Meta said in November that they would be deleting precise Facebook ad targeting options from their platform going forward. However, the fact is that the deletions that would be implemented were considerably more profound than anyone could have anticipated.
In a more recent additional update, Meta released…
“Starting Jan 19, 2022, we’re removing some Detailed Targeting options because they are either not widely used, they may be redundant with others or too granular, or because they relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as targeting options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation”.
On January 19, thousands of detailed targeting choices were deleted from Meta’s targeting options. If you rely on targeting alternatives that are no longer available, this can have a detrimental influence on your advertising campaign.
As part of the original notification, Meta proposed removing detailed targeting options that were related to sensitive topics, such as “options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that are related to health, race or ethnicity,” “political affiliation,” “religion,” and “sexual orientation.”
It is anticipated that specific targeting pertaining to health concerns (“Lung cancer awareness”), sexual orientation (“LGBT culture”), religious practices, church and groups (“Catholic church, Baptist”), political ideas, political parties, social issues, causes, organizations, and people will be eliminated.
A concern at the time was for non-profit organizations that target people who had expressed an interest in their cause. Wow was this a major overhaul for them? Once the modifications were put into place, Meta published another notice about what it was doing, this time stating that the deletions will be significantly harsher than previously written about.
It appears that a large number of precise targeting possibilities were lost as a result of this, according to accounts we’ve been hearing from my communities. And many of them have nothing to do with sensitive subjects at all, but instead, fall into one of the other categories – “removing some Detailed Targeting options because they are either not widely used, they may be redundant with others, or too granular, or because they relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive“.
Meta suggests that for ad targeting you now use…
Alternative Targeting products to reach your audiences
“Beyond the remaining Detailed Targeting options, you can still use other available targeting products such as:
- Broad targeting, which includes gender, age and location. Targeting broadly essentially means that you’re mostly relying on our delivery system to find the best people to show your ad to. This approach can lead to us finding potential customers you never would’ve known about otherwise.
- Custom Audiences, which lets you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. You can use sources like customer lists, website or app traffic, or engagement on Facebook, to create Custom Audiences of people who already know your business.
- Lookalike audiences, which are created from an existing audience, and can help optimize audience reach.
- Lookalike expansion, which will be automatically applied if you leverage lookalike audiences and optimize for conversions, value or app events using the conversions objective. You control the audience used to create the lookalike audience. However, we may deliver ads beyond the selected 1-10% lookalike range. We do this if our system predicts it’s likely to improve performance.
- Targeting expansion, which uses advertisers’ Detailed Targeting inputs as a guide to delivery. We may deliver ads beyond your Detailed Targeting selections if our system predicts it’s likely to improve performance. Targeting Expansion is available for opt-in on all objectives, except Brand Awareness and Reach”.
Steve Brown
