Meta Is Changing Facebook Ads Targeting For 2022
Meta (formerly Facebook) has recently announced that they are removing Facebook Ads audience targeting options across four categories starting January 19, 2022.
Meta has announced recently that audience targeting changes are coming this Jan 19, 2022 to Facebook ad campaigns.
Why the change? This is due to industry pressure and Facebook holding up to their promise. Also, there’s a rising concern and sensitivity when Facebook users are identified based on their affiliation in terms of social causes, health conditions, or demographic characteristics.
So What are Changing In Facebook Ads Targeting?
The updates will start to roll on January 19, Facebook will then start to remove the targeting options on these four main categories along with their niche segments that were rarely used:
- Health causes such as breast cancer awareness.
- Sexual orientation such as LGBT.
- Religious practices and groups such as Catholic Church and other religious practices.
- Political beliefs such as causes, political figures & parties, or social issues.
Advertisers can keep their audience targeting settings and the ads will continue delivering until March 17, 2022.
So if you have an ad sets created prior to January 19 update, it will still be possible for you to make any changes through campaign-level which involves: budget amounts or changing campaign names. This won’t impact targeting until March 17.
Though take note that if you edit in ad set level, this will trigger audience changes. Additionally, if you have an ad set paused to prior to March 17 and reactivate it, the new changes will be implemented.
After that period – March 17, it won’t be possible anymore to edit audiences that are deprecated.
Will this have any impact for Social Advertisers?
Meta has been the most pressured to make these changes compared to other platforms. So it would be interesting to see if other social media platforms will follow these changes as well especially on their targeting capabilities.
Without the ability and feature to have a granularity in targeting across sensitive categories, other social media platforms will face the same criticisms that have been directed towards Facebook as well.
But expect that other social media platforms will follow suit with this update in the future.