There have been some big changes going on with Facebook of late. I am sure you see it in the news, one super big one has to do with ads talking about anything related to housing, credit or employment.
That includes realtors, mortgage loan officers, insurance agencies, credit such as loans, employment & home services companies. You talk about anything related to a house, credit or employment then you are now required to live in a world with super restrictive targeting.
Its all related to this little section that should now be showing up in your ad account when you try to launch new campaigns:
What that means is your ads will become less effective, your CPA will go up and your ROI will go down.
This all is a direct result of Facebook being sued & then settling with HUD earlier this year (Full Complaint Here). Forbes wrote a great piece about all the finer details of the settlement here. Facebook is just now releasing an update that is restricting targeting options inside your Facebook Ads manager. You can now no longer run ads against, age, zip codes, gender or income etc. Its super restrictive.
See the screen shot below to get an idea what I am talking about:
With Facebook also removing all of that valuable 3rd party data last year, which included homeowners, income etc, what can you do to get better results?
You need to utilize data off of Facebook. If you run with the existing data you will be fishing in a pond with thousands of other fisherman. You might catch a fish but it will take you a while and probably not worth your time. When you go and use a custom audience its like fishing at a pond stocked with your ideal fish and you are the only one there.
That’s exactly where you want to be. Luckily, custom audiences are still fully allowed to be used as long as they do not discriminate.
We are one of only a few agencies around to my knowledge that has access to some really powerful custom audiences from one of the biggest data providers. These audiences are all fully approved by Facebook to be used on the platform. That means we can target people who are in market for just about anything including housing & credit related.
Even if you do not have access to data like that, you can go out and purchase a list from many of the other data providers out there just be careful to ensure they do not discriminate. You don’t want to wake up one morning and see your ad account shut down.