Facebook will let users hide ads targeted via Custom Audience lists

Facebook quietly announced a new feature coming later this month that will allow users to control whether or not an advertiser can show ads to them using a Custom Audience list.

“People have always been able to hide all ads from a specific advertiser in their Ad Preferences or directly in an ad. But now they will be able to stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list,” Facebook wrote the corporate blog.

Why we care

Custom Audiences are often comprised of a company’s active and best customers. Not being able to show ads to a critical mass of those users could potentially hurt campaign performance. However, this kind of control could be a net positive for advertisers as well as users. When users have the ability to opt-out, marketers have greater incentive to think carefully about the relationships they have with the customers on their lists and the messaging they’re serving them.

Facebook has made a number of changes to how Custom Audience lists are managed in the past year. This latest update is a more proactive feature — moving beyond simply giving users information on why they’re being targeted and letting them control if they see the ad or not.

The announcement was included in news related to allowing users to hide political ads, but the soon-to-be released feature applies to all campaigns using Custom Audiences.

Facebook first launched the Ad Library in May 2018 and over the past several months we have spoken to dozens of political campaigns, activists, NGOs, nonprofits and volunteers about our policies for political ads. Two themes we heard were that first, people want more transparency over who is using ads to try to influence voters and second, they want more control over the ads they see. So today, we are announcing a number of updates to do just that.

• View audience size in the Ad Library: We are adding ranges for Potential Reach, which is the estimated target audience size for each political, electoral or social issue ad so you can see how many people an advertiser wanted to reach with every ad.
• Better Ad Library search and filtering: We are adding the ability to search for ads with exact phrases, better grouping of similar ads, and adding several new filters to better analyze results — e.g. audience size, dates and regions reached. This will allow for more efficient and effective research for voters, academics or journalists using these features.
• Control over Custom Audiences from a list: Later this month we will begin rolling out a control to let people choose how an advertiser can reach them with a Custom Audience from a list. These Custom Audiences are built when an advertiser uploads a hashed list of people’s information, such as emails or phone numbers, to help target ads. This control will be available to all people on Facebook and will apply to all advertisers, not just those running political or social issue ads. People have always been able to hide all ads from a specific advertiser in their Ad Preferences or directly in an ad. But now they will be able to stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list — or make themselves eligible to see ads if an advertiser used a list to exclude them. For example, if a candidate has chosen to exclude you from seeing certain fundraising ads because they don’t think you will donate again, but you still want a chance to see those ads, you can stop yourself from being excluded. 
• See fewer political ads: Seeing fewer political and social issue ads is a common request we hear from people. That’s why we plan to add a new control that will allow people to see fewer political and social issue ads on Facebook and Instagram. This feature builds on other controls in Ad Preferences we’ve released in the past, like allowing people to see fewer ads about certain topics or remove interests. 

The expanded transparency features will roll out in the first quarter of 2020 and will apply in all countries where we facilitate “Paid for by” disclaimers on ads. We plan to deploy the political ads control starting in the US early this summer, eventually expanding this preference to more locations. 

More on the news

• With the new control feature, users will also be able to make themselves eligible to see an ad even if the advertiser has excluded them from the Custom Audience list.
• Last April, Facebook added information on when a Custom Audience list had been uploaded to the platform to the “Why am I seeing this ad?” feature.
• The company later updated the terms around how advertisers and their agencies could use Custom Audience list for transparency purposes.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues

Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.