Budget
Broad Targeting
Running ads with minimal audience restrictions, letting the platform's ML algorithm find converters from a wide pool. Increasingly effective as Meta Advantage+, Google PMax, and TikTok Smart+ mature their bidding algorithms. Counterintuitive: restricting audience often hurts performance because it limits the algorithm's optimization surface. Broad targeting with strong creative typically outperforms narrow targeting with average creative at scale. Works best above $5K/month per campaign where the algorithm has enough conversion data to optimize.
Why it matters
It hands audience selection to the platform's model, which usually beats manual segments now, but it also removes your ability to explain why a campaign worked.
In practice
Give it a clean conversion signal and enough budget to exit learning. Broad with a noisy signal and a small budget is the worst of both approaches.
Related terms