What Audience Should You Target on Meta Ads?
One of the most common questions business owners and marketers ask is, “What audience should I target on Meta Ads?” With so many targeting options available, it is easy to overcomplicate things.
From my experience running campaigns for clients across multiple industries, there are four audience types that consistently work. Whether you are running manual campaigns on Facebook or Instagram, these audiences give you a strong foundation for testing and scaling.
1. Excluding Past Purchasers
The first rule of efficient targeting is to avoid wasting budget on people who have already converted. If someone has purchased your product or completed a lead action, exclude them from your prospecting campaigns.
This helps you:
Maximize reach to new potential customers
Prevent overlap and wasted impressions
Keep your campaigns cost efficient
Of course, you can always re-engage existing customers with a separate upsell or loyalty campaign. But for prospecting, keep them excluded.
2. Lookalike Audiences
Lookalikes remain one of the most powerful tools in Meta Ads. These are audiences created by using your own first-party data such as:
Purchasers
Website visitors
Social media engagers
By creating a lookalike, you let Meta find people who share similar behaviors and interests to your best customers. This is especially effective once you have a decent amount of conversion data to feed the algorithm.
3. Interest-Based Audiences
If you are building awareness, interest targeting is still a valuable option. Here you target people based on their interests within your niche.
For example, if your client is Nike, you might target:
People interested in sports shoes
People interested in running and training
People interested in athletic apparel
Interest targeting works best when combined with clear creative that speaks directly to those passions.
4. Retargeting Audiences
Finally, you cannot ignore retargeting. This is where you re-engage people who have already interacted with your brand but have not yet converted. Examples include:
Website visitors who browsed but did not buy
People who added to cart but abandoned checkout
Social followers or engagers who have not purchased
Retargeting audiences usually deliver some of the highest conversion rates because these users are already familiar with your brand.
Putting It All Together
With these four audiences, you can create a strong Meta Ads strategy:
Exclude past purchasers to keep prospecting clean.
Leverage lookalikes to scale your best-performing audiences.
Target niche interests to build brand awareness with relevant groups.
Run retargeting campaigns to convert warm leads.
From here, test and compare performance. Some industries will see better results with interest targeting, while others thrive on lookalikes. The key is to keep experimenting until you find the mix that works for your objective.
Final Thoughts
If you are wondering what audience to target on Meta Ads, start with these four categories. They cover the full customer journey from awareness to conversion and give you a framework that works across almost every niche.
The real magic comes from your creative. Audiences set the stage, but it is your ad copy, visuals, and offer that turn clicks into customers.
