Meta Changes their Ads Targeting
Meta’s targeting changes that affect your music marketing strategy!
July 24, 2025 / by DailyPlaylists
Reading time: 4 to 5 minutes
Meta's latest updates, particularly the generalisation of detailed targeting interest options, are hugely impacting how advertisers, and anyone - big or small - who is doing music marketing reaches their desired audiences. These changes mean that the design of your ad content is more critical than ever for Meta's AI to effectively detect who you want to attract.
Here's a breakdown of the updates and how to improve your content design for music marketing:
The Impact of Meta's Latest Updates
Interest Targeting Consolidation: Since June 23, 2025, Meta is combining smaller interest groups into broader categories. For anyone doing music marketing, this means highly specific genres like "Progressive House" are now merged into broader terms like "House Music". Similarly, niche metal genres or specific band fan bases that were once targetable are now replaced by broader options like "Heavy Metal".
Increased Ad Costs for Niche Targets: Advertisers in music marketing have reported a doubling of ad costs because Meta's AI struggles to find their specific niche within these broader categories. Previous precise targeting that yielded low costs per click (e.g., $0.03-$0.04) has seen significant increases (e.g., $0.14-$0.20). Which in return can hinder those with smaller budgets.
AI Takes the Lead in Audience Selection: This consolidation is an intentional change, with Meta now using its AI to "decide who to target within the broad categories". Even existing campaigns using highly specific targeting will be affected by January 15, 2026, if not updated.
Detailed Targeting Exclusions Removed: As of March 31, 2025 (in Ads Manager) and June 10, 2025 (for boosted posts), Meta has removed the ability to use detailed targeting exclusions, citing improved campaign performance without them. Custom audience exclusions remain available as an alternative.
Considering all this,it’s good to understand what Meta is using to implement these changes so we can work around it for our music campaigns.
How Meta's AI Detects Your Audience (and Why Content Creation Matters More Now)
Meta's advertising system relies on advanced machine learning (ML), including its proprietary Andromeda system, to predict which ads a person will find most interesting. Andromeda uses deep neural networks to "better learn higher-order interactions from people and ads data" and can "dynamically reconstruct latent user-ad interaction signals on-the-fly" to understand complex relationships between users, products, and services. Basically, it can understand your behaviour on Meta to show you what interests you, like when you wonder how Instagram knows what you were thinking because you saw an ad of something you thought not long ago?
This means, we need to make things easy for Andromeda, making it obvious where do we want to aim our content., Using text overlays that are readable, bold and clear, test different audios and make them as clear and understandable as possible and a clear Call To Action (CTA) that invites your viewers to do what you want.
Example:
‘Listen to my latest single’, ‘This song is for anybody who X’ ‘If you like X you would like X’, etc…
With the shift away from granular interest targeting, your ad content itself becomes a more critical signal for this AI. It needs to clearly communicate the specific niche or ideal fan you're trying to attract. Now niches are removed in favor of more general targeting and then AI takes care of the rest.
Some practical tips for more content design:
Ensure Hyper-Clarity and Specificity in Messaging:
Again, since detailed interests are broader, your ad creative (visuals, copy, audio/video clips) must explicitly call out your niche. If you make "symphonic metal," your ad should use those terms, not just "heavy metal."
Design your content to directly speak to your ideal fan's specific needs, interests, or pain points. This acts as a strong, explicit signal to Meta's AI, helping it align its predictions with your desired outcomes.
Focus on Content that Drives Engagement and Conversions:
Try to provide Meta Ads with as much information as possible about your audience. If you already made an ad that converted relatively well, add it there. The more conversion data your ads generate (e.g., streams, purchases, sign-ups), the better Meta's AI can optimise. When your content resonates and drives conversions, this provides valuable data points back to Meta's system, allowing the AI to learn who your ideal customer is and then find more people like them within broader audiences.
Consolidating your ad sets can give Meta's algorithms more conversion data for better, faster optimisation.
Testing is key:
Try on different versions of your content and A/B tested, all this is a little trial and error, so be patient. Probably your first ad will not perform as good as you expected but doing tests of your ads, combining different formats, CTAs, audio bits of your music or messages directed to your niches can help you fine tune the type of content that your audience really engage with. This is the part where you can be as creative as possible.
Some practical tips on the Technical End
Now, let’s go for a bit more of specificity, though this part is a bit more technical, these can help you jump a level on your ad campaigns. This can increase your ad costs but use it at your discretion if you would like to go more detailed on your ads.
Prioritise and Use Custom Audiences:
Custom audiences refer to "warm audiences", are people who have already interacted with your music or business. These include website visitors, email lists, video viewers, and engagers with your Facebook page or Instagram account.
Create custom audiences for:
Website Visitors: Use the Meta Pixel to create audiences of all website visitors, retaining data for up to 180 days. Meta's AI knows that recent visitors are more likely to convert and will prioritise them, but you still benefit from the largest possible audience.
Email Lists: Upload your email lists (CSV or TXT files) to create custom audiences. The more data you provide (email, name, city), the more likely Meta is to match users to their profiles. Including customer value can help Meta prioritize finding more valuable customers.
Instagram/Facebook Engagers: Build audiences of anyone who has engaged with your professional Instagram account or Facebook page, including followers, profile visitors, or those who interacted with posts/ads.
Inclusion Strategy: It is recommended to add all your major custom audiences into one ad set. Meta's AI will prioritise putting ads in front of your warm audience even if you don't explicitly separate them, as it aims to get you the best results. This strategy leads to fewer campaigns and ad sets, which is easier to manage and allows Meta to optimise better by spending more budget on fewer ad sets, gathering more conversion data faster.
Embrace Broader Targeting with Strong Content ("Suggest an Audience"):
With the changes, the "suggest an audience" option (part of Advantage+ audience) allows you to provide suggestions for age, gender, and detailed targeting, which Meta's AI can use or ignore. This offers a "hybrid option" providing the "best of both worlds" let’s say.
For new ad accounts without much conversion data, adding these suggestions (e.g., interests related to your music genre) can provide valuable "direction" to Meta's AI.
Open targeting (no detailed targeting, just location) can also perform well, especially for ad accounts with significant conversion data, as Meta's AI becomes "much smarter than us advertisers at being able to work that out". You can also consider Lookalike audiences if you want to specify a bit more based on population, if you want to get more granular.
By prioritising clear, relevant, and high-performing content, especially through the smart use of custom audiences, you provide Meta's sophisticated AI with the necessary signals to effectively identify and attract your desired audience in the evolving advertising landscape.
Meta’s updates caught a lot of users by surprise, however being attentive to these changes and adapting to them quickly are key, by making content designed specifically for your niche audience and setting the best values on your ads, even if they are broader now.