What Meta Removing Detailed Targeting Options Means for Businesses

Meta has recently revised its detailed targeting options, affecting areas like health, race, and ethnicity. Learn how these changes impact ad strategies and discover alternative targeting solutions to keep your business’s marketing efforts on track.

January 16, 2024

In case you missed it, Meta recently announced that they would be removing detailed targeting options. As highlighted by Meta, “We’re discontinuing some detailed targeting options because they are either not widely used, redundant with others, too granular, they relate to topics that people may perceive as sensitive (e.g. targeting options referencing causes related to health, race or ethnicity), or because of legal or regulatory requirements. We will provide alternative targeting recommendations within Meta Ads Manager when possible.

Which Detailed Targeting Options Are Affected?

Meta has described the affected detailed targeting options, citing examples such as ‘referencing causes related to health, race or ethnicity.’ The scope of this change is considerable, particularly given Meta’s lack of specificity in their announcement.

However, Meta hasn’t announced which interests these targeting options directly relate to. This ambiguity is not new; a similar situation occurred in 2022 when Meta retired certain ad targeting options without clear communication about the specific interests affected. Back in 2022, Meta removed ad targeting options perceived as sensitive, including those related to:

Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)
Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)
Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)
Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organisations, and figures

Based on the above, we expect the recent 2024 announcement to be another phase to the initial 2022 targeting retirement similar to the above examples.

How Can Businesses Still Utilise Meta Ads?

Despite the ongoing reduction of interest and detailed targeting options, Meta Ads continue to offer valuable features. These can effectively drive sales and leads, such as custom audiences (including website retargeting), enabling businesses to target existing customers in their funnel.

Other targeting options include lookalike audiences (based on website visitors and/or your Facebook/Instagram page) and Meta Advance+ audiences. The Meta Advantage+ audience utilises Meta’s advanced AI to find your campaign audience, making it a noteworthy option in light of the evolving AI technology.

How Can Affected Ad Sets Be Edited?

These updates started on the 15th of January, so you may start to see errors in your affected ad sets which prompts you to edit these ads.

To review and edit your affected ad sets:

Open the Meta Ads Manager campaigns page. Look for a warning banner at the top of the page.
Select See affected ad sets in the warning banner.
Hover over your affected ad sets to make edits.
Go to the Audience section, under Detailed Targeting, and look for warning messages showing you which options are affected and what to do. You may see affected options listed to remove, with alternative suggestions if available, or see Remove all unavailable options.

When you no longer see warning messages in the Audience section, you have removed or replaced all of the affected options and can save or publish your ad set.

What Does The Future Hold For Detailed Targeting Via Meta Ads?

Given the pattern of removing detailed targeting options by Meta, it seems likely this trend may continue. We advise exploring other ad formats, like retargeting and lookalike audiences, particularly as there’s a possibility that Meta Ads might phase out interests-based targeting in the future.

However, the reduction in detailed targeting options might not significantly impact businesses and advertisers. From our experience, interest-based targeting can often be inconsistent, sometimes triggered by minimal audience interaction such as merely viewing a related post. This is, obviously, based on the assumption from the platform so may not always be 100% accurate.

Using more focused targeting methods like retargeting and lookalike audiences could be more beneficial, especially for businesses operating in niche markets.