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Facebook ads targeting options: what you can and cannot target on Meta today

Facebook ads are targeted, and on Meta you target an audience with five kinds of tool: location, age and gender, language, detailed targeting by demographics, interests and behaviours, and audiences built from your own data (custom, lookalike and saved audiences). You cannot pick the members of a named Facebook group or the followers of someone else's Page; Meta's pages offer audiences only from your own Page, account, website and customer list. Postcode targeting exists, but not for teens or in housing, employment and financial campaigns.

Last updated 13 October 2026

Are Facebook ads targeted? How to target an audience in Meta ads

Yes. Every ad set has an Audience section, and Meta's page about reaching new audiences lists what you can set there. Everything in this post comes from Meta's Business Help Centre as it read on 13 October 2026, unless a date is given. The Help Centre pages carry no publication date, and Meta notes that not every option is available for every placement or advertiser.

Meta's audience tools and their limits, from Meta's Business Help Centre on 13 October 2026
What you want to reach	The tool Meta offers	Limits Meta states
People in a place	Locations: countries, states or provinces, cities, congressional districts, ZIP or postcodes	Up to 25 countries, 250 cities or 50,000 postcodes. No postcodes in housing, employment or financial campaigns, or for teens.
An age group, or men or women	Age and gender	Ages 13 to 65+, with a higher minimum in some countries. Gender is unavailable for teens and fixed in the special categories.
Speakers of a language	Languages	Unavailable for teens.
People with an interest, behaviour or demographic trait	Detailed targeting	Include only: exclusions were removed in 2025. Unavailable for teens and for ads that click to WhatsApp.
Your customers, site visitors or followers	Custom audiences	Built from your own data and your own Page, account or events. Up to 500 for each ad account.
New people who resemble your customers	Lookalike audiences	Needs a source audience of yours. Limited or unavailable in the special categories.
The same settings again	Saved audiences	Editing one updates every campaign that uses it.

Meta gives one example of each kind of detailed targeting: an interest such as blues music, a behaviour such as frequent travellers, a demographic such as being at university. It says the options draw on things like the ads people click, the Pages and posts they engage with, groups they joined, events they responded to, and the device they use. Several selections are read as "or", not "and", unless you narrow the audience.

Can Facebook ads target groups, or the followers of another Page?

Not by name. Meta's list of custom audience types has no audience made from the members of a Facebook group. What its pages do say is narrower: groups a person joined are one of the factors behind detailed targeting, so group membership can feed an interest option, but you choose the interest, not the group.

Followers of another Page are the same story. Meta defines an engagement custom audience as people who engaged with your content, and the steps for a Facebook Page audience have you select your Page. None of the pages we read offers a competitor's Page as a source. The audiences Meta does list are:

From your business: website visitors (through the Meta pixel), app activity, catalogue interactions, a customer list and offline activity such as in-store purchases.
From your content on Meta: video viewers, lead form openers, Instant Experience, Shop visitors, your Instagram professional account, your Facebook events, your Facebook Page and your Marketplace listings.

Page and Instagram audiences look back 365 days at most, and they refresh themselves as people engage or drop out. Any custom audience can be the source for a lookalike audience, where a percentage range sets how closely the new audience matches the source: smaller is closer, larger is broader.

Customer lists and personal data

A customer list custom audience is built from identifiers you already hold, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Meta says the list is hashed before use and then matched against profiles, and that it learns no new identifying information from the hashed data.

The responsibility stays with you. Meta's setup page tells advertisers to check they have a legal basis to use the information, and says that under the GDPR the advertiser is the data controller for an uploaded list. A list cannot be named after or built on sensitive information such as health or financial details; Meta says audiences that are flagged for this cannot be used. You can also upload a list for exclusion only, for example people who opted out of marketing.

This is general information, not legal advice. Privacy law differs by country. In Australia the regulator is the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, whose direct marketing guidance lists targeted online advertising that uses personal information as an example. Elsewhere, ask your own regulator.

Facebook ads zip code targeting, postcodes and radius

ZIP code and postcode targeting is a standard option outside the restricted cases below. Meta's page on using location targeting lets you search for up to 50,000 ZIP or postcodes in an ad set and recommends a bulk upload for long lists.

When you enter a place or drop a pin, Meta picks a radius by default and you adjust it with a slider. The minimum and maximum vary by location type.
A radius never crosses a national border, even if the map appears to. Add each country separately.
A radius cannot be set on a postcode, state, region or country. Those cover the whole area.
For a city you can choose Current city only.

What a location actually reaches (people who live there, were there recently or go often) is covered in our post on ads in the wrong language or location.

What Meta has removed from detailed targeting, and when

Detailed targeting options Meta has removed or consolidated, with the dates Meta gives
Date	What changed
19 January 2022	Options relating to topics people may perceive as sensitive were removed: causes, organisations or public figures connected to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation. Announced on 9 November 2021.
31 March 2025	Detailed targeting exclusions were removed in Ads Manager, for new ad sets and from active campaigns. Boosted posts followed on 10 June 2025.
23 June 2025	Meta began combining related interests into broader groupings, for example within a sports category, a film or music genre, car models or a type of food and drink.
15 January 2026	Campaigns created before 23 June 2025 that still used a consolidated option stop delivering.

The first row is from Meta's announcement of 9 November 2021, which said the removed options were based on people's interactions with content, not on personal attributes. The rest are from its page of updates to detailed targeting. That page says you can still exclude people with a custom audience, and with the brand protection and employee exclusions in your ad account's advertising settings.

Minimum age rules, and what you can target for teens

The lowest age you can select is 13 and the highest is 65+, which covers everyone older. Meta says the minimum is higher in some jurisdictions and gives Australia, at 16, as its example. Its page about advertising to teens then lists what is unavailable worldwide when an audience includes people under 18, or older in some countries:

Gender and language.
Postcodes and any location smaller than a city, including a custom radius or pin drop.
Detailed targeting.
Website, app, customer list, engagement and offline custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.

That leaves age and location down to city level. The page also says ads with locations in the EU, the EEA or Switzerland have not been delivered to people under 18 since November 2023. Meta announced the limits in two steps. On 27 July 2021 it said interest and activity targeting for under-18s would end within weeks, and on 10 January 2023 it said gender would go from that February.

What is restricted in special ad categories

Campaigns for housing, employment, or financial products and services have fewer options. For advertisers based in the United States, or showing ads to people in the United States, Canada and the European countries Meta lists, its page on audiences for these campaigns says:

No postcode targeting and no location exclusions.
A city, address or pin drop includes a wider radius: 15 miles in the United States and Canada, 10 miles in the listed European countries.
Age is generally fixed at 18 to 65+, and all genders must be included.
Some detailed targeting options are unavailable, and Advantage+ lookalike is unavailable.
A saved audience is updated to comply.

Our post on Facebook ads for real estate goes through the housing category, including who must declare it.

Advantage+ audience vs targeting

Everything above describes what you can enter. Whether Meta stays inside it is a separate setting. Advantage+ audience is on by default, including when you save an audience, and with it on, detailed targeting, age range, gender and included custom audiences are suggestions Meta can go beyond. Our post on Advantage+ audience lists which inputs are hard limits and how to switch to the original options.

Sources

Questions people ask

Can Facebook ads target groups?

Not by name. Meta's list of custom audience types has no audience made from the members of a Facebook group, and its Page audience is built from your own Page, not someone else's. Meta does say that groups a person joined are one of the factors behind detailed targeting, so membership can feed an interest option that you select.

Are Facebook ads targeted?

Yes. In each ad set you can set locations, age, gender, languages and detailed targeting by demographics, interests and behaviours, and you can add custom, lookalike and saved audiences. With Advantage+ audience on, which is the default, Meta treats several of those entries as suggestions it can go beyond.

Does Facebook ads zip code targeting still exist?

Yes. Meta's location targeting page lets you enter up to 50,000 ZIP or postcodes in an ad set. Postcodes are not available in housing, employment or financial products and services campaigns in the countries Meta lists, or when the audience includes people under 18.

What is the minimum age you can target with Meta ads?

Meta says the minimum age on Facebook and Instagram is 13, and higher in some jurisdictions; its example is Australia, at 16. For audiences that include people under 18, gender, language, postcodes, detailed targeting, custom audiences and lookalike audiences are unavailable, and ads with locations in the EU, the EEA or Switzerland are not delivered to under-18s.

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Mockingbird is an independent product from Onwards Analytics and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Meta. Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Meta Ads Manager and the Meta Ad Library are trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. Meta changes its tools often; check Meta's own help pages for the current detail before you rely on it.