By now, Iโm sure a lot of advertisers are aware that there are quite a number of interest targeting that are no longer available on the Meta Ads Manager dashboard.
With a big chunk of interest targeting being entirely removed from the targeting list on 17th March 2022, this poses a quite big problem.
All previous ad sets that have been affected by the interest targeting removal are all paused until the affected interest targetings are removed manually.
On the 19th of January 2022, Facebook announced the updates on the detailed targeting options related to the sensitive topics and the categories below are all to be removed.
1. Referencing causes
2. Organizations
3. Public figures that related to health
4. Race or ethnicity & political affiliations
5. Religion
6. Sexual orientation
In other words, interest targetings are no longer as detailed as before. Laser-targeted interest targetings are getting more difficult for all advertisers. The removal of these targeting elements could change and cause major impact on the ad performance.
What are the Impacts of the Removal?
1. Harder to Perform Laser-targeted Interest Targeting
With the removal of interest targetings on specific keywords, more keywords are moved into broader categories instead of individual products, figures, and organization naming. This made advertisers that previously had very good results face more challenges to do laser-targeted interests, unlike in the old times.
2. Audience Insights from Previous Learning No Longer Useable – Learning Reset
The interest targeting removal also affects the previous and existing ad sets where the affected ad sets with the interest targeting will be paused until itโs removed from the ad sets. All advertisers are required to make changes accordingly to turn back on the affected ad sets. These major changes will affect the previous campaign learning and basically reset the whole learning.
3. Inconsistent Campaign Performance
Due to the updates on the interest targeting, most advertisers are only able to proceed with the ad campaigns with broader audience targeting. A broader audience would make the targeting less defined and harder to reach the most relevant audience consistently. Therefore, advertisers are more likely to experience inconsistent results whereby the best performing ad sets may have unstable cost per result that fluctuates from time to time.
Itโs been challenging since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Additionally, the market competition getting more intense due to the sheer number of advertisers flocking into the digital markets and the rising numbers of more online-based business models.
This latest update on the Facebook Interest Targeting makes it even more challenging for advertisers to maintain, optimize and improve their campaign targeting without a proper strategy.
How about you? Did you notice these changes? How are you coping with it? What is the latest strategy that you are implementing to optimize your campaigns? Feel free to share with us in the comment section below!
We also took quite a lot of effort with trials & errors along the way together with our existing clients to cope with the Facebook interest targeting removal. Fortunately, we managed to devise workable strategies that help the campaign performance that can be applied to almost every client from different industries.
If you would like to learn more about our latest strategies to cope with the interest targeting updates on Facebook & Instagram to optimize the campaign targeting and performance further, Sign up for our Facebook & Instagram 2 Days Hands-on Advertising Workshop!
Contact Us to Learn More:
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