Use audience expansion in your ad set

Last updated: 1 week ago

You can use audience expansion to expand the reach of your ad set by showing your ads to member accounts with similar attributes to your target audience. Audience expansion is a good choice for an upper-funnel marketing strategy, as it can help drive quality prospects into your marketing funnel by building awareness and consideration to a broader group.

For example, if your ad set targets member accounts with the skill Online Advertising, audience expansion might expand your audience to member accounts that list the skill B2B Marketing on their profile.

Use audience expansion in your ad set

To use audience expansion in your ad set:

  1. Go to your ad account in Campaign Manager.

  2. Click Advertise on the left menu.

  3. Choose to either:

  4. In the Audience section of the Set up ad set page, select or clear the checkbox next to Enable Audience Expansion.

    Here's a tip

    Audience expansion is automatically enabled on ad sets where it’s available.

    The Audience Expansion checkbox in the Audience section
  5. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish creating or editing your ad set.

Results

After you launch your ad set with audience expansion, we recommend reviewing the following metrics from your reporting dashboard to see the impact on your ad set: 

  • Cost per click (CPC) 
  • Cost per mille (CPM) 
  • Reach 
  • Impressions 
  • Engagement

We also recommend reviewing your ad set’s professional demographics reporting to gain a better understanding of your audience.

Considerations

When using audience expansion, keep in mind the following considerations.

Consideration Description
Targeting exclusions If you exclude specific attributes from your target audience, those attributes from that targeting criteria won’t be included in audience expansion.
Reporting Performance and professional demographic metrics such as impressions and clicks will include activity from both your target audience and expansion audience.
Target audience size

When building your ad set, the estimated target audience size in the Forecasted Results panel won't include member accounts from audience expansion.

Also, if you save your audience, the audience count on your Audience page won’t include member accounts from audience expansion.

Availability restrictions Audience expansion isn’t available for dynamic ad formats (follower, spotlight, or jobs ads), our auto-generated audiences (Auto-Targeting, buyer groups, or predictive audiences), or if you create an Accelerate ad set.

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