As explained by Meta: “An exclusion-only custom audience is a type of customer list custom audience that can only be used to exclude people from your ad audience. Unlike a regular custom audience, an exclusion-only custom audience cannot be used to include people in your audience.”
Why would advertisers want to ban people from seeing their ads?
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As explained by Meta: “An exclusion-only custom audience is a type of customer list custom audience that can only be used to exclude people from your ad audience. Unlike a regular custom audience, an exclusion-only custom audience cannot be used to include people in your audience.”
Why would advertisers want to ban people from seeing their ads?
Meta said that exclusion-only audiences can be used to ensure that people who’ve opted out of a business’s products or services no longer see those promotions, reducing wasted ad spend. This can also be used to exclude people that a business has “a legal or regulatory obligation not to target,” the company said.
Meta added that the option can be used as a permanent guardrail against accidental inclusion when utilizing custom audiences.
It’s essentially an expanded custom targeting element, which businesses can use to safeguard against accidental ad exposure through other means.
“As an advertiser, you can use a regular custom audience to include and exclude people from your ad audience,” Meta said. “If you use an exclusion-only custom audience, however, you can only exclude people from your ad audience. You can’t use an exclusion-only custom audience to include people in your ad audience, and you can’t change an exclusion-only custom audience to a regular custom audience after it’s been created.”
In addition to Meta’s guidance on where this could be valuable, Facebook ads expert Jon Loomer advised that the option could be valuable for excluding employees, to eliminate paying for ads that have no value.
There may also be other use cases, though for the most part, those could be facilitated by existing custom audience exclusions.
