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Social Bulldog’s Newsletter — Detailed Targeting Changes

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How much “automation” and “expansion” can Facebook add to the audience building process before every audience is simply just a broad audience? We continue to receive news and updates that suggest Lookalikes and Detailed Targeting Audiences will become less transparent and more out of the advertisers’ control. 

We believe the biggest impact to Detailed Targeting Audiences will be a concept called, “Detailed Targeting Expansion.” Facebook describes this as the following: “When advertisers optimize for conversions, value or app events, their detailed targeting selections will be used as an input to guide ad delivery. This means we may deliver ads beyond their detailed targeting selections if it’s likely to improve performance.

Social Bulldog describes this as: “Nice effort, but Facebook will target whoever it thinks will convert on this. :)”

We have observed that forced Detailed Targeting Expansion has been rolled out to several accounts, while others still have the option to check or uncheck the expansion strategy. 

If you see this message while building your audience, you no longer have the option to check or uncheck Detailed Targeting Expansion. You are now opted into Detailed Targeting Expansion for all of your audiences. 

If you see this message while building your audience, you have not yet been rolled into automatic Detailed Targeting Expansion; however, your time is probably coming. We suggest testing an audience with and without Detailed Targeting Expansion to understand the type of impact this will have on your ads once your option to opt out goes away. 

All that being said, this change does make sense. As a result of privacy policies, the size and accuracy of Detailed Targeting Audiences has decreased dramatically. Broad audiences are vital to scaling in this current environment. Ultimately, forcing these expansion strategies will help advertisers who are timid when it comes to broad targeting.

Social Bulldog Suggestion:

Are you nervous about broad targeting but have noticed that Interests and Lookalikes are becoming less and less scalable? Start small by testing some of your top performing ads into a low spending broad audience!