Meta audiences after iOS and cookies: what still works?

What still works on Meta is a broad audience in which Meta does its own searching, fed with your own data. Location, minimum age, language and excluded custom audiences are hard limits; age, gender, interests and lookalikes are suggestions Meta may deviate from ^[1][2]. Your strongest assets are customer lists and website visitors who gave consent.

That applies whether you advertise yourself or want to check what a Facebook Ads agency sets up. How to build campaigns and ad sets is covered in Meta campaign structure in 2026. This article is only about who you reach.

What is a limit, and what is a suggestion?

With Advantage+ audience, Meta distinguishes between audience controls, which really restrict your reach, and suggestions, which Meta uses as a direction ^[1].

If you set "women" as a suggestion, Meta can also show your ad to men if it expects them to respond ^[1]. If you want a hard limit, choose "Further limit the reach of your ads" and untick the option to use it as a suggestion, but then Advantage+ is off ^[1][3]. Raising the minimum age up to 25 or excluding a custom audience is possible without Advantage+ switching off ^[3].

Limits for your whole business, such as countries you don't deliver to, are set in your ad account settings ^[1]. Campaigns in a special ad category, such as financial products, employment and housing, have no access to Advantage+ audience ^[1].

Language. If you don't choose a language, Meta shows your ad to people it believes understand the language of your ad ^[4]. If you do choose one, it is a hard limit ^[1]. For a bilingual audience, one ad in several languages often works better than two ad sets: Meta shows each person the right version, and your results stay in one ad set ^[4].

Which audience do you choose?

• Advantage+ audience (broad). Meta searches itself, based on things such as past conversions, Pixel data and interactions with your ads ^[5]. Meta writes that it can deliver 7.2% to 14.8% lower cost per result, depending on the goal, but doesn't mention a measurement method ^[5].
• Detailed targeting. Interests, behaviours and demographics ^[6], which Meta may expand if that performs better ^[7]. Excluding by interests has not been possible since 31 March 2025, and since 23 June 2025 many interests have been merged into broader groups ^[8].
• Lookalike. People who resemble a source, such as your customers. The source needs at least 100 people; Meta recommends 1,000 to 5,000 ^[9]. For new ad sets with a source from website, app or customer list, the lookalike automatically becomes a suggestion ^[2].
• Custom audience. Your own data. Excluding is a hard limit, including is a suggestion ^[1][10].

If Meta expands your audience, the estimated audience size no longer tells you how many people you can reach in total ^[7]. So don't pay too much attention to that number.

Turn your own data into your advantage

Interests have become less precise, but what you know about your customers hasn't. You create custom audiences from website visitors via the Meta Pixel, customer lists with email addresses or phone numbers, offline purchases, and people who interacted with your videos, lead forms, Instagram account or Facebook Page ^[11]. Three uses belong in every account:

1. Excluding existing customers from campaigns for new customers, a hard limit even with Advantage+ ^[1]. For people you must never reach, there is a customer list that serves only for exclusion ^[12].
2. Re-engaging people who opened your lead form but didn't submit it, or watched most of your video ^[11].
3. A lookalike as a starting point, based on your best customers and not on all website visitors ^[9].

Your website visitor audience is only as good as your measurement. People who decline your cookies aren't in it: in Belgium you need prior consent for pixels ^[13]. Safari also lets cookies set via JavaScript expire after 7 days without interaction ^[14].

How to pass that consent correctly to your tags is covered in Consent Mode v2 in practice. How the Conversions API passes on events from visitors who gave consent more reliably is explained in Meta Pixel or Conversions API.

Broad or narrow: how to decide

A broad audience works best if your offer is relevant to many people, if you pass on enough conversions and if your ad itself makes clear who it is for. Enough here means: an ad set usually exits the learning phase after about 50 results per week ^[15]. The claim you read online that Advantage+ only works "from 50 conversions per week" is something we can't find in any public source.

An example without client data: an installer targets a 15 km radius with €800 per month, at €40 per quote request. That is about 5 requests per week, far below 50. Broad or narrow then makes little difference; one ad set, a goal that occurs more often and ads that mention the region help more.

In such a small audience, ads also wear out quickly. How to recognise that is covered in creative fatigue on Meta.

Test fairly with an A/B test

If you want to know whether broad works better than your lookalike or your interests, use Meta's A/B test. It shows each version to a separate part of your audience and compares them on cost per result ^[16]. Meta advises against switching ad sets on and off by hand, because audiences then overlap ^[16].

• One variable: the same ads and the same budget, only the audience differs ^[16].
• Long enough: only judge once both ad sets could exit the learning phase ^[15].
• Beyond cost per result: put the leads from both versions next to what sales did with them.
• No retargeting: Meta recommends A/B tests with Advantage+ audience for almost all campaign types, except retargeting ^[5].

Not sure whether your audiences are still right? The free Meta Ads audit reviews broad targeting, lookalikes, retargeting and exclusions, together with structure, measurement and creatives.

What has changed since iOS 14.5

Apple. Since iOS 14.5, released on 26 April 2021, apps have to ask permission before they track users across apps and websites owned by other companies ^[17][18]. Since then, Meta has measured events from iOS devices through Aggregated Event Measurement, with aggregated data ^[19].

Europe. Since the end of 2024, people in the EU, the EEA and Switzerland can choose less personalised ads, based on their session and a few basic details ^[20]. The Digital Services Act bans profiling-based ads aimed at minors and ads based on special categories of personal data ^[21]. Since early October 2025, Meta also no longer allows ads about politics, elections or social issues in the EU ^[22].