Facebook Implements More Automated Ad Targeting via Detailed Targeting Expansion

As of September 21st, Facebook low key rolled out a pretty big update to its targeting options. This update will impact all advertisers who are using the conversion objective, leveraging Detailed Targeting or Look-a-like audiences AND optimizing for conversions, value or app events.

This update is called Targeting Expansion.

For those familiar with Facebook’s ad offering you’ll find that Targeting Expansion itself is not new. However, the update makes it so that advertisers do not have the ability to opt out of this feature, and it will be automatically applied to all campaigns that meet the above criteria.

So what is Targeting Expansions?

Targeting Expansion allows Facebook’s algorithms to show your ads beyond your target audience when the system believes your ads will yield better results. Not only will these people fall outside of the targeting criteria you as the advertisers selected, but Facebook won’t even provide reporting on who else saw your ads.

It’s important to note that Targeting Expansion is specific to Detailed Targeting/Look-a-like’s and doesn’t apply to location, age, or gender targeting options. Any exclusions and targeting outside of Detailed Targeting continues to apply. It also ONLY applies to the conversion objective in the platform.

So that means, while leveraging the conversion objective if you want to reach women aged 35-45 in New York, you still can and your ads will only be shown to that specific audience. It’s as soon as you start adding in Detailed Targeting (interests, behavior, demo) or Look-a-likes, that your ads can be served to users outside your desired audience.

The good news is, if you are leveraging Video View, Brand Awareness, R&F, Traffic, etc in tandem with Detailed Targeting, you can rest assured that your ads are showing just to the people you selected during set up, for now.

So I’m sure many advertisers are asking, is this a good thing?

My answer is, it depends. If you’re a marketer that has a very specific audience you want to target or build creative around a specific interest, then you might not get the value that Facebook hopes from this update. However, if you’re a marketer that only cares about hitting a specific KPI then this update could prove effective.

The reality is, Facebook’s ad platform is extremely powerful due to its vast reach and ability to hyper-target users. This update seems like it diminishes the latter a bit. It’s also putting a lot of trust in Facebook at a time when Facebook hasn’t necessarily earned our trust. While I’m sure Facebook wouldn’t roll this out if they didn’t conduct testing to show how it improves performance, it’s still kind of shocking that they aren’t giving advertisers the ability to opt-out.

Let me know what you think about this update in the comments below.