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Facebook No Longer Allows Scraping of Facebook User IDs for Ad Targeting

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facebook audience targetingFor quite some time, advertisers could scrape Facebook user IDs for those who shared, liked or otherwise engaged on anyone’s Facebook page or account.  This means you could scrape the IDs of those Facebook users who engaged or shared with competitor’s Facebook pages and then you could target ad campaigns specifically to those exact people.

The process was technically against Facebook’s terms of service, however there were many tools that people could use to scrape IDs for ad targeting with little to no consequences, although Facebook would disable or throttle many of those third party tools that scraped IDs.  However, Facebook has changed their ad serving settings so that you can no longer target users simply by scraping their Facebook IDs.

facebook custom audiencesIf you are advertising a Facebook app however, you can still target by user IDs.  However, that change means you can only target those who download or use your Facebook apps, and you must include the Facebook App ID for cross-referencing.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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