Meta Targeting, Audiences and Ad Previews From Your AI Agent

Two questions decide an ad before it spends anything.

Who sees it? Countries and an age range are a start. A real campaign also targets interests and job titles, retargets the people who visited your site, excludes the people who already bought, and finds new people who look like your best customers.

What do they see? Meta crops one image differently in each placement. In a Story or a Reel, the buttons and the caption cover part of the image. When the price is in the image itself, only the rendered ad tells you if it still reads.

Until today, your AI agent could build a Meta campaign with countries, ages and gender. For anything more precise, and to check the crop, you opened Ads Manager.

That changes today. Your agent can now target, build audiences and show you each placement of an ad, from the same conversation where it builds the campaign.

What Is New

Ask your agent to…	What happens on Meta
Find interests and job titles	The agent searches Meta by name and shows each option with its category and the size of its audience.
Target them on an ad set	A new ad set targets the interests and job titles you choose, and includes or excludes Custom Audiences.
Build a website audience	The people your Pixel saw in the last 1 to 180 days, on all pages or on the pages you name, except the people who sent an event, such as a purchase.
Build a customer-list audience	The people of up to 10,000 emails and phone numbers that you give.
Build a lookalike	The people of one country who are most like another audience, from 1 % to 10 % of that country.
Check your Pixel	Each event that your Pixel received in the last 7 days, with its count and the time of the last one.
Optimize for a custom conversion	An ad set can now optimize for a custom conversion, and not only for a standard event.
Show the ad preview	The ad as Meta renders it in each placement, for an ad or for a creative that has no ad yet.

The agent also lists the Custom Audiences and the custom conversions that exist on the ad account, and tells you which ones an ad set can use now.

From Audience to Ad Preview, in One Conversation

In Claude, in ChatGPT, or in the Adgent inside the AdCrunch console:

Does the Northwind Web Pixel send Purchase?

The agent reads the events of the Pixel for the last 7 days. An ad set that optimizes for an event that never fires gets no delivery, so this is the first check.

Make an audience of the people who visited the product pages in the last 30 days and did not buy. Then make a 1 % lookalike of our customers in France.

The agent creates the website audience, then the lookalike. Meta can take some hours to fill a new audience.

Add an ad set to Spring Prospecting: France, ages 25 to 54, interests about yoga, the lookalike included, our customers excluded. No Advantage+ audience.

The agent first searches Meta for the yoga interests, so that it uses real options and does not guess an id. Then it creates the ad set. The ad set arrives paused.

Show me the Reels and the Stories ad preview of the 9:16 ad.

The agent gets each placement as Meta renders it and looks at the images itself. It tells you that the Reels caption covers the bottom of the image, and that the €49 price at the top still reads. You also get a link to each image, and a link to the ad preview of Meta, for you to open.

Activate it.

Spend starts there, and not before.

Advantage+ Audience: The Agent Must Choose

Meta can show an ad set to people outside its targeting when it expects better results. Meta calls this Advantage+ audience. With it on, Meta treats your age range, your interests and your audiences as suggestions, not as limits.

Meta now requires an answer for most new ad sets. AdCrunch asks for it on every one: the agent must state on or off. AdCrunch has no default, because a default would decide for you who sees your ad.

With Advantage+ audience on, Meta accepts no minimum age above 25 and no maximum age. AdCrunch refuses that request before it sends anything to Meta, and the agent tells you why.

What Each Ad Preview Shows

With no placement named, the agent gets four: the Facebook feed, the Instagram feed, Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels. It can also ask for Facebook Stories and Facebook Reels.

Each placement comes back on its own:

ok: the image, as Meta renders it on a phone.
unsupported: Meta does not show this creative in this placement. The agent gives you the words of Meta.
failed: Meta or the render failed. The agent gives you the reason, and the other placements still come back.

The link to the ad preview of Meta stops working 24 hours after the call. The link to the image works at least as long. AdCrunch deletes each image after about a day.

An ad preview spends nothing and changes nothing. The agent can ask for one as often as you want, before and after each change to the creative.

The Rules That Keep It Safe

An ad set still starts paused. Targeting changes who an ad set can reach, not when it starts. Nothing spends until you activate it, and your AI client can ask you to approve that step.

An audience spends nothing. A Custom Audience is a group of people, not an ad. It has no status and no budget, so its creation needs no approval. It is still on the Activity page, with the person who asked for it.

Your customer list stays a hash. AdCrunch turns each email and each phone number into a hash before it stores the request, and Meta receives only the hashes. AdCrunch keeps no plaintext copy. The Activity page shows how many emails and phone numbers a list held, never the list.

The terms stay with you. Before your first customer list, a person of the ad account must accept the Custom Audience Terms of Meta. No API can accept them for you. Until a person accepts them, the agent gives you the page in Ads Manager where you do it.

Only your ad account. Before an ad preview, AdCrunch checks that the ad or the creative belongs to the ad account you connected. An ad of another account is refused, even when your Meta login can reach it.

Never a covered image. In the EU, Meta can show a cookie dialog over its ad preview. AdCrunch removes it. If something still covers the ad, the placement comes back as failed. The agent never judges an image that hides your ad.

What It Does Not Do Yet

We prefer that you know the limits before you meet them.

No targeting changes on a running ad set. Targeting is set when the agent creates the ad set. To change who sees an ad set, create a new one.
No interest exclusions. Meta removed them. To exclude people, exclude a Custom Audience.
Interests and job titles form one group. A person who matches any one of them can see the ad. There is no “yoga and running” rule yet, and no employers, behaviors or demographics.
A customer list is fixed. The agent cannot add people to a list or remove people from it. To refresh a list, create a new one.
One country per lookalike. For two countries, create two lookalikes.
An ad preview needs an ad or a creative. The agent creates the creative first, then shows its ad preview. Six placements are available, not every placement of Meta.
Meta only. On TikTok, Google Ads and OpenAI, the agent reads. It does not change anything.

Each of these tools is also on the AdCrunch REST API, with the same rules.

Where It Fits

The loop your agent runs on Meta now starts earlier and checks more:

Read your accounts and performance, across Meta, TikTok, Google Ads and OpenAI.
Plan the quarter as data your agent can execute.
Target interests, job titles and Custom Audiences, and build those audiences. New today.
Build paused campaigns, ad sets, creatives and ads.
Check each placement of an ad before it goes live. New today.
Copy, bid, schedule and rename what already runs.
Save the playbook that says how your team does all of it, and run it by name.

Ready to let your agent choose the audience and check the ad?

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Read the guide: Change what runs on Meta →