What Facebook’s Detailed Targeting Updates Mean for Advertisers

Reading Time: ~1 Min

woman on laptop looking at facebook

A couple weeks ago on January 19, 2022, Facebook’s updates to their Detailed Targeting options were officially removed. While your impacted ad sets can continue using these options until March 17, 2022, any new ad sets no longer have those options.

Detailed Targeting is the ability to refine your target audiences based on their interests and behaviours. This data is gathered by Facebook via the ads someone clicked, pages they’ve engaged with and activities they’ve engaged in on Facebook.

What’s Affected?

The topics included in this update are causes, organizations or any public figure that relates to health, race/ethnicity, politics, religion or sexual orientation.

Examples included by Facebook are:

  • Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)

  • Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)

  • Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)

  • Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures

What Does This Mean?

Depending on your company or client services/products, prospect targeting just got a lot more difficult. Your best option for targeting now lies in:

  • Custom Audiences, which are uploaded customer lists, website/app visitors or people who have engaged with your page/post.

  • Lookalike Audiences which are created via your above Custom Audiences. Facebook takes the data from the Custom Audience and creates an audience that has similar interests and behaviours on Facebook to your Custom Audience.

Written by Cheryl Goeres


Stay up to date on all things digital marketing by subscribing to our newsletter.

Previous
Previous

4 Benefits of Using Google Tag Manager

Next
Next

6 Tips For Your Digital Marketing Resumé