Social media giant Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is in the midst of rolling out a significant change to targeting for its Meta Ads offering.
The change in question relates to its detailed targeting options. When creating an audience for an ad campaign, you can choose from a vast array of detailed targeting options to refine your audience to your target avatar. These options encompass demographics, interests and behaviours, allowing people to target based on education level, life events, hobbies, and their online behaviours, amongst many others.
Previously, when building an audience, you could refine this by including people who match particular targeting options, and also excluding people. Now, however, Meta is in the process of removing the ability to exclude people from an audience based on detailed targeting.
Meta says it’s doing this to improve the performance of campaigns. It claims that a three-month test it conducted earlier this year revealed the median cost per conversion was reduced by 22.6% when exclusions based on detailed targeting weren’t used. However, this was a test conducted only between April to June, with only 15 advertisers involved, and the statistic is the median figure, not the average.
Whether this feature removal will actually result in a reduced cost per conversion is yet to be seen, but in some cases at least, it seems like a questionable move.
Let’s say you were running an ad for dog-themed merchandise, and the products made a joke about cat lovers, putting them down. While this could prompt some engagement on the ad from cat lovers, the chances are they wouldn’t purchase the products, so to avoid wasting budget, you may exclude people with cat-related interests, such as ‘cat lady’, from your audience.
As a more extreme example, a business could be selling genuine fur coats. This business almost certainly wouldn’t want to show the ads to vegans or those who follow the likes of PETA, for example, as these individuals won’t want to purchase the products, and any disparaging comments they leave on an ad could actually end up discouraging others from purchasing too.
Any campaigns that currently use detailed targeting exclusions will still run until January 31st, 2025, at which point the campaigns will stop until the audience is amended. For new campaigns, Meta is in the process of removing this feature, which began in July and is set to be implemented across several months. For us here at Engage Web, this has finally hit for our ad account and our clients.
If you’re running ads via Meta currently, it’s worth checking to see whether any of your campaigns will be affected and start planning accordingly. If you’re hoping to run ads in the future, it will be more important than ever to ensure the targeting options you can use are as refined as possible to match up with your target audience.
If you need help with running Meta ads, be that on Facebook, Instagram or both, we’d be happy to discuss how we can help you. Reach out to our Engage Web team today.
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