How will Facebook’s ad targeting changes impact charities?

Meta announced that they are removing some detailed targeting options from Facebook Ads Manager on 19 January 2022. Detailed targeting allows advertisers to select who ads are shown to on Facebook and Instagram.

The areas affected include health, race, or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion and sexual orientation.

Currently, advertisers can use ‘psychographic targeting’ – targeting based on user behaviour – to select who ads are shown to. For example, if you engage with content on LGBTQ+ issues, you might be marked as someone with an interest in this area and advertisers could target you based on that interest.

Under GDPR rules, Facebook and Instagram can’t target users, based on this information about their behaviour, without their explicit permission.

According to Meta, the decision to remove this targeting criteria will, “address feedback from civil rights experts, policymakers, and other stakeholders on the importance of preventing advertisers from abusing the targeting options we make available”.

Privacy campaigners have been particularly concerned about how this information has been used in political campaigning. While these changes make some effort to address the issue, arguably they don’t go far enough.

Melis Figanmese, Senior Campaigns Officer at the IFRC, said: “As a whole, it’s a good move, on Facebook’s part...As an organisation we care deeply about people’s privacy...In the beginning it may be difficult for charities to overcome, but there are very easy ways to get around it.”

We look at other ways charities can find new supporters and six things they can do to prepare for the changes ahead.

Different ways to find new supporters on Facebook and Instagram

There are two main ways to run campaigns that target potential new supporters. The first uses demographic and psychographic factors to develop a cold audience. The second uses your owned or Facebook-owned data to create a lookalike audience – people who subscribe to your mailing list or who have visited your Facebook page, for example.

Lookalike audiences will not be affected by the changes and at the IFRC Figanmese says, “what we’ve seen is that lookalike audiences, people who look like people who follow us [for example] actually tend to perform beter than the psychographic campaigns that Facebook is removing.”

Demographic and psychographic based audiences are also not disappearing completely. You will still be able to use broad demographic targeting using factors like geographic area, for example.

Karolina McIlroy, Freelance Digital Strategist, explains, that in the case of conversion campaigns, “Facebook is pushing you towards broad [targeting] anyway. You now cannot stop Facebook...showing your ads to a broader audience.”

McIlroy also suggests that charities can be more creative when they use this type of targeting.

When you search demographics, interests, and behaviours in Facebook Ads Manager only the first few suggestions are shown. But there are tools that will let you view the full list if you want to have more control over the remaining detailed targeting options. Tools include interest explorer and audience builder.

Six ways charities can prepare for this change

Create saved audiences using the detailed targeting criteria that are disappearing. Audiences created by January 19 2022 will still be available to use until 17 March 2022.

Build up your owned data by running lead gen campaigns to the saved audiences you have created. If the volume is large enough, you can use the data for those who engaged and the leads to create lookalike audiences in the future.

Make sure you are re-targeting within your existing conversion campaigns to psychographic audiences to improve the number of conversions.

Do more research with your existing audiences. Find out as much about who they are, their motivations and behaviours as you can to help inform your entire user journey from targeting to action.

Don’t put all your time, energy and investment into just one channel. McIlroy suggests exploring paid search for interest and intent-based campaigns. Using Google grants can be very effective for awareness campaigns, for example.

The IFRC has had success using Twitter: “The feeling is that Facebook is a lot cheaper than Twitter, which can be the case...but we make sure the...content that we’re running is extremely relevant to the user and to the time. So, for example, we were running a campaign called ‘Climate changed me’...The typical engagement rate for a charity is between 4-12% and we had 66-68% engagement.” says Figanmese.

The right kind of campaign can be extremely effective on other channels and well worth the spend. 

Overall, the experts we spoke to felt that this change was for the greater good and its impact on charities’ ability to attract, engage and convert new supporters would be minimal. Being creative with targeting and exploring other options should mean you are well prepared