Thousands of Detailed Targeting Options on Facebook Have Been Removed

At the beginning of November, Meta announced they will be removing some of their detailed targeting options for Facebook ads. We all expected that Meta will only remove a few categories but what we saw on January 19th surprised us all. 

The expectations: 

When Meta originally spoke about reducing detailed targeting options, the focus was on sensitive themes, “such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation”. Moreover, we expected that the removed detailed targeting options will be around health issues, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and groups, political ideas, social issues, causes, organizations, and people.

What was removed in reality:  

On January 19th, Facebook made another announcement stating that apart from removing the 

detailed targeting options we discussed above, they will also remove others “because they are either not widely used, may be redundant alongside others or too granular, or because they relate to topics that people may perceive as sensitive, such as targeting options referencing causes, organisations or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation.” 

The surprising part of this all is that Meta decided to remove more interests – the more unpopular ones. This could affect a lot of the more niche industries and businesses that rely on those granular detailed targeting options.

What can you do to try reducing the negative impact on your ads from the removal of so many detailed targeting options on Facebook? 

There are a few tips that could help you tackle the issue at hand. 

1. Use more lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences give you very good and precise targeting options. You do however need to have a strong enough database in order to use them successfully. 
2. You could test broad targeting by just age, gender and location. This is Facebook’s advice as well. You need to be careful when using this type of targeting. Why? It may be quite tricky on your advertising budget and lead/ sales relevance.
3. Another suggestion would be to use the “Suggestions” option available on the Detailed Targeting option in your Ads Manager.
   
   
   It is designed to present you with suggestions similar to the detailed targeting options you are inputting. This means that you don’t need to worry in case the interests you would like to add are not available. Facebook will present you with similar suggestions that you will be able to choose from. 

We hope you won’t find a lot of your “interests” to be missing. Our main advice would be to try different targeting options and tactics to determine what works best for your business. Also, do not forget to follow us to stay in the loop of all upcoming news from the social media world.