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Removal of Detailed Targeting Exclusions

January 21, 2025

Removal of Detailed Targeting Exclusions

By Naomi Alston, Ruben Hakobyan

As part of our continued efforts to help advertisers drive performance, we are removing Detailed Targeting exclusions. As part of this process, we will continue to support the ability to exclude your employers within Audience controls at the account level. For more information on account controls please see here.

We believe this change will help improve campaign performance. An advertiser test showed that the median Cost per Conversion was 22.6% lower when not using Detailed Targeting Exclusions vs using Detailed Targeting Exclusions.

As a result of this change, custom audiences will be deprecated within the exclusions field. You can still continue using custom audience exclusions by using the excluded_custom_audiences field instead. For more details please review this developer documentation.

Beginning January 21, 2025 developers can start to implement the code changes, and will have until April 21, 2025 to make these updates. This change will be released in V22. Please refer below to the list of impacted endpoints related to this change:

  • 'POST {ad-account-id}/adsets'
  • 'POST {adset-id}'
  • 'POST {adset-id}/copies'
  • 'GET {ad-account-id}/delivery_estimate'
  • 'POST {ad-account-id}/account_controls'
  • 'GET {ad-account-id}/account_controls'

Please refer to the below developer documentation for further details to support code implementation.

Request Type

Endpoint

Changes

POST

{ad-set-id}/copies

  • When duplicating an ad set, exclusions (except audience control exclusions at the account level) will be removed.
  • When an ad set is duplicated, if an account control exclusion has been created this will be added to the ad set.

POST

/act_{ad_account_id}/{adsets}

/{adset-id}

  • An error message will be shown if an advertiser tries to add any new exclusions when creating or updating an ad set.
  • We will not throw an error if the added exclusions are available within audience control exclusions at the account level. When an ad set is created or updated the account control exclusions will be added to the ad set.
  • When advertisers make any edit to their existing ad sets we will remove the exclusions. If the advertiser has added an audience control exclusion at the account level this will be added to the ad set.
  • We will keep running existing campaigns which have exclusions until they make any update in their adset.

GET

/act_{ad-account-id}/delivery_estimate

/{adset-id}/delivery_estimate

  • The field exclusions will only be accepted for one employer exclusion.
  • If anything other than employer exclusion is passed in the exclusions field an error will be thrown.

Request Type

Endpoint

Changes

POST

/<AD_ACCOUNT_ID>/account_controls

  • Allow employer exclusion in account controls.

GET

/<AD_ACCOUNT_ID>/account_controls

  • Detailed Targeting exclusions set on account controls will be returned.

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