Facebook Rolling Out New Targeting Mechanics, All US Advertisers To Get Partner Categories Access

Today, Facebook announced changes to its ad targeting features will be rolling out globally. Additionally, all advertisers in the US, including local businesses, will have access to the third-party targeting data available in Partner Categories.

The new targeting options will be based on four primary targeting types: location, demographic, interest and behavior.

• Location: Build campaigns around any combination of geographies, including country and city (France and London), country and state (Canada and Texas), state and city (Maine and Houston), and in the U.S., state and zip code (New York and 94115). Users can also exclude areas, for example by targeting New York City except zip code 11211.
• Demographic: There are now more relationship status values such as civil unions and domestic partnerships that can be targeted. A long-requested feature, advertisers will be able to target by recently changed life events within specific periods of time (e.g., new relationship status, newly engaged and newlywed, the latter two within three or six months, or one year).

• Interests: Rather than having multiple targeting options like broad categories and keywords, the company says it developed a new methodology “that increases the precision of interest-based targeting by allowing advertisers to simply choose one segment.” Advertisers can now choose by topic – for example, all the people who have liked baseball on Facebook can now be targeted by choosing “baseball”.
• Behaviors: In conjunction with Partner Categories, marketers can also target campaigns to people based on their offline activities such as purchases, website visits and device usage. Partner Categories will be added to the Ads Create Tool.

The changes will be rolling through in the coming weeks.