Audiences and Targeting
The Targeting section of the ad set form decides who sees your ads. Its heading on the form is Define your audience reach.
Two ways to fill it in, and you use one or the other.
Option one: a saved audience
Saved Audience (Optional) lists the saved audiences that already exist in your Meta ad account. Adsap reads them from the account; it does not create them. To build a new one, do it in Meta and it appears here after the next sync.
Picking a saved audience switches off every manual field below it. Locations, age, gender, detailed targeting and the custom audience fields gray out, and Adsap does not send them to Meta. That is deliberate: a saved audience already contains everything, and merging the two would silently produce targeting that matches neither.
If you want to adjust a saved audience, either edit it in Meta or leave this dropdown on None (use manual targeting) and build the targeting here instead.
Option two: manual targeting
Leave the dropdown on None (use manual targeting) and the fields below become editable.
Locations
Search and add countries, regions and cities. A city can take a Radius in Miles or Kilometers.
Age Min and Age Max
Defaults are 18 and 65.
Genders
Male, Female, or both.
Detailed targeting
Laid out as in Ads Manager. Each search box finds interests, behaviors and demographics such as parents, job titles, education and life events.
- Include people who match at least ONE of the following: items in the same box are an or. Someone matching any one of them qualifies.
- Narrow audience adds a box people must also match. Boxes are an and.
The line under the boxes spells out the result, for example People who match: (Cooking or Frequent Travelers) and Parents (All). The bin removes a narrowing box.
Meta offers only this shape. “(A and B) or (C and D)” needs two ad sets, and detailed targeting has no exclusions since Meta removed them in 2025. To leave people out, exclude a custom audience below.
Each narrowing box shrinks the audience, so add one only when you mean it. Meta’s delivery finds buyers inside a broad audience better than inside a hand-built narrow one.
Include Custom Audiences and Exclude Custom Audiences
Your account’s custom audiences, including lookalikes, on both sides.
Exclusions are the underused half. Exclude recent purchasers from a prospecting campaign, or your retargeting audience from your cold campaign, and you stop paying twice for the same people. That is the cheapest efficiency gain on this page.
Special ad categories override this
If the campaign declared Housing, Employment or Financial products and services, Meta restricts targeting whatever you enter. Age locks to 18 to 65, gender to all, and cities or ZIPs need at least a 15 mile radius. Social issues and Online gambling and gaming keep normal targeting. In every declared category, locations stay inside the countries declared on the campaign (one or more). See Creating a campaign.
There is no audience template
Adsap has no saved targeting objects of its own. Reusable targeting lives in Meta as a saved audience, and Adsap reads it from there.
That is on purpose. A targeting definition that lived only in Adsap would drift from what Meta enforces, and nobody looking at the account in Ads Manager would see it.
Checking the audience before you launch
Ask the AI Copilot for a delivery estimate on a proposed audience and it returns an estimated monthly audience range with a size assessment from too narrow to very broad. It sizes detailed targeting boxes exactly as the ad set will use them.
Do this before launching. A badly sized audience is the most common reason a well-built campaign fails to deliver, and you cannot see it until the ads have run for a few days.
Through the AI Copilot
You can search interests, behaviors, demographics and locations by chat, which is often faster than the pickers. Describe the audience in words, such as “people who like cooking or travel often, and are parents”. The assistant builds the same boxes, sizes the audience and reads the logic back to you before it creates anything. It can also list the account’s custom audiences, and check which ads use one before you delete it.