Webinar recap: How to maximise your Meta strategy in 2025

Sarah Kerrigan’s July webinar covered some major new enhancements to the Meta platform and was packed full of insightful tips emphasising the importance of AI and automation when seeking to maximise your meta strategy.

Kerrigan is Facebook advertising specialist and practitioner, she has been working in the social media space for her whole professional career and is highly experienced at helping businesses and professionals get the most out of social advertising. 

The relevance of Meta ads 

The presentation began with Kerrigan explaining the scope and relevance of Meta ads, including on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. The latest statistics on social media ad audiences show Facebook’s position has not moved from the top platform and Meta is still a primary marketing channel for many businesses, despite the emergence of platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn. With nearly 2.6 billion monthly active users around the globe, Facebook is still the most widely used social platform. 

AI and audience targeting

During the webinar, Kerrigan explained the new AI audience targeting feature introduced by Meta, which uses advanced AI tools to find the best campaign audience, automating the task for you. While the previous method of audience targeting relied on marketer’s assumptions, the new AI-driven approach focuses on finding the people most likely to convert from ads based on business data. This automated targeting feature has a multitude of benefits for users, including lowering costs per sale and website conversion. 

Advantage+ Audience campaign structure 

Meta’s Advantage+ Audience feature uses AI to automate audience building and targeting, saving time and resources by eliminating the need for multiple ad sets and campaigns. 
Kerrigan explained that it is no longer best practice to have separate retargeting ad sets, however, still emphasised the importance of creating custom audiences for retargeting, including website visitors, Facebook followers, and customers from CRM so they can be listed under advertising settings to give more visibility to what audiences Meta’s AI is targeting. 
Advantage+ Audience can be less effective for upper funnel and in some cases lead campaigns targeting specific demographics but is very useful for sales campaigns where you can allow AI to target an audience for you. 

AI creative enhancements 

Advantage+ also has a creative feature (Advantage+ Creative), which uses AI to enhance ad creatives by automatically adding things like music and text overlays. Using music in image ads can make them feel more organic and less like traditional ads, helping with engagement rates.  
The feature, similarly, to AI audience targeting, can save a lot of time and resource improving ads as the process can now be automated. However, marketers using the feature should review and customise these enhancements to ensure brand consistency and quality in Meta ads. Kerrigan cautioned against the use of ad overlays if strict brand guidelines are in place, as they can disrupt the visual consistency of an advert.

How to effectively leverage AI audience targeting in your Meta advertising 

Using AI features in Meta ads such as Advantage+ Audience can boost your ad campaigns while also saving you time and resources. These AI features are best applied when used primarily for sales and e-commerce campaigns, where the algorithm can optimise for your business outcomes, and simplify your campaign structure by consolidating audiences into a single campaign or ad set. 
You can continue to create custom audiences for retargeting but also leverage Meta’s AI to dynamically mix cold and retargeting audiences for optimal results on ads. Regularly monitoring campaign performance and creative enhancements will ensure the AI’s decisions align with your brand and objectives, and testing is essential to maintain quality and effectiveness.

Measuring conversions 

Kerrigan also looked at the newer and additional method of tracking ad conversions with the Facebook conversion API, which is different to the traditional pixel method. The conversion API measurement provides more accurate and reliable tracking without relying on third parties, although Kerrigan advises marketers to use the conversion API in conjunction with the pixel for the most accurate tracking.

Balancing AI and human creativity 

To ensure there is a balance between automation and creativity in campaign design and messaging, marketers need to stay updated with the latest creative trends and come up with unique and engaging ad variations.
The increased emphasis on creative design provides marketers with a real opportunity to develop and enhance the quality and creative elements of their brand to stand out. Marketers should use AI to enhance their Meta ads while maintaining overall control over creative elements to ensure brand consistency and quality.

Want to know more about how you can make the most out of your Meta advertising strategy? CIM’s Facebook and Instagram Advertising course is designed to teach you how to run results-driven Meta campaigns, with all the latest tools and insights from our expert course leader, Sarah Kerrigan.