How Facebook audience targeting has drastically changed

If you asked any paid media buyer how to run Facebook ads in 2017, they’d give you a completely different answer than if you asked that same question today (and if they don’t, run!).

Facebook used to be THE channel for ultra-precise, narrowed-in targeting, which, of course, made it an incredibly valuable tool for advertisers looking to reach highly relevant audiences.

But a lot has changed in the last ~7 years. Aside from the fact that we actually call Facebook “Meta” now, precise, advertiser-controlled audience targeting is no longer a key feature of the platform. Like most of the big paid digital channels, Meta has removed more and more advertiser control over time, relying more on its own modeling and algorithms to serve ads to the right people at the right time.

AI and ML advancements aside, there were a few key turning points that led to sweeping changes with how advertising on Facebook works.

Let’s dive in to how it used to work, what these turning points were, and how it works now, so you can leverage Meta properly — and not like it’s 2017.

How Facebook targeting used to work

Back in the day, you could target your Facebook ads to virtually any granular subset of people you could dream up, based on demographic info, interests, and behaviors. This included:

• Precise demographic info, including race, religion, and age as low as 13

• Household income bands

• Relationship statuses

• Subsets of parents based on the age of their kids

• Folks experiencing particular life events like anniversaries or birthdays

• Political leanings

• Education level

• Employers and job titles

• Virtually any interest or behavior you could think of, like:

  • Affinity for specific brands, activities, sports, public figures; or commuters, soccer fans, travelers, purchase behaviors, device users

See this (massive) graphic from 2018 that details all the possible targeting options on Facebook. Keep in mind that each of these interest categories contained thousands of individual interests.

This level of targeting was obviously incredibly useful to all advertisers, and made it easier than ever to reach new and high-intent users at a massive scale.

For example, think about how a nascent clean beauty brand, political campaign team, or consumer fintech company could all use the same tools on Facebook to achieve massive reach to their precise audience.

But if you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, it must have been really easy for Facebook and its advertisers to abuse all this information,” you’re already ahead of where Facebook was (publicly, at least) at the time.

The audience insights tool

If you remember the old audience insights tool, you might not even know there’s still a version of it currently available because it’s so watered down.

The old version of Facebook’s audience insights tool was an absolute goldmine. Facebook used to let you pop in ANY targeting inputs you’d like, and would spit out the demographics and interests of those folks, so that you could:

• Learn all about the people in your audience

• Target your audience’s interests — critically, interests you may not even have thought of (This strategy was pivotal in scaling Facebook while I was leading growth at SmartAsset, and got us spending ~$1M a month on Facebook ads during my time there).

Luckily, I was able to find a screenshot of what this tool used to look like. You entered your inputs into the gray menu on the left, and could then learn all about this audience on the right:

There’s still a version of this tool that exists, but it’s so watered down that I don’t see how it’s useful. The inputs are much more limited, to age, gender, location, and a limited set of interests.

When I tested it, the outputs were virtually the same across the various different demographics I tried, and were incredibly generic, as you can see in the list below.

Custom audiences and lookalikes

Custom and lookalike audience lists have also gone through a lot of change, though not nearly as visibly.

They certainly still exist and are widely used, but they’re not as powerful as they used to be, particularly for smaller brands with less reach. To understand why that is, it’s important to note the two most common ways of building a custom audience:

• Uploading a customer list of emails, phone numbers, or some other identifier that you already have from users who have made a purchase or used your service

• Using your Facebook pixel to define a set of users based on an action they took on your site

Once you build a custom audience this way, you can then tell Facebook to make you a net new audience of people that “look like” the folks in your seed list. Facebook’s ability to do this accurately relies on being able to take your seed list and match it up with folks on Facebook.

Match rates used to sit in the 60% - 80% range. The missing 20% - 40% wasn’t a deficiency in Facebook’s ability to understand your data — more often than not, you just had folks in your list that either didn’t use Facebook, or used Facebook with different contact info.

You can see why having a large audience is necessary to inform Facebook’s ability to model, even when match rates used to be this high. Today, match rates are much lower. I’ll explain why.

The two major turning points

There were two key events over the last 10 years that meaningfully changed the way Facebook functions as an ad platform. The first takes us back to 2014…