Why Interest Groups are the Key to Targeting the Right Audiences on Facebook
Interest groups were introduced roughly 10 years ago as a way to make Facebook as an advertising platform more familiar to people that were running Google ads. Interest groups are a direct effort to mimic affinity audiences in google. This is tremendously important in understanding how they are designed to work.
Google is an intent-based platform. Users are exposed to Google ads because they have given the system a signal to say that they are interested in that type of conscience at that very moment. Affinity audiences were googles way of allowing their advertisers to reach users who might not yet have intent.
Facebook is designed to create intent. Over half a decade after interest groups were invented Facebook made a seismic shift and how the platform operates. Since this shift, the ads themselves became more targeted, and audiences as a technology were no longer supported by developers at Facebook in the same way ever again.
Interest groups are built on conversations and actions, but they do not imply sentiment. Human nature is often to be more communicative in things that we don’t like rather than things that we want. Plus up to 1/3 or more of users in an interest group are there because of an error in the code.
The population of an interest group also is incredibly dynamic. Meaning that if we are trying to create intent, by showing ads to users over time, if those users change on a regular basis, we are creating more waste with our spend