Interest Targeting
By the AdFlint research team · Last reviewed July 2026
The subset of Meta's detailed targeting built from topics and pages people engage with, used to approximate affinity when no first-party signal exists yet.
Interests are inferred from Facebook and Instagram activity, so they describe engagement patterns rather than verified intent, and Meta shows you nothing about how a user qualified. They earn their place at the top of the funnel when you have no pixel history to work from. The usual error is layering dozens of interests, producing an audience indistinguishable from broad targeting anyway.
Interest Targeting compared with
The settings this gets confused with, and how to tell them apart.
- Interest Targeting vs Broad Targeting
- Interest Targeting vs Advantage+ Audience
- Interest Targeting vs Custom Audiences
- Interest Targeting vs Lookalike Audiences
- Interest Targeting vs Website Custom Audiences
- Interest Targeting vs Customer List Custom Audiences
- Interest Targeting vs Engagement Custom Audiences
- Interest Targeting vs Saved Audiences
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