There's a lot going on at Facebook. Beyond the recent outage and changes to its advertising platform, the allegations made by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen are also under scrutiny. Among other things, she holds Facebook responsible for the riots that took place at the Capitol.
However, as advertisers, these past few months have been full of challenges, changes, and adjustments, and many of us have had to start from scratch with new strategies. We can expect that changes will continue to occur on the advertising platform. As Facebook continues to lose its ability to access accurate data, they will continue to make changes and adjustments. We need to maintain a mindset of change in order to adapt to this new reality and be proactive.
You can read more here about the latest removal of interests in detailed segmentation.
In September 2021, without prior notice, Facebook began removing the option to select or not select " Detailed Targeting Expansion " in conversion campaigns.
This option is not recommended because the idea behind detailed targeting is to get as close as possible to our ideal customer. This option tells Facebook's AI system to search for people outside of those interests. This can lead to two problems: the budget being spent faster due to the much larger audience, and the ad being seen by too many people who find it irrelevant.
Another change that will take place starting October 11th is the removal of prior estimates of audiences and interests, as well as unique metrics , but what are prior estimates ?
When we're running a campaign, at the adset level, Facebook provides an audience size estimate to help us understand how many people meet our interest and location criteria, and how our ads might perform based on these selections. These estimates include potential reach, estimated daily results, and, if you're using interest categories, an estimate of the number of people who might have a particular interest.
Facebook announced that it will be changing the way it displays estimated audience reach for ads.
Currently, when you set up your ad on Facebook (adset level), Facebook displays the 'Potential Reach' with a fairly specific number range.
To ensure consistency in presenting these estimates, Facebook is changing potential reach and interests to ranges instead of specific numbers. Facebook will remove this information and provide a more general range instead.
As you can see here, the Estimated Audience is broader, and the potential reach figure in this example covers a potential discrepancy of 10 million users. Not all estimates will be this broad, but the premise is the same: Facebook will now show you a much more generalized reach estimate. You will no longer be able to see the specific numbers for your audience targeting.
Why the change?
Facebook doesn't explain exactly why it's updating its numbers, but it does provide some hints of an explanation in the overview .
These changes will have a significant impact on ad data and reach. Facebook is moving away from more specific figures and toward more generalized estimates because it no longer has the capacity to provide accurate, real-time data.
You can read more about Facebook's estimated audience size calculations here .
In this video I talk about the changes in digital advertising:
You can also read my previous entry where I talk about Facebook's latest recommendations in light of all these changes.
Here you can read about Instagram's recent changes .
There's no doubt that the way we do advertising on Facebook is going to change; you need to be prepared and up-to-date so you can make the necessary changes to your strategies.
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