Meta announced that in early 2022 the ability to target people based on health, race and ethnicity, political affiliations, religion, sexual orientation, and many other topics would be eliminated. The change, which is fully active now, was indicative of a broader trend that speaks to the growing sensitivity to overly precise targeting parameters across the platform’s user base.
What does this mean for us as advertisers? Let’s start with a historical flashback.
The social giant stated that these changes stemmed from historical discrimination against people and were meant to avoid any future misuse of their targeting tools. Meta has received a number of complaints about how advertisers were abusing these powerful capabilities.
Shortly after the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg remained steadfast in not making major reforms. When aggressively questioned by congress members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he repeated that taking down misleading political ads would go against Facebook’s support for the values of free speech.
By contrast, other platforms took a different stand: then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the platform would prohibit all political ads starting November 2019, in an effort to do away with any potential issues regarding political advertising. He explained in his tweet that our democratic infrastructure may not be able to handle the ramifications of the enhanced reach of political speech. Therefore, taking a step back to reassess the implications of this activity would benefit democracy.
With the countless examples of Facebook targeting abuse, it’s no surprise Mark Zuckerburg finally decided to take action and steadily made adjustments over time:
- In 2018, over 5,000 ad targeting classifications were removed.
- The anti-Semitic ad groups were halted in response to the ProPublica report.
- New requirements were introduced around sharing custom audiences.
The next big hit came in April 2021 when Apple’s iOS 14.5 release gave users the right to opt out of cross-app tracking, directly impacting ad personalization and reporting. From a targeting standpoint, this meant advertisers ended up with smaller and less accurate pixel-based audiences—with major drawbacks::
- Vastly reduced efficacy of retargeting for some accounts
- Less accurate pixel-based audiences for building lookalikes
- Trickier decisions when choosing objectives for simultaneous campaigns
iOS 14.5’s changes also coincided with the promise of a “cookie-less” world on the horizon and a need to move tracking to the server side, Meta’s rejection of Apple’s Private Click Measurement (PCM) in favor of its own solution called “Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM)”, and a shrinking of maximum attribution windows from 28 days to 7 days. For some advertisers, all this meant every stage of the funnel needed small adjustments to targeting.
With the scene set, how does this affect our placement and targeting today?
With the conjunction of interest-based targeting options getting smaller and iOS 14 limiting pixel-based optimization and audience construction, what should you do to tackle these changes? Here are a few tips:
1. Use on-platform engagement audiences more. Users are still sharing lots of data with Meta while interacting on Facebook and Instagram, and you are still permitted to use it for re-engagement efforts.
- Video viewers are still great for retargeting
- People who engage with your content are still great for building lookalikes
- Both of these audiences can usually handle budget increases
2. Leverage your email or CRM list more
- Target your lists directly, and aim to segment it with more care
- Build a wider range of lookalikes based on these segments
- These, too, can usually handle a bigger budget.
3. Implement the Conversions API — this will help fill in gaps, allowing you to make audiences built from website activity work well even post-iOS 14.5.
4. Test out broader targeting with broader messaging. Sometimes the best solution we found was a bigger rethink about how we were addressing key audience segments, ensuring the message had a broader appeal so we could target more broadly.
There is currently no consensus among tech companies regarding ad policies and standards. No matter what decision is made and which policies and standards are enforced, backlash from the government, the masses, and reporters is almost guaranteed. The question for us is how we prepare in an ever-changing landscape.
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