Meta does it again. After eliminating thousands of interests over the last few years, they have decided to remove more detailed targeting options once again. As of January 19, 2022, advertisers can no longer use detailed targeting options for topics related to health causes and certain individual identification factors and beliefs. While Facebook has previously eliminated targeting based on use from advertisers, this decision arises from users becoming more aware of the sensitive targeting options available and the negative impact on their privacy. Although this is challenging to navigate for marketers that positively benefit from targeting, there are ways to overcome the removal of these detailed targeting options and still reach the intended audiences.

First-party data is increasingly crucial to better understand your customer base and find more users. Marketers can build first-party data through Custom Audiences of users who have interacted with content. Building a Custom Audience can involve more than just building a retargeting audience of site visitors. There are many other engagements that allow you to reach people who have expressed interest in your brand through actions such as viewing a video, visiting a Facebook page or interacting with an Instagram account, along with other actions users may take with your content that can be used for retargeting. Collecting data from engagements, as well as any conversions on the site, also provides ways to test various look-alike audiences based off of different seed audiences. When interests are limited, finding people who have similar interests to those users already engaging with your content can help expand reach and drive more engagement.

In addition to Custom Audiences, marketers can use location targeting to reach customers in their key markets. Whether it’s targeting an audience near physical storefronts or ZIP codes correlated with the top converters, concentrating on specific areas can drive lift in sales or foot traffic.

In this ever-changing digital marketing landscape, it’s best to learn as much as you can about existing customers to help inform your targeting. From there, you can start engaging audiences at all stages of the funnel to build your own data instead of relying on Facebook’s targeting.