Finding a larger online audience is a goal most business owners have. For years, Facebook ads have been used by motivated business owners to inform the masses about their products/services. Like many other popular social media websites, Facebook has undergone many changes since its inception. The most recent changes announced by this social media juggernaut involve their ad targeting tools.
A recent announcement by Facebook informed users of their advertising platform that changes to their targeting options would be unveiled in January of 2022. Read below to find out more about these changes and how they will affect your ability to segment users on this social media platform.
The Removal of Certain Detailed Targeting Options
The changes announced by the Facebook team directly affect the ability of users to target their ads based on certain criteria. Starting January 19th, 2022, Facebook removed certain sensitive options from its detailed targeting platform. These targeting options include things like:
- Sexual orientation
- Religious groups/practices
- Health issues
- Political affiliations
The team at Facebook said these targeting options are being removed because they aren’t based on their user’s personal attributes or physical characteristics. By removing these options, Facebook hopes to protect users’ interactions on their platform that may shape the way businesses target them.
Learning How To Build Saved Audiences
In July 2021, Facebook halted support of their popular Audience Insight tools. While this did affect the advertisers’ ability to segment their audiences on Facebook, there are ways to build saved audiences with Facebook Insights. By navigating your way to the Facebook Business Suite and opening your Audience Insights for your page, you can get a glimpse of who your audience is.
This page will show you information regarding the age, gender and top locations of the people viewing your ads. You can also navigate to the Potential Audience tab to find out more about the people you could reach by running ads on both Instagram and Facebook.
Making Lookalike Audiences For Your Facebook Ads
If you want to advertise to Facebook users similar to the customers you already have, then creating lookalike audiences is a must. In the past, Facebook Ads allowed advertisers to create location-targeted lookalike audiences on their platform. While this platform no longer allows this type of location-targeted lookalike audiences, there are ways around this restriction.
By adding geotargeting during your Facebook Ad campaign setup, you can generate lookalike audiences. You will also have a list of retired lookalike audiences from past campaigns. If you do have a list of these retired lookalike audiences, you should have an option to find their replacements. If you want to effectively use these lookalike audiences in new campaigns, then you have to ad location targeting in the ad set level phase of the campaign creation process.
As you can see, there are many changes coming to the Facebook Ad targeting process. With the information in this article, you can prepare for these changes.
By, Peter Roesler, President of Small Business SEO. 25+ years in marketing! Yippee.
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