The vocabulary behind Meta ad delivery and the readings Ad Atelier produces — defined in plain language. For how the two delivery stages differ, see Stage 1 vs Stage 2.
Stage 1 retrieval
Stage 1 retrieval is the upstream step in Meta ad delivery where the platform decides which broad audience pool a creative is eligible to be shown to — driven largely by the creative itself — before any user-level optimization happens. It is the step Ad Atelier predicts. Get it wrong and no amount of downstream tuning will reach the audience you intended.
Stage 2 optimization
Stage 2 optimization is the downstream step where Meta optimizes delivery to specific individuals within the audience pool a creative was already routed into during Stage 1. Bids, budgets, and conversion signals act here. Ad Atelier deliberately does not model Stage 2 — it reads eligibility, not outcome.
Audience routing
Audience routingis the assignment of an ad creative to a particular audience pool by Meta’s algorithm — the practical result of Stage 1. When advertisers say an ad “found the wrong audience,” they usually mean it was routed to a pool whose taste, age, or gender skew did not match the intended buyer.
Advantage+ audience
Advantage+ audienceis Meta’s automated audience mode that infers who should see an ad from the creative and account signals rather than from manually defined targeting. Because the creative now carries most of the targeting weight, reading what the creative signals — before you spend — matters more than it did in the manual-targeting era.
Aesthetic tribe
An aesthetic tribeis Ad Atelier’s term for a cluster of audience taste and identity that a creative’s visual signals map to — and that Meta tends to route visually similar creatives toward. The predicted tribe is the headline output of a reading, carrying an age band and gender skew with it.
Entity signature
An entity signatureis Ad Atelier’s term for the fingerprint of a creative that determines whether Meta will collapse it into another ad’s delivery pool. Two creatives with near-identical signatures compete for — and dilute — the same audience instead of opening a new one.
Six-axis reading
A six-axis readingis Ad Atelier’s breakdown of a creative across six dimensions of strength and weakness. It names the single weakest axis — the one most likely to cap reach — and pairs it with three concrete suggestions for the next iteration.
Creative pre-flight
Creative pre-flightis the practice of evaluating an ad creative’s likely audience routing before any budget is spent — rather than discovering it from delivery data days later. It is the category Ad Atelier sits in: a check you run upstream of the auction.
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