Broad targeting is running ads with minimal audience restrictions and letting the platform's delivery AI find converters — the targeting philosophy behind Advantage+ and Performance Max.
Definition
Instead of stacking interests and demographics, you give the system a wide-open audience, strong creative, and clean conversion signal, and the delivery models locate buyers auction by auction. It works because the platform's per-impression prediction now outperforms human segment logic at scale — provided the conversion signal it learns from is accurate and the creative gives it something to work with.
Why it matters
Broad targeting inverted a decade of craft: audience-stacking skill lost value, while creative volume and signal quality gained it. Teams that fight the shift by micro-segmenting typically pay higher CPMs to reach the same converters the broad system would have found cheaper.
In agentic execution
Adlyse's agents manage the broad-targeting inputs that still matter — signal quality, creative rotation, exclusions — and reallocate between broad and structured approaches based on measured results, not doctrine.
Related terms
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