The recent spate of enhancements to Facebook Ads is continuing today with several new ways to target Facebook ad campaigns. Last week, Facebook turned on time scheduling, and this weekend, ad editing. Today, it’s enabling three new features: connection targeting, multiple country targeting, and birthday targeting.
Connection Targeting
Connection targeting is perhaps the most robust of the new targeting features. With connection targeting, advertisers can now target their ad to only reach users who are:
- Fans of any of your Pages
- Users of any of your Applications
- Members of any of your Groups
- Attendees of any of your Events
Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.
However, currently, advertisers are not able to use the new features to target members of any generic Page, App, Group, or Event. That would be very powerful, but would also encourage targeting behavior that Facebook may not want to enable. Nevertheless, as it currently stands Connection Targeting could be a very powerful tool for marketers and developers to re-engage certain segments of their Page’s fan base or application’s user base.
Multiple Country Targeting
Just like it sounds, multiple country targeting allows advertisers to reach users in multiple countries (up to 25) with a single campaign. Until today, advertisers had to create different ads for each country. Facebook delivers the ad based on a combination of profile data and IP address.
Birthday Targeting
For advertisers interested in reaching Facebook users on their birthdays, Facebook now has a new checkbox to do just that. Birthdays are compelling scenarios for interaction on Facebook, so we expect to see many advertisers take advantage of this feature.
