Tag Archive for: ad targeting

Facebook To Limit Ads Targeting Medical, Religious, and Political Data

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After years of criticism around Facebook ad targeting, Meta says it will be restricting the ability to target individuals based on sensitive information, such as their health conditions, religion, or political beliefs.

Specifically, Facebook will be removing targeting options for four distinct categories of audience data:

  • Health causes (targeting interests such as “Chemotherapy” or “World Diabetes Day”)
  • Sexual Orientation (including targeting interests such as “same-sex marriage”)
  • Religious practices or groups 
  • Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and popular political individuals

Starting January 19, 2022, advertisers will no longer be able to target new ads using this highly specific audience information. However, existing campaigns will continue delivering to their targeting audiences using this data through March.

For existing campaigns, you will be able to edit campaign-level information (such as your budget or campaign name) without affecting targeting details until March 17.

If a campaign is paused, though, it will be updated using the new targeting restrictions when resumed.

The vast majority of advertisers should be unaffected by the new ad targeting policies. If you provide medical services or are using ads to promote political efforts, however, you will likely need to review your existing audience targeting and begin planning for a new approach to reach your target audience.

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Facebook Limits Ad Targeting For Minors and More

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Just days after Google announced sweeping changes to how it handles advertising and data privacy regarding users under 18, Facebook has revealed it is making similar changes to its ad platform.

The news comes along with the launch of new ad creation tools and placements this week by Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads to Remove Targeting For Minors

Facebook is notifying advertisers that it will be disabling many targeting options for ads aimed at minors starting August 23.

As the alert says:

“Starting August 23, many targeting options, including detailed targeting and Custom Audiences, will no longer be available to target people under 18 globally, 20 in Thailand or 21 in Indonesia. For new ads that include young people, you’ll only be able to target by location, age, and gender.”

New Campaign Ideas Generator

Having trouble coming up with ideas for an upcoming marketing campaign? Facebook has a new tool just for you. The idea generator allows brands to input their vertical and specify if they are running an evergreen or seasonal campaign. 

With this information, Facebook will then give you campaign ideas with data, insights, and resources for putting the campaigns into action.

Along with these ideas, Facebook’s campaign idea generator also creates draft organic posts to use and offers free assets like images for you to use.

New Ad Placements in Instagram Shops Being Tested

Lastly, an article from AdWeek disclosed that Instagram has been testing placing ads within the Instagram Shop Tab.

The ads appear on the homepage of the tab and can be expanded with a tap to show more pictures, product information, and related products – as you would with organic listings in the Instagram Shop Tab.

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Microsoft Advertising Moves To Treat Phrase Match Similarly To Google Ads

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Microsoft Advertising announced this week that it will soon start including broad match ad targeting for campaigns using phrase matching. 

The change will occur “mid-May” and is aimed to “simplify keywords and improve your relevancy when reaching customers,” according to the announcement. 

Notably, this means the ad service is keeping in line with Google Ads, who made a similar change in February. 

“So… What Does This Mean For My Ads?”

Essentially, this update means that your ads which are being matched with queries for phrases matching your targeted keyword will also be shown for searches related to the meaning of your keyword. 

For example, Microsoft Advertising says the new system would match a search for “winter vacation in Miami” to the targeted keyword “Miami vacation.”
The company also says it will respect the word order of your keyword “when it’s important – for example, it won’t match ‘milk chocolate’ to the keyword ‘chocolate milk.”

Broad Match Modified Keywords To No Longer Be Offered

With this adjustment, Microsoft Advertising says it will be removing the option to create new broad match modified keywords beginning in August of this year. Existing broad match modified keywords will be treated the same as phrase match keywords. 

With this in mind, there is no need to change over your existing campaigns or keywords.

Planning For This Change

While there is no action for you to take immediately, there are a few things to keep in mind as the update rolls out. 

With the more broad matching included in phrase match campaigns, it will be important to monitor what searches are connecting with your keywords. This more broad approach could lead to potentially irrelevant queries showing your ads. 

On the upside, this change means it should be easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns, especially if they are advertising on both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

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LinkedIn’s new ad targeting options allow you to target your ideal customer

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LinkedIn is expanding its ad targeting options to allow advertisers the ability to better target their ideal audience.

The professional social platform has launched lookalike audience targeting which allows you to create an ad audience similar to your dream customer.

As the company says in their announcement:

“LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences combine the traits of your ideal customer with our rich member and company data to help you market to new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts.”

Specifically, the company highlights a few ways lookalike audience targeting can help businesses improve their advertising:

  • Reach high-converting audiences: Discover audiences similar to those who are already interested in your business.
  • Get results at scale: Extend the reach of your campaigns to more qualified prospects.
  • Engage new target accounts: Target your ads to additional companies you may not have previously considered. These companies match a similar company profile to your ideal customer.

In testing, LinkedIn says lookalike audience targeting led to a 5-10x increase in campaign reach without sacrificing ad performance.

At the same time it announced the launch of these new targeting options, LinkedIn also revealed a few other improvements to their ad platform:

Interest Targeting

While interest targeting has been available on LinkedIn since January, the company says it is now increasing the targeting capabilities of the feature.

Through a partnership with Microsoft, LinkedIn will now allow advertisers to target users based on not only their LinkedIn profile information but through the professional topics and content they engage with on Bing.

Audience Templates

LinkedIn has also created some new features specifically aimed at new advertisers. Audience templates provide advertisers with a selection of more than 20 premade B2B audiences. This way, you can start targeting your ideal audience without having extensive knowledge of ad targeting.

The templates cover a range of characteristics, from users skills, job titles, groups, and more.

In the announcement, LinkedIn says the new features will all be rolling out over the next two weeks.

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LinkedIn introduces new interest targeting options for advertisers

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LinkedIn is working to make itself a worthwhile advertising platform for brands, and that includes launching new targeting options for advertisers.

Starting over the next week, advertisers will be able to target ads on LinkedIn based on users’ professional interests and behavior.

As the company says in their announcement:

“We’re excited to announce interest targeting in Campaign Manager. Interest targeting lets you reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests — based on the content they share and engage with on LinkedIn. With these added options, you can more easily achieve your campaign objectives and grow your business.”

You can target your ads based on over 200 categories such as artificial intelligence, global economy, and customer experience.

Specifically, LinkedIn says brands can benefit from Interest Targeting in a few ways:

  • Serve relevant ads and content that match a member’s professional interests. Interest targeting can help you shape brand perception with different professional audiences by associating your brand with the topics that they care about. For example, if you sell Cloud Computing services, you can target members interested in “cloud computing” and create a campaign with Sponsored Content ads that show how your solution is helping business do more with their data.
  • Deepen your influence with the buyer committee within your target accounts. Today, many of our customers use LinkedIn’s powerful account targeting to inform their Account-Based Marketing campaigns. Now you can kick it up a notch by using account targeting along with interest targeting to reach an audience of potential buyers who have already expressed, or are likely to express, an interest in the content that’s relevant to your business.
  • Reach those interested in pursuing a certificate program. You can also use a combination of degrees and interests to reach the audiences who would be a naturally fit for higher education programs.

Interest Targeting is currently rolling out on LinkedIn and is expected to be available to all advertisers within the next week.

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Google Improves YouTube Ads With Better Tracking and Targeting

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YouTube Ads

YouTube may be one of Google’s largest platforms, but it gets treated a bit like the black sheep when it comes to Google’s ad services. Targeting has been limited compared to typical AdWords options, and ad options have been built around desktop functionality first.

This is all starting to change, as Google says it is rolling out several updates aimed to make advertising on YouTube better on both mobile and desktop. The announcement also mentioned that over 50% of YouTube videos are now happening on mobile, which likely motivated the change in how they think about ads on the platform.

Target Advertising

Google is now allowing YouTube ads to utilize information associated with users’ Google accounts like their search history, demographic information, and whether the viewer has engaged with an advertiser in the past to better target who sees your ad.

More Focus on Mobile

In response to the increasingly mobile viewership of YouTube, Google is shifting away from a desktop-first mindset. To do this, they are moving from using cookies and pixels because they were not designed for targeting users on YouTube’s mobile, TV, and set-top box apps. The hope is to make tracking and ad functionality more accurate across all devices.

Better Control of What Ads You See

Not all of the new changes are limited to advertisers. Google is also introducing the option for users to device what ads they see on both Google and YouTube from one location. For example, if a user mutes a specific advertiser in Search, the advertiser will also be muted for the user when they watch videos on YouTube.

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Pinterest Announces 3 New Ways For Brands To Connect With Users

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Pinterest may be one of the leading social platforms around, but its forays into advertising have been slow. The company took its time testing “Promoted Pins” to make sure they didn’t negatively impact users. When the ads finally were rolled out to all, they were also incredibly simple, with limited targeting and customization.

The company is finally expanding its ad platform with new targeting features that will give advertisers entirely new ways to connect with Pinterest’s more than 100 million monthly active users, according to a recent announcement.

Now, you can focus your ad efforts to make sure you are only targeting users who are likely to be interested in your brand and your products, improving the ad experience for both users and advertisers at the same time.

Customer List Targeting

Much like Facebook’s Custom Audiences, Pinterest’s custom list targeting is designed to help you connect with your existing customers on the social image board by targeting users from a list of your customers using email addresses or mobile ad IDs. Pinterest will then match your list with its own user database so you can serve them ads directly.

Visitor Retargeting

Retargeting is a great way to keep potentially interested visitors to your site engaged with your company even if they don’t initially make a purchase. With Pinterest’s visitor retargeting option, you can tag users that come to your site and serve them ads that are particularly suited to their interests and needs.

According to Pinterest, visitor retargeting has increased click-through rates (CTR) by as much as 3x for those who were granted early access to the option.

To use visitor retargeting, you will have to add Pinterest’s conversion tag to your site, which will allow you to tag or exclude users who have:

  • Landed on your homepage
  • Signed up for something
  • Added an item to their cart
  • Checked out

Lookalike Targeting

You might be familiar with this targeting option thanks to the version of it in use at Facebook called Lookalike Audiences. Lookalike targeting lets you reach out to groups of people based on their behaviors and interests specifically based on the activities of your customers.

Pinterest reports that this option increased CTRs for early-access users by up to 65% and increased reach for ads by nearly 30x.

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Bing Ads Expands Demographic Data To Improve Ad Targeting

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Bing Ads is improving its age and gender targeting by collecting more robust demographic data from users to help advertisers better target consumers.

According to the company’s blog, Bing’s global coverage of demographic data has recently doubled, which the company says will ensure its new targeting capabilities will provide “an increase in click-through rate and conversion rate for targetable users, thus potentially increasing the overall return on investment for all your campaigns.”

Advertisers can now utilize Bing’s new increased targeting features by setting targeting rules in “Advanced Targeting” within their Bing Ads dashboard. From there, they can segment audiences by age range, gender, device, and time, which will cause an automatic lift in bids when targeted audiences are searching.

Along with the announcement, Bing Ads released comScore data on its current audience, showing Bing Ads audiences tend to be more female and are most likely within the age range of 35-44.

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