Facebook Ads Audience Strategies That Still Work in 2024

The Post-iOS Audience Reality

Remember when you could target "people interested in yoga who also like organic food and have a household income over $100K"? Those days are fading fast.

iOS 14.5+ fundamentally changed Facebook advertising. With 75-85% of iOS users opting out of tracking, the data signals that powered detailed targeting have degraded significantly. Interest and behavior targeting simply isn't as reliable as it used to be.

But Facebook advertising still works—you just need different strategies.

What's Changed (And What Hasn't)

What's Degraded

Interest-based targeting accuracy
Behavior-based audience sizes
Cross-platform tracking
Conversion attribution windows
Detailed demographic targeting

What Still Works

First-party data audiences
Broad targeting with creative filtering
Value-based lookalikes
Engagement-based audiences
Geographic targeting

Strategy 1: First-Party Data Is King

Your own data is now your most valuable targeting asset. Unlike third-party data that's degraded by privacy changes, first-party data comes directly from your customers.

Customer List Custom Audiences

Upload your customer emails, phone numbers, and any customer match data. These audiences now outperform most interest targeting by significant margins.

Best practices:

Upload separate lists for different customer segments (high-value, recent, lapsed)
Include customer lifetime value for value-based optimization
Update lists monthly at minimum
Use hashed data for privacy compliance

Website Custom Audiences

Despite pixel limitations, website visitor audiences remain valuable:

Recent visitors (7-30 days) for hot remarketing
Product page viewers for abandoned browser campaigns
Purchasers for exclusion and lookalike seeding
High-value page visitors for targeted expansion

Strategy 2: Value-Based Lookalikes

Standard lookalikes have declined in effectiveness, but value-based lookalikes still perform well. The difference: you're telling Facebook not just who to match, but who your BEST customers are.

How to Build Value-Based Lookalikes

Export customer data with lifetime value attached
Create a Custom Audience with LTV as the value column
Build lookalikes from this value-weighted source

Facebook prioritizes finding users similar to your highest-value customers, not just any customer. This is particularly important as audience quality has become more variable.

Lookalike Sizing

1% lookalikes: Highest quality, smallest reach
1-2% lookalikes: Good balance for most campaigns
2-5% lookalikes: Broader reach, use for awareness
5%+ lookalikes: Essentially broad targeting

Strategy 3: Broad Targeting with Creative Filtering

Here's a counterintuitive approach that's working better than ever: remove most targeting restrictions and let your creative do the filtering.

How It Works

With broad targeting, Facebook's algorithm finds converters based on their behavior patterns, not declared interests. Your creative serves as the qualifier—if your ad clearly shows who your product is for, irrelevant audiences won't engage.

When Broad Works Best

Sufficient conversion volume (30+ conversions/week per ad set)
Strong, differentiating creative
Products with wide appeal
Accounts with good historical data

How to Implement Broad Targeting

Age and gender: Only restrict if product is genuinely age/gender-specific
Interests: Remove all interest targeting
Behaviors: Remove all behavior targeting
Location: Keep geographic restrictions that make business sense
Placements: Let Facebook choose (Advantage+ Placements)

Strategy 4: Engagement-Based Audiences

Engagement audiences are built from users who interact with your content on Facebook or Instagram—and they're unaffected by iOS tracking changes.

Valuable Engagement Audiences

Video viewers (25%, 50%, 75%, 95% completion)
Instagram profile visitors
Facebook page engagers
Lead form openers
Ad engagers (people who engaged with any ad)

These audiences represent users who've shown interest through platform-native actions, making them reliable targeting sources.

Strategy 5: Advantage+ Audiences

Meta's Advantage+ options use AI to expand your targeting. While they reduce control, they often outperform manual targeting in the current environment.

Advantage+ Audience (Expansion)

When enabled, Facebook can expand beyond your defined audience when it predicts better performance. Test this feature systematically.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

For e-commerce, these fully automated campaigns often outperform manual setups. They require surrendering targeting control but can deliver strong ROAS.

Testing Framework for Audiences

Don't assume what works. Test systematically:

Baseline: Your current best-performing audience
Challenger 1: Broad targeting with same creative
Challenger 2: Value-based lookalike
Challenger 3: Engagement-based audience

Run for sufficient budget to achieve statistical significance (typically $500-1000 per audience minimum).

The Bottom Line

Facebook advertising hasn't died—it's evolved. The advertisers succeeding today have shifted from relying on Facebook's targeting data to providing their own through first-party data and creative-based filtering.

The most important change is mindset: treat targeting as an input to test, not a solution to set and forget.

Need help navigating Facebook's targeting changes? Our [Facebook Ads team](/services/facebook-ads) stays current with what's working now, not what worked two years ago.