A few days ago, I saw this message at the top of my Audiences page:

Detailed targeting exclusions will be removed on June 28th, 2024.
The exclusions you already added will still work, but you’ll need to remove them to use a saved audienceA saved audience allows a Facebook advertiser to save often-used targeting settings to easily use later. More with any new ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More.

Like most advertisers, I found this news surprising, but not completely unexpected. It didn’t seem completely inconsistent with something Meta might do.

“Sent In Error”

And then SearchEngineland released an article that says that the alert was sent in error. From Meta:

This alert was a bug and sent in error. There are no immediate changes related to detailed targeting exclusions.

Maybe I shouldn’t make assumptions, but the language of this non-denial denial may be telling. “There are no immediate changes…”

What would be considered immediate? Couldn’t June 28th fall within the definition of “not immediate?”

Don’t Kill This Rumor Yet

Unless Meta provides a more emphatic rejection of this notification, I’m not buying it.

The message we were seeing was awfully specific with an actual date when Detailed Targeting exclusions would go away. Maybe the alert shouldn’t have appeared yet, but consider me skeptical that this is just a random bug.

This is one of those features that is mostly a remnant of the old days before audience expansion. Some advertisers still use it, but I question how useful it still is.

It’s not that it is completely without utility. But, I assume that very few advertisers use it, and many who do likely use it unnecessarily — potentially at the detriment of their ad performance. This is the classic example of the type of feature that Meta has discontinued in the past.

Do you exclude detailed targeting?