META Ads Have Changed: Here's How to Adapt

Today we’re going to chat about Meta ads. And if you’ve been spending hours today just trying to find that perfect interest targeting on your Meta ad accounts, honestly, I think it’s time that you hang up the boots, you go grab yourself a coffee and call it a day, because honestly, the Meta platform’s fundamentally changed, and what worked not only 12 months ago, but even the last few months, is now actually starting to hold you back. The thing that we’re seeing now is your creative, your images, your videos, your copy: that is now your targeting. But the thing is that we’ve seen that most marketers and a lot of businesses haven’t yet adapted to that just yet.

So we’re going to unpack it and find out exactly how to make your Meta ads work better on today’s podcast. If we haven’t met before, my name is Jordan McFadyen, and welcome to the For The Daring Growth Seekers podcast. And of course, this is a podcast designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing in the AI era. And this is a great example today, because Meta is changing the different policies, the way that we actually advertise on the platform. As we’ve seen with Google Ads, with AI Max and Performance Max campaigns over there, there’s a lot of different changes of these different platforms, and I guess that’s one thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time in our ad account and across a lot of different client accounts today, which has driven me to talk about this little shift in Meta ads that we have been seeing, quietly making a lot of old strategies pretty useless. And as I audit new accounts that are coming onto our books here at Done By Nine, it’s becoming more and more prevalent that we need to really take a careful look at our Meta ad accounts and our creative, and start to actually adapt to the new way of marketing. Because this isn’t just a new feature that we’re talking about here today. This is a complete change of how the Meta and Facebook and Instagram algorithm is actually helping you find new customers and new clients.

The old way, if we go back in time, was us telling Meta exactly who to target. Remember, we would go into the ad platform, we would create different interest-based targeting, we would tell it the exact demographics that we’re looking for, we’d put in all these different interests in there as well. But the new way is about really showing Meta’s AI who your customer is, but doing that through the ad creative, and then letting Meta actually go find those people for you.

And this is happening now across New Zealand, Australia, across the whole world. Meta is pushing advertisers towards its AI-powered Advantage+ tools. And also the detailed targeting options are actually starting to be removed or bundled into broader categories. So right now, if you haven’t been into your Facebook ad account for a while, it’s probably worth you going in and having a look, if you don’t manage it yourself or you’ve got an agency managing it. Chances are you’ll have a grey banner across the top that is literally saying that there are quite a few of the targets, or the interest-based targeting that you have previously gone for, which are now being removed or condensed or put into some broader categories as well.

So in today’s episode, I want to try and give you a really clear explanation of what we have seen changing as we go through the different ad accounts. Also, why broad targeting is now outperforming these hyper-specific audiences that we might have targeted in the past. And also, we’ll run through a bit of a simple plan to make sure your ads are actually set up for success for these changes that we’re seeing across Meta.

So the first thing I want to focus on really is that there is that big move away from the manual targeting to actually using AI-powered audiences instead. So again, let’s go back to the old way. We used to layer different interests within different ad groups. We would put in all these different behaviours and different demographics. We’d create lookalike audiences and exclude people to really narrow down our targeting. And the campaigns used to look really complex. Used to have a campaign with a whole heap of different ad sets in there, and then some creative, bundled into that campaign structure as well.

But what we’re seeing now, and where the best results are coming from, is moving and allowing Meta to take some of that control back. Because Meta is moving away from that granular control that I’ve just described. They’re pushing marketers and advertisers towards more focusing on broader audiences, and then using their AI and their machine learning to help actually find the right people. If you log into the account, it’s all part of the Advantage+ suite of tools.

So the AI is obviously really advanced, and we know that. We know this technology is moving really fast. And it can actually find better pockets of customers than we can actually manually select ourselves. It’s analysing things like user behaviour. So it’s having a look at what users are actually doing on Facebook and Instagram. Remember that when you’re logged into these accounts, you’re literally giving away all your data. Anything you do in terms of where you’re stopping your scroll, the type of videos that you’re looking at, the type of content you’re reading, the links that you’re clicking on. It’s learning everything about you based on those small little actions that you’ve taken across Facebook and Instagram.

And it’s also having a look at the content of your ad, and it’s comparing that to determine who’s more likely to actually convert, and to actually more likely interact with your ad and actually perform the action that you want with your particular campaign. So that is the new way, of why we’re shifting from this manual targeting to actually go into these AI-powered audiences.

So the next question that we need to have a look at is then: why is your creative now your new way to target your customers? So the most important thing I want you to get away from this real quick podcast today is that Meta’s AI is literally seeing what is in your ad. So if you create an ad with an image or a video, it features, I don’t know, a plumber fixing a toilet, the AI is literally understanding the context. It’s going to help find people who have shown an intent or shown an interest in different plumbing services. Maybe they’re looking for a new build and they’re looking for a plumber to be able to come through, or a renovation.

They’re going to lots of different renovation pages, or they’re looking at Facebook groups or Facebook Marketplace for things that could help them with their renovation. All those little interest-based targeting are going to help them to build this profile, and this understanding that this particular person is potentially looking for a plumber. And your ad copy is being scanned for things like keywords and the intent behind those keywords. So let’s do another example. You’re talking about tax time for small businesses, if you’re an accountant. The algorithm, what it’s doing there, is it’s going to match that ad to people who are more likely business owners, people who are more likely thinking about tax, for example.

And this means that generic and bland creative is going to fail. And what I mean by generic and bland is, you don’t have to be suddenly all out there and really crazy and really loud. It’s more you need to think about how your ad is speaking directly to your ideal customer, because that is now the primary signal that you are giving the algorithm. So this is why the brand piece comes in really strongly, which is a massive thing we talk about in this podcast a lot: how we need to show our brand, our authority in our marketplace, the fact that we are actually trusted.

But on top of that as well, we also need to have a really clear understanding about who we are trying to target with our product or our service. And if we can marry those two with really detailed creative and different creative options to test, then we’re going to have a better shot of actually seeing better results within the Meta ad platform.

So the question then is, when is all this actually happening? When are these changes taking place? And sad to say, this is not a future event that we’re planning for and prepping our ad accounts for. This is something that’s actually happening now. And again, if you rolled into your Meta ad account today, you were most likely seeing some changes: pulling you into Advantage+ campaigns, removing some of the detailed targeting, giving you dates and deadlines of when you need to remove some targeting things as well.

Meta is literally rolling out these changes, and they have been since 2024, really. And that’s going to continue throughout the rest of this year. Some reports are actually suggesting that they’re potentially going to move fully towards an AI-generated campaign control by sometime within 2026. And as I’m saying here, many detailed targeting options that we are seeing across the platform have already been removed. So if you haven’t been into your ad account for a while, or you’ve got someone else managing that account, it’s probably worth you having a bit of a look, or getting them to audit the account and to see what has been removed or what has been changed.

Because ad sets that are using some discontinued targeting options have most likely been updated by now. The bottom line is, if you wait to adapt, you’re going to be left behind pretty quickly. And then the ads aren’t going to perform as well. And just like that, you’ll start to see some red flags, and you’ll see, all this money we’re spending on Meta, we’re not getting some of the same results that we used to get. No shit, because you probably haven’t been into the account and actually had a look to see what’s actually changed, what ad creative needs changing, what ad creative is working well, and making some of those tweaks and some of those steps.

So if there’s three things I want you to take away from this podcast today: the first one is actually embrace broad targeting. So on the next campaign, try testing a broad audience. I know it’s a bit nerve-wracking. Maybe set the location, the age and the gender, but leave all that other detailed targeting empty and give it a go. Let the creative do the rest of the work. It’s something we’ve been testing a lot with a lot of our clients, and we do get fantastic results when you compare that, and put that with a campaign setting that is really targeted with the right type of conversion action that you actually want out of that campaign as well.

The second step is it’s time to audit your creative, okay? I want you to look at the current ads and make sure it’s immediately obvious: who are you trying to talk to? Who is the type of person you are trying to connect with these ads? If it’s not abundantly clear with your creative, then it’s time to create new ads that really shows off your product, your service. Maybe it’s showing it off in action, speaking directly to your customers’ pain points, and it’s really clear about who you are trying to deal with and who you’re trying to talk to with that ad and with that creative.

And the third one, that we haven’t really spoken about too much in today’s podcast, but I do think that you need to do a bit of thinking around this, and we can even do a future episode on this as well, is think about your first-party data, okay? So your website traffic, your email lists, they are getting more and more valuable. So especially email lists, because that’s obviously data that you hold onto and you can actually provide Meta. Use that data to create some of these custom audiences, especially for things like retargeting. That still works really well.

Try to think about how you can use some of the Meta on-page data that they have, like people who are actually watching your videos for 25% of the time. If someone’s sitting and watching one of your videos for 25% of the length of the video, chances are they’re pretty interested in the type of product or service that you have. And that type of first-party data, that is giving the Meta algorithm a much better, high-quality source of data for it to learn from. Match that with good creative, match that with your broad targeting, and just like that, hopefully you’re going to get a better result from your Meta campaigns as well.

But look, if you need any help with anything to do with your Meta campaigns, you need to do a bit of an audit of your current campaigns and how they’re actually performing, or you just want to have a look at your whole marketing strategy, that’s obviously what we do here at Done By Nine. You can go to our website, donebynine.com. You can obviously reach out to me or a member of the team from our website, or you can listen to all our other podcasts, all our other pieces of content that we release. We try to release one or two pieces each and every week. So donebynine.com is the place to get that.

And look, the days of outsmarting the algorithm with clever targeting on Meta, those days are done and dusted. There is a new formula for success with Meta ads, and it’s been changing all the time, and it’s going to continue to change and adapt over the next few months as well. It is about creating authentic, relevant content that is actually going to resonate with your ideal customer, and then essentially trusting AI to do its job on top of that.

And this is a shift, I know, I get it, from being like this media buyer to instead being like a creative brand strategist. And the businesses that get this, and that understand this, and that actually adapt their creative, they’re going to be the ones who are going to win on Meta moving forward. They’re going to be the ones who see the great results and the great conversions from this platform. The businesses that don’t, they’re going to be the ones that are going, oh, man, Meta used to be good, or, it feels as though we’re just wasting a heap of cash on advertising at the moment.

But if you don’t adapt, then that is going to be the likely scenario moving forward. So the question is no longer, who should I target? The question should now be, what should I show them?