ADVERTISMENT TARGETING CRITERIA SUGGESTIONS

An online system suggests targeting criteria to advertisers creating new ads in the online system by generating a seed group of targeting criteria. The seed targeting criteria include targeting criteria already selected (if any), targeting criteria previously used, and targeting criteria extracted from the ad being created (e.g., from ad components) or a page being promoted by the ad. The seed targeting criteria are expanded via collaborative filtering on advertisers, collaborative filtering on targeted users, and determination of relationships within topic hierarchies. The online system selects a subset of the expanded targeting criteria by applying a machine learning model to each targeting criterion to determine a probability of the advertiser selecting the targeting criterion if it were suggested. The targeting criteria are ranked based on the determined probabilities and selected based on the ranking. The suggested targeting criteria may also be ordered in the user interface based on the ranking.