Facebook will no longer allow Special Ad Category advertisers to use the Special Ad Audiences tool.
Meta will be sunsetting Special Ad Audiences, a tool that lets advertisers expand their audiences for ad campaigns related to housing, employment, and credit ads.
In 2019, in addition to eliminating specific targeting options for housing, employment, and credit ads, Facebook introduced Special Ad Audiences as an alternative to Lookalike Audiences.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Special Ad Category advertisers must declare their category before creating ads. If advertisers fail to declare it, the Facebook policy team shuts down their advertising accounts.
Now, it’s getting more limited with this new rule.
Deprecation Timeline
Following is the timeline from Meta regarding the deprecation of Special Ad Audiences:
- August 25, 2022: you will no longer be able to create new Special Ad Audiences.
- September 13, 2022: Special Ad Audiences will no longer be available in new ad creation via the API.
- October 12, 2022: Special ad audiences will no longer be available in new ad creation across Ads Manager and the API. After this date, the affected ad sets may be paused for delivery. To resume delivery of the paused ad sets, you will need to update them to remove Special Ad Audiences.
According to this timeline, you’ll no longer be able to use Special Ad Audiences in new ads via the API on September 13 and Ads Manager on October 12.
How can the Special Ad Category advertisers benefit from Facebook after this update?
It’s still unclear if Facebook is going to introduce a new way or release some restrictions for Special Ad Category advertisers or not.
That said, the only option is to go broad audience. However, some other options still benefit from the Facebook advertising platform. I will prepare some tips and tactics. Please keep an eye on Digital Boom for more.
