A client's cost per lead dropped from $50 to $32 after switching from narrow manual targeting to Meta's Advantage Plus broad targeting. The platform's AI uses behavioral data to find the right people without manual audience selection, which actually hurts performance by forcing expensive auctions on tiny groups.
We dropped a client's cost per lead from $50 to $32 by doing the opposite of what most people do. They were spending hours finding the perfect interest, the perfect lookalikes, the perfect little audiences that only they knew about, and it was killing their results. Here's what's actually happening in 2026. Meta's AI has gotten scary smart. They're not just looking at what people like anymore. They're tracking what people actually do, what they read, what they watch, what they buy. They have more data than you could ever figure out manually. So when you go super narrow with your targeting, you're basically telling Meta, hey, ignore all your data, only show my ads to these specific people. And you end up in super competitive auctions against everyone else fighting for that same small audience. So we switched them to Advantage Plus, went broad, cost per lead dropped and the quality went up. Let the algorithm do its job and your creative do the targeting. That's the game now.
