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Advantage+ audience can work really well. If yours isn't bringing enquiries, open the age, gender and location breakdown in Ads Manager and check whether the campaign is reaching the right people. For a childcare centre that means first-time parents and parents of 0 to 2 year olds within a realistic drive of the centre. If it isn't, switching to a standard audience with a tight catchment often drives better results.
If you run Meta ads for your childcare centre, you've seen the recommendation in Ads Manager. Switch on Advantage+ audience, let Meta find the people, sit back.
It's sold as set and forget, and for a lot of advertisers it works well enough that they never check where the spend is going. For a business that focuses on local families, the default setup can result in a lot of wasted ad spend.
What is Advantage+ audience actually optimising for?
Advantage+ audience is Meta's automated targeting. Instead of you choosing ages, locations and interests, Meta treats your settings as suggestions and goes looking for whoever it predicts will complete the action the campaign is optimised for.
Hand it the keys with no guardrails and it goes looking for the cheapest result it can find. If your campaign is set to optimise for clicks or landing page views, that means the cheapest clicks, wherever they happen to be, rather than the families nearby who are ready to enrol.
Meta's system is very good at finding people who behave like the people who already responded. The catch for childcare is that the people who click an ad and the people who book a tour are often different groups. Advantage+ can drift toward an audience that clicks and never enquires. The clicks and reach look fine, and the enquiries stay flat.
How do you check who your ads are reaching?
Ads Manager will show you who your ads are actually reaching, broken down by age, gender and location, and we look at that on every campaign whether Advantage+ is on or not.
- In Ads Manager, open the campaign and use the Breakdown menu to view results by age and gender, then by region. Look at where the spend went rather than where the clicks came from.
- Compare the breakdown to the people who actually enquired. If the enquiries are coming from parents aged 25 to 44 within a few suburbs and the spend is spreading to 18 to 24 year olds two regions away, the algorithm has found a cheap audience rather than the right one.
- Check whether Meta has automatically opted the campaign into any Advantage+ features since you last looked. It does this quietly, and it's the first thing to rule out when cost per enquiry rises on a campaign you haven't touched.
- Do this monthly at least. Drift is gradual, and a campaign that was fine in February can be reaching the wrong people by August.
In short, your breakdown by age, gender and location should match the families you're after, first-time parents and parents of 0 to 2 year olds within a realistic drive of the centre. Spend landing anywhere else is wasted.
What guardrails do we put in before letting it run?
Before we let Advantage+ run on a childcare account, three settings are in place.
Tight local targeting, with a radius that matches how far families will actually drive and the outer suburbs excluded rather than left to chance.
The campaign optimising for an enquiry, a form or a call rather than a click or a page view. That one setting changes who Meta goes looking for more than anything else does, and it only works if your conversion tracking is counting every real enquiry.
Exclusions for existing families, staff, people who've already enquired, and any audience segment that has proven to click without converting.
When is Advantage+ audience fine?
With those guardrails in place, Advantage+ often works well, and on a larger account with enough enquiry data it can find families a manual audience would miss. It's also a reasonable choice when a manual audience has become too narrow and the same people are seeing the same ad too often, which is a question for the ad fatigue article rather than this one.
Where it doesn't work, switching to a standard audience with a tight catchment usually drives better results. Meta's recommendations are built to work on average across every advertiser on the platform, and your centre isn't average. It has one address and a catchment of a few suburbs. So we test what Meta suggests against what we know works locally and keep whichever one brings enquiries, the same way we split the budget on what the enquiries say rather than what the platform suggests.
Not sure how your childcare centre's Meta campaigns are set up? Book a free ads audit and we'll pull the demographic breakdown with you.
Elaine Liaw is Head of Digital at Playground Digital. She has spent 10+ years in digital marketing for Australian and global family brands, from baby food to one of Australia's largest childcare platforms.