by Deb Stowe, AIM Group | Oct 26, 2022 | Recruitment

Marketplaces will no longer access to hyper-targeting options on FacebookSpecial Ad Audiences tool discontinued by Meta this monthReal estate and recruitment marketplaces particularly impactedMeta has put an end to Facebook’s controversial advertising targeting tools, officially shutting down Special Ad Audiences this month. It’s an end of an era for recruitment and real estate marketplaces, which have long used the social network to maximize consumer reach.Facebook’s huge global audience (with around 3 billion users) had made its targeting products highly effective. The most potent version of this was Lookalike Audiences, which allowed targeting Facebook users by race, gender, age and other demographic indicators. It was replaced with Special Ad Audiences in 2019.“The targeting tool was very effective because it could deliver you a really large audience, and you could reach people you had already reached and others who are similar,” Denis Van Allemeersch, COO of Aimwel, a marketplace advertising specialist, told the AIM Group. “Its loss has shrunk companies’ reach considerably."

Hyper targeting particularly powerful in jobs, real estate

Through Lookalikes, a job board or a recruiter could build a profile of potential applicants by demographic fit and target suitable audiences for vacancies. It was a particularly powerful tool for reaching passive candidates. In real estate, property classifieds and agents could apply the same targeting fit for specific property units and projects.Facebook was forced to sunset Lookalikes in 2019 due to growing political pressure (in large part driven by the Cambridge Analytica scandal), but replaced it with Special Ad Audiences — a much narrower targeting tool that enabled a focus by housing, employment, or credit.But Special Ad Audiences was still deemed too controversial, with widespread concerns over discrimination. Under a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Meta announced in June it would withdraw the Special Ad Audiences tool by the end of 2022.In a Meta blog post, Roy L. Austin Jr., VP of civil rights and deputy general counsel at Facebook, said: “The field of fairness in machine learning is a dynamic and evolving one, and Special Ad Audiences was an early way to address concerns. Now, our focus will move to new approaches to improve fairness.”Facebook still has an ad targeting option, but it’s highly limited. It requires advertisers to certify compliance with the company’s non-discrimination policy and restricts how housing, employment, and credit advertisers create their target audiences. Facebook disallows the use of gender or age targeting and requires location targeting to have a minimum of a 15-mile radius.“Facebook’s vision is to give you less control over what you want to target. They want you to provide them with information to target correctly,” Van Allemeersch told us.The company has also removed ad targeting options that people may find sensitive across all ads. These changes have already rolled out to North America and the E.U.

Is Facebook still useful as an ad tool?

The new changes have certainly downgraded the impact of Facebook’s advertising potency. Marketplaces should experiment with the new format and find out what remains effective.“We also had to reinvent the way we target on Facebook. We needed to rethink and understand what is going on and what we can still do on Facebook. We took a look at the different combinations of options: bidding strategies, goals with Facebook — what would work and what would we expect,” Van Allemeersch said.Aimwell positions itself as a one-stop shop for recruitment marketplaces, with technology that can serve job campaigns through both aggregators and social media. It automatically generates advertising campaigns for every job.According to Van Allemeersch, companies will most likely have to rely on other features available on Facebook and the wider digital world in general, including bidding, goal setting, geolocation, and retargeting to find the optimum combination. However, casting the net too widely costs money without delivering performance.Facebook’s pro-privacy initiative is only the beginning of an internet-wide shift to much fewer hyper-targeting options.“It won’t get any better,” said Van Allemeersch. “This is part of an industry-wide trend looking at legislation and privacy. Facebook is ahead of the curve in this sense. But this will flow into all classifieds.”