Facebook Ads API Partner AdStage Adds Overlap Targeting

A Facebook Ads API partner introduced a more efficient way to target ads on Facebook, as AdStage announced the rollout of its Overlap Targeting feature.

AdStage said Overlap Targeting is available immediately to its users, and it can be used on Facebook’s custom audiences, interests, behaviors and target partner categories, with that list set to be expanded in the coming weeks.

AdStage explained the rationale behind Overlap Targeting in a blog post:

Let’s say you sell vintage National Football League jerseys online, a relatively niche product. Your target audience is interested in football collectibles.

But if you add \"Football\" and \"Collectibles\" as targeted interests, you’ll end up adding two separate groups to your target audience when all you really want is the overlap of these two groups.

Targeting multiple interests like this is inefficient because football fans aren’t necessarily interested in commemorative jerseys and collectors aren’t necessarily interested in football. Your ads would then display to many disinterested people and result in wasted ad spend.

Instead, you want to target people who are interested in both football and collectibles. You want to reach the overlap of these two interests. It’s a smaller audience, yet a highly relevant one that’s worth investing in. That overlapping audience is highly likely to purchase your product, and it’s the one you should focus on reaching.

The company then offered details on how Overlap Targeting works:

AdStage Overlap Targeting lets you refine your Facebook ad targeting with \"and/or\" conditions to reach a niche audience. It’s an incredibly easy way to decrease your cost per acquisition and increase your return on investment by focusing your ad spend on a highly relevant subset of users.

With Overlap Targeting, you can refine your targeting from those interested in \"Football or Collectibles\" (about 225 million people) to \"Football and Collectibles\" (about 4 million people).

Finally, AdStage described layering within Overlap Targeting:

To expand your reach to highly relevant audiences, you can even combine the \"and\" statements of Overlap Targeting with the standard \"or\" statements created by default when you target multiple items. For example, you can target people who like (either NFL, football or San Francisco 49ers) and (either collectibles, antiques or souvenirs).

This selection targets a broader audience of people who’ve indicated some interest in football and some interest in collectibles, but it still filters out people that are only interested in one of these categories.

Advertisers: Would you be interesting in a feature like AdStage’s Overlap Targeting?