Buying traffic · also called open targeting, broad audience
Broad targeting
Broad targeting means giving an ad platform few or no audience restrictions beyond country, age and language, and letting its algorithm decide who sees the ad.
Old-style buying meant choosing interests: "car owners", "homeowners aged 45 to 60". Broad targeting drops those filters. The buyer sets the location and perhaps an age floor, and the algorithm uses the ad itself and the conversion data to find responders.
For Social-to-search arbitrage, broad has become the norm, and features such as Meta Advantage+ nudge every campaign that way. The creative does the targeting: an ad about roof repair attracts people with roof problems. The conversion signal does the refining: if revenue is reported through a Conversions API, the system drifts toward people who click search ads.
Broad targeting is cheap per click because the platform has the widest pool to choose from. The risk is that an algorithm told only to find clicks will find the cheapest ones, often accidental tappers or low-value regions. So broad targeting works only with a meaningful optimisation event, tight Geo-targeting, and regular checks of where spend actually went.
Think of it like this
Narrow targeting is fishing with a rod in one chosen spot. Broad targeting is a wide net, which only works if you are strict about which fish you keep.
Related terms
Lookalike audience
A lookalike audience is a targeting group an ad platform builds by finding people who resemble a seed list you supply, such as past converters.
Meta Advantage+
Advantage+ is Meta's family of AI automation features that choose audience, placements, budget split and creative variations for Facebook and Instagram ads.
Geo-targeting
Geo-targeting is restricting an ad campaign to people in chosen countries, regions or cities, and excluding everyone else.
Creative
A creative is the actual advertisement a person sees: its image or video, headline, text and button.
Learning phase
The learning phase is the early period after launching or significantly editing a campaign, when the platform's algorithm is still testing who to show the ad to.