In managing Facebook ad targeting in campaigns for clients this week we encountered notices that additional detailed targeting was being removed. For example, for an online music instruction client, Facebook informed us that targeting of ads to people interested in the late musician Chet Atkins was being removed.
In recent years Facebook has removed some interest and geographic targeting options for the purposes of privacy protection and limiting the perceived ability to use interests for discrimination in housing, employment and other areas.
But this one seemed different, so we discussed it with our Facebook rep who said it was likely just the Facebook engineers “cleaning up” the Facebook Ads platform by removing interest targeting that was not widely use. While Facebook lookalike targeting general works better than interest targeting there are circumstances where interest targeting can be useful so hopefully Facebook won’t cut too deep into this type of ad targeting.
