Age, Gender, and Placement Restrictions

You don’t need to do that…

Advertisers love to restrict by placement or audience when it isn’t necessary. If you’re optimizing for a purchase, you shouldn’t need to do this. Meta will adjust.

Problems Related to Demographics

The algorithm’s weakness would be when optimizing for something further up the funnel. If Meta thinks you want clicks or views or even leads, Meta will show your ads to people to get those actions.

But if there’s a problem to be solved related to age or gender, use value rules instead. I do this for leads because I’ll otherwise get cheap and low-quality leads from people 65 and up. I lower the bid on that group instead of removing them entirely.

Problems Related to Placements

I also see advertisers remove placements far more often than they need to. They’ll say that Audience Network is trash and remove it universally.

While Audience Network certainly isn’t great, it’s also rarely an issue when optimizing for conversions. Meta knows you won’t get sales there, so you will barely see any impressions from that placement.

Where placements become a problem is when optimizing for top-of-funnel actions. If you optimize for clicks or landing page views, you’ll get a lot of low-quality clicks from Audience Network. If you optimize for ThruPlay views, you’ll get forced ThruPlays from Audience Network Rewarded Video.

But again, if there’s a problem to be solved related to placement when optimizing for these actions, restrictions are rarely required. Use value rules instead. You could lower the bid on Audience Network when this happens.

Restricting audiences is one of the seven most common mistakes that advertisers make. Read about the rest here.