Facebook ads targeting
in Malta.

A few years ago, targeting was the main skill in Facebook advertising. You picked interests such as “home improvement” or “yoga”, stacked them, excluded a few others and hoped you had found your customers. Today most of that work has moved inside Meta’s delivery system. When you create an ad set, Advantage+ audience is switched on by default for most objectives, and the age ranges, interests and audiences you add are read as hints about who to start with, not walls Meta has to stay inside.

What you still control firmly are the audience controls: the locations, the minimum age, the audiences you want excluded and, if you choose, the languages. Meta will not show the ad outside those. Inside them, it looks for the people most likely to do what you optimise for, whether that is a lead, a WhatsApp chat or a purchase, using its own data and the signals your Pixel and Conversions API send back.

That changes what “good targeting” means for a Malta business. It is less about finding a clever interest and more about three things: setting the controls correctly for where you actually sell, giving Meta good data about who became a customer, and writing ads that make the right people stop and the wrong people scroll past.

Set a minimum age when there is a real reason: alcohol, cosmetic treatments and some financial products need 18 or more, and a few of Meta’s own policies require it. Beyond that, an age range you type in is treated as a suggestion when Advantage+ audience is on. That is usually fine. Many Malta businesses assume their customer is “women aged 30 to 45”, then find that a good share of their buyers are older, younger or men buying gifts.

Gender targeting is rarely worth it outside products that are clearly for one group, and it is not available at all in the special ad categories. Leave it open and let the creative do the work: an ad showing a men’s barber cut will mostly be clicked by the people it is meant for.

Language targeting matches the language people use Facebook and Instagram in. Meta’s own advice is to leave it empty unless your ad is in a language that is not common in the location. For Malta that is useful in a narrow way: an ad written in Italian, Serbian or Filipino for one community, for example. For an English or Maltese ad aimed at everyone, leave it blank, or you may quietly cut out customers who use the app in another language.

Custom audiences are built from your own data, and they are still the most valuable targeting you have. You can create them from people who visited your website (up to 180 days back), people who engaged with your Facebook Page or Instagram account (up to 365 days), people who watched your videos, people who opened or sent your lead form, and customer lists you upload.

Use them in two ways. First, for retargeting: showing a reminder or an offer to people who visited a product page or asked about a price but did not book. Second, for exclusions: keeping existing customers out of an ad for new customers, so you do not pay to show a “first visit” discount to people who already come every month. Exclusions of custom audiences are still hard controls, even though interest exclusions are gone.

Customer lists need care under GDPR. Upload only people you have a lawful basis to use this way, tell them in your privacy notice that you use their details for advertising on social media, and let Meta hash the data during upload. A list of 200 customers from a shop in Paola is small, but as an exclusion or as a lookalike source it is genuinely useful.

A lookalike audience asks Meta to find people who resemble a source audience, such as your customers or your best leads. The source needs at least 100 people from one country, and Meta suggests 1,000 to 5,000 for better results. You choose a size from 1% to 10% of the people in the target country: 1% is the closest match, 10% is broader.

Malta changes the maths. Because the country is small, a 1% lookalike is a small group of people, and the gap between 1% and 10% is less dramatic than in a large country. For most local businesses, a lookalike of past customers is worth testing against a broad Malta audience, but it is often not the winner it would be in Germany or the UK. With Advantage+ audience switched on, Meta also treats a lookalike as a suggestion rather than a limit.

Lookalikes are not available for the housing, employment and financial products and services categories. A good source matters more than the percentage: a list of 300 people who actually bought is a better seed than 5,000 people who once liked a post.

We start with the business, not the settings: where you deliver or serve, who your best customers are, what they buy first, and how they like to get in touch. From that we set the controls (locations, minimum age, exclusions), build the custom audiences from your website, Instagram and customer list, and write ads that speak to the customer you want. Tracking comes first, so Meta learns from real enquiries and sales, not clicks.

After launch we read the results by age, placement and location, and adjust the ads and the offer before touching the targeting. Our Meta ads management starts from €1,249 a month plus ad spend, excluding VAT, and the ad account and audiences stay in your name.