Further Targeting Options Removed from Facebook Ads.

Back in January, Meta announced that certain targeting options available on Facebook Ads around ‘sensitive causes’ were to be removed. Which was a big blow for non-profits, because it removed targeting options which were highly effective as part of colder acquisition in general, but more importantly, were extremely relevant for reaching a more charity-conscious audience. 

This has meant advertisers have had to make use of broader interest-targeting options, which can provide less audience insight, and often worse performance. 

Now, there appear to be even more targeting options removed. Over the last few weeks, we have seen first-hand that many ad set audiences are no longer able to run. We’ve also heard from multiple clients of these further restrictions also. 

Some non-profits have been affected more than others with the interest options available. For example, there are still quite a few ‘animal-charity’ specific targeting options available, whereas any cancer charity options have been decimated. 

Making more use of audience segmentation as well as lookalikes has become pivotal to campaign success, with lookalikes becoming increasingly more valuable and focal to ad campaigns. 

In many ad accounts, a banner now re-appears (similarly to how we saw it in Jan-March) to say there have been changes. However, the ‘learn more link’ doesn’t seem to reference any new updates since the original announcement. 

We did find this update, which mentioned further changes being rolled out at the start of April; so it has potentially just taken a few weeks/months to take effect.

Either way, I expect this to be a continued trend over the next few months, so we’ll be continuing to explore and test alternative strategies.

Will Rhodes, Paid Media Manager

New Facebook Fundraiser Challenges. 

Meta have now added ‘Fundraiser Challenges’ to Facebook which allows supporters to start their own individual fundraisers under one umbrella fundraiser. Non profit organisations can use this tool to set a fundraising goal and select an activity for supporters to get involved with. If the organisation sets the challenge of ‘running 1 mile every day in September’ for example, supporters can select their own individual fundraising goals to raise money on behalf of the organisation. 

As soon as supporters join the challenge, they can begin raising funds and are added to a Facebook group for the challenge. Here, they can share pictures, connect with others who are taking part and rally supporters around the challenge activity. 

One major benefit for non-profit is that they no longer have to pay to promote fundraising activity on Facebook. Previously, fees could be added or taken from the money that is donated. Charities could also expect to face fees for promoting fundraising challenges through major platforms such as Just Giving. Organisations can now capitalise on the new Facebook Fundraiser Challenges feature at no extra cost.

Max-Leslie Smith, Paid Media Executive 

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Updates to Google Ads Keyword Planner.

A new feature has been rolled out for all Keyword Planner customers this August. Initially trialled in 2021, the ‘Organise keywords into ad groups’ tool utilises an automated machine learning system where Google then suggests which ad groups are best for the keywords. 

The aim of the update from Google is to save advertisers the time of sorting through keywords and trying to gauge where they would perform best, which traditionally would have done manually. 

It has taken time and thought from Google as to which keywords are best suited to which ad group, so it will be interesting to see how well Google’s recommendations work and if it will provide more insight than we can garner manually. 

We will be experimenting with this new tool and analysing the results to see if it is a tool we can confidently utilise.  

This is another update heading in the ‘automation’ direction from Google. A trend that we suspect will continue in updates going forward. 

Brogan Carroll, Paid Media Analyst

New Twitter Ads Pixel 

Twitter has released an update to their ‘Conversion Tracking’ products which are intended to improve setup and increase measurement capabilities. The new ‘Twitter Pixel’ is one of the biggest changes within the platform, with a simplified setup that combines the legacy Universal Web Tags (UWTs) and Single Event Tags (SETs) into one. 

The update also includes improvements to the troubleshooting and event creation process as well as the ‘Twitter Pixel Helper Chrome’ extension.

The main other change is the new ‘Conversion API’ (CAPI) which can run in conjunction with the ‘Twitter Pixel’ or on its own. It aims to connect advertisers to the API and track conversion events without using third-party cookies – a great move to enable more privacy.

Twitter says these updates should not impact any existing setup. However, it is recommended to update from the older ‘UWTs’ and ‘SETs’, to the new ‘Twitter Pixel’.

James Sherlock, Paid Media Analyst 

Are there any other recent digital developments that caught your attention? Feel free to tweet us @upriseUPSEM, email us at hello@upriseup.co.uk, or simply send us a message through our contact page.