reflect the total number of Accounts Centre accounts that meet the targeting criteria.

Our ad delivery system uses the custom audience that you based your lookalike audience on as a guide for ad delivery, while also dynamically assessing performance. If our system finds better performance opportunities beyond the percentage that you selected for your lookalike audience, Advantage lookalike allows us to dynamically make updates that reflect where we're seeing better performance and we may expand your audience further to include similar opportunities.

Note: Targeting options are limited for audiences that include people under the age of 18 in most countries, under 20 in Thailand and under 21 in Indonesia. Learn more about targeting options to reach teens and how this update may affect your ad sets.

For some objectives, tick the box to enable Advantage lookalike under Audiences, in Ads Manager. Advantage lookalike is automatically enabled for new, duplicated and draft campaigns and ad sets with lookalike audience created from mobile, website or customer list Custom Audiences that use the following optimisations and objectives:

• Engagement: Conversion, app event or conversation optimisation.
• Leads: Conversion or app event optimisation.
• App promotion: All optimisations.
• Sales: Conversion, value or app event optimisation.

Existing ad sets or campaigns created before 21 September 2021, may not have Advantage lookalike enabled. You can edit your optimisation goal to value, conversion, conversation, app install or app event optimisation, or edit your event optimisation to update these ad sets or campaigns.

Editing an existing ad set to enable Advantage lookalike resets the learning phase.

Note: Advantage lookalike isn't available for campaigns that use special ad categories such as housing, employment and credit (HEC) and social issues, elections and politics (SIEP). Exclusions or other targeting selections (such as age, gender, language, location, interests and behaviours) continue to apply.