About Meta and special ad categories

Meta recently added special ad categories in its ad platform for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and audience network. Long story short, if your campaigns are related to 1 of the themes below you should clearly indicate that.

• employment
• loans
• housing
• social issues, elections or public

And you best actually do that. If you try to circumvent this or fail to report it, your ad account may be suspended. You don't want that, of course.

'Okay, no problem. Then I select the category and you're done.'? Not quite. There are some snags. Especially for recruitment campaigns or for performance marketers in real estate or finance, the rules of the game change.

Selecting one of these categories immediately creates restrictions within your targeting. And those restrictions are not few and far between.

• Age, gender or zip code is no longer possible
  • The age category is set to 18-65+ by default.
  • Your ads are shown to men and women anyway
  • The minimum radius around a given location is 15km whereas it used to be 1km.
• The interests remain much more general
• Subject area, education level, employers and a few others have completely disappeared. Even within "regular targeting," these are more limited.
• You can no longer exclude based on interests

So there are definitely limitations in how you will set up campaigns. But they are not insurmountable.

So custom audiences and lookalike audiences do remain available. And we're fans of those anyway. Targeting your own data is the most qualitative targeting Facebook has to offer.

In addition, you can creatively optimize a bit. The new categories also cause Facebook to analyze your assets in a different way. Looking specifically at recruitment, it's best to include job title, experience level or degree in your body copy. These additional keywords ensure that Meta shows your message in a more targeted way to the right profiles.

Facebook today is and remains an interesting traffic driver for many a performance marketer. At the same time, it is not the only social medium and by extension digital medium that can provide quality visitors and/or inflow.

Therefore, don't just focus on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, but dare to look at what else is available. POI-based advertising, for example, through which you reach very targeted visitors from certain locations, programmatic display or Pinterest and TikTok Ads. The possibilities are endless and digital allows you to test, scale and optimize.

Maybe, maybe not. Today we do not yet see a noticeable impact on our campaigns and those of our clients. We do notice that the past few days many ads have been rejected...and approved again after application. So check your campaigns;-) At the beginning of 2022 we will be able to draw real conclusions about hard figures and the effect on our benchmarks.

Until then, it's best to follow the new rules of the game and optimize your campaigns where necessary. Need to spar about what this means for you? For your social recruiting or your digital campaigns? We'd love to do that, just give us a call.