Is Facebook Still Profitable After Its Audience Targeting Changes?

Back in November 2021, Facebook announced that it would remove detailed targeting options relating to topics that can be perceived as sensitive such as health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation starting January 19, 2022

At first, this change doesn’t seem too impactful but later on, Facebook made a follow-up announcement that, aside from removing topics that can be perceived as sensitive, they will also remove targeting options that are redundant or too granular. 

Following this announcement, a lot of detailed targeting options were removed and, in turn, a lot of campaigns across different industries were hugely affected by this change.

Results went down, ROAS went down and ultimately, revenues were lost.

With all the noise about the impact of these changes, you might wonder, “Is Facebook Ads still profitable for me?” A lot would argue that it’s not, but we’re here to tell you otherwise. Yes, Facebook Ads still work and in this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know.

What It Means for Marketers

If you are just thinking about starting out with Facebook Ads, you might not realize how much it means to have some detailed targeting removed. A lot of media buyers rely heavily on detailed targeting to find new prospects for their brand or service. When Facebook implemented the changes, ad sets that were affected were automatically paused by Facebook.

And if available, Facebook would recommend alternative detailed targeting for you to use in lieu of the ones that were removed. However, some of these alternative suggestions were either too broad or irrelevant to your target audiences.With the lesser number of options available, media buyers would have no choice but to use the broad alternatives, which means that more and more people are using the same targeting as you are.For smaller businesses with a smaller budget, it just didn’t make sense to spend so much money competing against hundreds or thousands of ads.

The Fix

• Using broad targeting
• Utilizing custom audiences
• Creating lookalike audiences
• Lookalike Expansion
• Targeting Expansion

But it’s easier said than done and doesn’t guarantee success.

You need to have the right skills and knowledge to be able to make these tools work for you. That’s why at Hackalogy, we developed a course that teaches you the skills of the trade, so you can ride out the negative impacts brought on by changes in the platform. Through the course you will also learn our tested and proven framework for running Facebook Ads—tested through our years of accumulated wins and challenges in running Facebook Ads.

Subscribe to our newsletter today and be one of the first to get early access to our course, plus other exclusive Facebook Ads content (Cheatsheets, Mini-Guides and Videos).