Detailed Targeting Is Mostly a Suggestion (And Other Updates)

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These are mostly smaller things I stumbled upon during the past week, either while fumbling through Ads Manager or reading up on the latest news relevant to Meta advertisers. While none warranted a full post on their own, all are worth knowing about.

Detailed Targeting suggestions update
URL parameters update
What happened to the breakdown by attribution?
Combined Sales and Awareness objective
Meta AI Business Assistant chatbot thing
US bill may require advertiser verification
New custom event attribution lag?
Preview to Publish

Let’s get to it…

1. Detailed Targeting Suggestions Update

This isn’t a shocking update. You might even call it expected. But advertisers should take it as a sign of what’s to come.

You have even less control when using detailed targeting inputs now.

Meta introduced Detailed Targeting Expansion (as it was originally named) in 2021. This gave advertisers the option, with the check of a box, to allow their ads to be shown to people beyond your detailed targeting inputs if doing so was likely to improve performance.

By the end of 2021, this setting was moved to a fixed default for performance goals that maximized the number of conversions, value of conversions, and app events. You could not turn that expansion off.

What has happened since then is a confusing web of changes in labels and functionality. Detailed Targeting Expansion became Advantage Detailed Targeting, which became Advantage+ Detailed Targeting. That final “+” was added with the rollout of Advantage+ Campaigns.

Along the way, Advantage+ Audience became the recommended default, making any initial inputs an audience suggestion. If you turned Advantage+ off — also worded as “switching to original audiences” or “further limit the reach of your ads” — you could turn suggestions off for some targeting inputs, though it would depend on the performance goal.

Initially, using performance goals that maximized the number or value of conversions, app events, link clicks, or landing page views would force Advantage+ Detailed Targeting (Meta added link clicks and landing page views in 2024). In these cases, any detailed targeting inputs were only seen as suggestions and could not be turned off.

In late 2025, Meta expanded the performance goals that would force suggestions with lookalike audiences. At some point since then, the same has happened to detailed targeting.

Advantage+ Detailed Targeting cannot be turned off for the following performance goals:

Maximize number of conversions
Maximize value of conversions
Maximize number of landing page views
Maximize number of link clicks
Maximize number of app events
Maximize number of conversations
Maximize number of Instagram profile and Facebook page visits
Maximize number of calls
Maximize number of reminders set
Maximize number of leads
Maximize number of conversion leads

The key additions are all of the performance goals after “app events.” It does not matter if you turn Advantage+ off, switch to original audiences, or whatever else you want to call it. When using these performance goals, detailed targeting will only be used as suggestions.

If you use any performance goal not listed (which is a shrinking group), you can still turn off suggestions.

I have a lot of thoughts on this that will require a separate post. But the main thing to understand for now is that your detailed targeting inputs are almost always used as suggestions now, not tight constraints. And it puts the usefulness and impact of detailed targeting in significant doubt.

2. URL Parameters Update

In an update that’s at least five years too late, Meta has finally consolidated the URL Parameters builder when creating an ad.

For whatever reason, there have always been two different places to build and add URL parameters when creating an ad:

Within the Destination section when providing the URL
Within the Tracking section at the bottom

You may now see this message in the Destination section:

URL parameters have been moved to Tracking so you can manage them in one place.

So now you should build and add URL parameters at the bottom.

The builder hasn’t changed much at all over the years, but it remains useful.

Because it hasn’t changed, this tutorial I wrote five years ago remains mostly relevant (except for the stuff about Universal Analytics).

3. What Happened to Breakdown by Attribution?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new Breakdown by Attribution options.

I was excited about it. I was using it regularly.

And then it disappeared…

This appears to be a random quirk with the rollout — unless it’s merely in testing right now. I’m still seeing it in some accounts. But if you lost it or never had it at all, you’re not alone.

It’s a great feature, so I hope it comes back soon!

4. Combined Sales and Awareness Objective

I’ve been holding this one in my back pocket for a while now. I’ve known it’s a thing for a month or two, but I’ve been waiting to actually get access to it in one of my accounts before writing about it. I’m sick of waiting, so I’ll just tell you what I know for now.

There’s a Help Center article about how to create combined Awareness and Sales campaigns. Here’s how Meta describes it:

A Combined awareness and sales campaign is a new campaign type in Meta Ads Manager that enables advertisers to run both awareness and sales ads together under one campaign. By leveraging Meta’s automation, your budget is optimized across both objectives to help drive more conversions and deliver more efficient results. This campaign type is designed for advertisers focusing on lower-funnel goals such as conversions.

I find this very confusing. On one hand, you are combining sales and awareness into one campaign, optimizing across both objectives. On the other hand, you’re still optimizing for lower-funnel goals, such as conversions. So where does the “awareness” side of this come into play?

I have no idea, but I’m sure it would be clearer if I actually had access to the feature. To find out if you do, follow these steps:

Create a campaign
Select “Awareness” as your campaign objective
In Campaign details, select “Combine Awareness and Sales”

It’s pretty straightforward, so I don’t think I have it. When I create an Awareness campaign, no such option is available in Campaign Details.

If you have this and can shed any light on how it works and its effectiveness, let me know!

5. Meta AI Business Assistant Chatbot Thing

If you haven’t already, you’re going to start seeing the Meta AI logo all around Ads Manager. The Meta AI Business Assistant will give you easy access to Meta’s AI-powered chatbot to get answers on things like campaign performance and account issues.

Here are some examples Meta provided of how you might use it:

Identify Performance Trends: The assistant uses your current and past campaign performance to quickly generate actionable insights and performance visualizations that help you achieve your goals.

Resolve Issues Quickly: Automatically resolve issues for disabled accounts, daily spend limits and more by simply asking the assistant for help in the chat.

Populate Campaign Data Instantly: Simply select in your Ads Manager what you want to analyze to get personalized recommendations. No need for screenshots or pasting of information.

Chat to Take Action: Quickly apply the recommendations for your campaigns or follow links to learn more, directly from the chat.

I’m sure the ability to resolve account issues “quickly” will be of special interest to advertisers. We’ll see if that’s fool’s gold or a reality.

If you don’t have it yet, you’re not alone (I don’t have it). Meta AI Business Assistant is launching in Beta in English only for select small businesses, and it will be rolled out to more advertisers throughout 2026.

6. US Bill May Require Advertiser Verification

Apparently motivated by the recent report that Meta made as much as $16 billion on scam ads in 2024, US senators introduced a bill that would require ad platforms to verify their advertisers.

According to a report from Reuters, the bill “would require social media platforms to verify government-issued identification of advertisers or the ‘legal existence’ of businesses, as well as promptly review and act on reports of scams by users or government entities.”

Such levels of verification aren’t new to advertisers. This is already common for certain special ad categories, particularly when running ads for political causes and social issues. But requiring all advertisers (only enforceable in the US) would certainly involve a much larger group.

This would certainly require more staff for review. It’s also a potential headache for advertisers, depending on how accurate and efficient the review process is.

All that said, I fully support any measure that would help limit scam ads and make them easier to cut off. In theory, a verified advertiser may be less willing to risk a ban with their name attached. And it should be easier to ban those who are caught from creating ads in the future.

Personally, I’d love to see some sort of verification on social media generally. We’re flooded with bots, fake profiles, and internet tough guys hiding behind anonymous profiles. I’d support a verification-required social media platform — and not one that charges you a monthly fee for that initial verification.

7. New Custom Event Attribution Lag?

I don’t create new custom events often these days, but I’ve now experienced this each time I did. For whatever reason, Meta wouldn’t report on attributed conversions using that event.

Now, allow me to clarify a couple of things. When Meta detects a new custom event, it’s initially blocked. You need to first verify it before Meta will track it.

I created an event that would only happen after registering for a specific lead magnet. Once registered, there was a button to access the first lesson. When that button was clicked, it fired the event (called Lesson1).

This event fired 160 times in a matter of a couple of days, according to Events Manager. After deduplication, that would mean 80 separate events.

But Meta didn’t report a single attributed conversion.

Trust me, I’ve considered all of the same explanations I’d give if someone came to me with this. The event was set up and firing properly. While there would have been some organic fires of that event as well from organic subscriptions, the likelihood that NONE of them came from an ad is between slim and none.

I have a few dozen custom events that I’ve created in years past, and I use them for reporting. So the issue isn’t that I can’t get reporting from custom events at all. The question is whether there’s an initial lag (beyond what is normal) for a newly created custom event.

Anyway, I gave up on this event. I’m not using it anymore, so I can’t say for sure if it would eventually start working. But it reminded me that I had a similar experience about six months ago when I created a different custom event.

So if you’re running into this, know that you’re not alone. I just don’t have a solution for you.