Solved: Facebook Ads Showing to the Wrong Audience?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your Facebook ads situation. It's a really common thing to see and it causes a lot of confusion, but the answer probably isn't what you're expecting. You've hit on one of the biggest shifts in how Meta ads work these days, and it forces us to think less about who is clicking, and a lot more about who is actually buying.

Let's get straight into it.

We'll need to look at why Facebook is ignoring your targeting...

So, your suspicion is spot on. The reason you're seeing clicks from people outside your specified 18-25 age range is because of a feature called Advantage+ Audience. This used to be a little tick-box called 'Detailed Targeting Expansion', but Meta has made it more central to how ad sets work now, and in some cases, it's on by default and you can't even turn it off.

Here’s the simple version of what it does: You give Facebook a set of instructions, your 'ideal' audience—in your case, people aged 18-25. Facebook looks at that and says, "Right, got it. That's a good starting point." Then, its algorithm immediately starts looking for people outside that group who share similar characteristics and behaviours to the people inside your group who are actually converting.

Think of it like this: you send a personal shopper out to buy you a specific brand of trainers in a size 9. But you tell them, "Look, if you find a different brand that's a better fit, higher quality, and on sale, just buy those instead. My ultimate goal is to get a great pair of trainers, not specifically that one brand."

That's what you're doing with Advantage+ Audience. You're telling Meta, "My goal is to get [conversions/sales/leads]. Here's who I think my customer is (18-25 year olds), but if you can find me cheaper or more frequent conversions from 60-year-olds, go for it. I trust you."

The old way of running ads was to build these tiny, perfectly curated audiences and force the ads onto them. The new way—the way that actually works at scale—is to give the algorithm a clear goal (your conversion event) and a broad starting point, and then let its machine learning do the heavy lifting. Trying to micromanage every demographic is an outdated strategy that often leads to higher costs and limits the platform's ability to find you customers. The machine is smarter than us at finding patterns in user data, so our job has shifted from being a targeting perfectionist to being a brilliant strategist who gives the machine the right goals and the right creative.

I'd say you are focusing on the wrong metric...

This brings me to the most important point, and it's a bit of a contrarian view. The fact that a 60-year-old is clicking your ad is, in itself, completely and utterly irrelevant. It's a vanity metric. It tells you nothing about the health of your business or the success of your campaign.

The only question you should be asking is: Are these people converting?

Let's imagine you sell graphic t-shirts aimed at students. You set your targeting to 18-25. The algorithm starts showing ads and finds that, for some reason, a small cluster of people aged 55-65 are not only clicking, but they're buying. Why? Who knows. Maybe they're buying gifts for their grandkids. Maybe they just have surprisingly youthful taste. Does the 'why' really matter if they're giving you money at a profitable cost per sale?

If you force Facebook to *only* show ads to 18-25 year olds, you might miss out on that profitable pocket of customers. Your overall cost per sale might go up because you've artificially restricted the algorithm from finding the cheapest conversions available on the platform.

This is why your campaign objective is so critical. There's a fundamental misunderstanding I see all the time. People think they are paying for their ad to be shown to their target audience. That's not true. You are paying Facebook to achieve an objective, and it will show your ad to the people within your audience most likely to help you achieve it cheaply.

If your objective is 'Traffic' or 'Reach', you are literally telling Facebook: "Please find me the people inside (and outside) my target audience who are most likely to click on things or see things, for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being very good at its job, goes out and finds people who are known to click on lots of ads but rarely buy anything. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. You're optimising for worthless actions.

If your objective is 'Conversions' (or 'Sales'), you are telling Facebook: "I don't really care who sees it. Just go and find me people who will perform this specific action (e.g., purchase, fill out a lead form) at the lowest possible cost." Now, the algorithm's entire focus shifts. It ignores the cheap clickers and starts hunting for buyers, wherever they may be.

This is the fundamental choice every advertiser makes, whether they realise it or not.

You probably should be asking 'What is my campaign optimising for?'...

So, the first thing you need to do is go into your Ads Manager and check what campaign objective you've selected. If it's anything other than 'Sales' or 'Leads' (depending on your goal), then that's your problem right there. You've given the machine the wrong instructions.

If you are running a 'Sales' campaign and have your pixel set up correctly to track purchases, and you're still seeing clicks from 60-year-olds, then you should check your reports to see if they are actually buying. In your Ads Manager, you can use the 'Breakdown' feature by age. If you see that the 55-65 age bracket has a profitable Cost Per Purchase, then you should celebrate! The algorithm is working its magic and has found a new, unexpected customer segment for your business. This is a win, not a problem.

If they are clicking but not buying at all, and your campaign has been running for a while with a decent budget, then it might be a sign that the algorithm is struggling to find conversions and is just defaulting to cheaper traffic. This can happen if your creative isn't resonating, your offer isn't compelling, or your budget is too low for it to exit the 'learning phase'. But the solution isn't to restrict the age range; it's to fix the underlying problem with the creative, the offer or the landing page.

The core relationship to understand is between the cost of your traffic (CPC) and how well that traffic converts on your website (Conversion Rate). Together, they determine your actual Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). A cheap click that never converts is infinitely expensive. A more expensive click that reliably converts can be incredibly profitable. You need to get comfortable with higher CPCs if they lead to lower CPAs. The maths has to work out.

To help you get a feel for this, I've put together a simple calculator. Play around with the sliders to see how a small change in conversion rate can have a massive impact on your final cost to acquire a customer, even if the cost per click goes up.

You'll need a better way to structure your audiences...

Okay, so let's assume you've fixed your campaign objective to 'Sales' or 'Leads'. You're ready to trust the algorithm a bit more. Does that mean targeting doesn't matter at all? No, not at all. Structure is still hugely important for control, budgeting, and understanding what's working.

Instead of thinking about one single audience, I'd encourage you to think in terms of a funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Top of Funnel): This is your prospecting campaign. Its job is to find new people who have never heard of you. This is where you'd use your 18-25 age targeting, combined with relevant interests. And yes, you would leave Advantage+ Audience turned on here to let Meta prospect for you.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel): These are people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. This is a retargeting audience. You could target people who have watched 50% of your video ads, or people who have visited your website but didn't add anything to their cart. The messaging here would be different, maybe showing them customer testimonials or a different angle of your product.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): This is your hottest audience. These are people who have shown strong buying signals—they've added a product to the cart, or initiated checkout, but didn't complete the purchase. You retarget them with an ad that gives them a little nudge, maybe reminding them of the product or offering free shipping. This is where your best return on ad spend usually comes from.

By splitting your campaigns this way, you get the best of both worlds. You let the algorithm run wild at the ToFu stage to find new customers efficiently, but you maintain tight control over your MoFu and BoFu audiences to nurture and convert the people who are already in your ecosystem. This kind of structured approach is what separates amateur advertisers from professionals. It ensures you're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall but building a repeatable system for customer acquisition.

The cost to acquire a customer (CPA) will naturally be different at each stage of this funnel. It's most expensive to acquire a brand new customer at the top, and cheapest to convert someone who has already added an item to their cart at the bottom. Understanding this performance difference is key to managing your budget effectively.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this all up, a lot of modern paid advertising, especially on platforms like Meta, is about un-learning old habits. We have to move from being micromanagers to being smart strategists who leverage the power of the platform's algorithm. It can be a scary transition, but it's the only way to get sustainable results. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Putting a strategy like this into place can feel like a lot of work, especially when you're used to doing things a certain way. It requires a solid technical setup with your pixel, a thoughtful campaign structure, and creative that is built to convert, not just to be seen. It definitely takes expertise to get right.

This is where working with a specialist can make all the difference. We do this day-in, day-out, and can help you bypass the expensive trial-and-error phase by implementing a professional, data-driven advertising system from the start.

If you'd like to go through your ad account together on a call, I'd be happy to offer a free, no-obligation strategy session. We can look at your current setup, diagnose the core issues, and outline a clear plan to get you focused on the metrics that actually grow your business.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh