Commentary

The Loss of Facebook Partner Categories: How Marketers Can Cope

Many marketers are still sulking over the removal of Partner Categories, Facebook’s third-party data exchange. And that’s understandable. Many advertisers had come to rely on Partner Categories as a means of targeting their media buys on Facebook. For these advertisers, the path to finding audiences on the platform has entirely changed course. 

Despite their frustrations, few advertisers are likely to walk away from advertising on Facebook in light of the unpopular move. Facebook still exists as a gateway to large, valuable swaths of engaged consumers. So how can marketers who continue to invest in Facebook reach their audiences?

Third-Party Data Still Rules the Day

Facebook will still allow advertisers to target their first-party audiences on campaigns via a CRM upload, and many industry headlines to date put an emphasis on first-party data as a go-forward strategy. But let’s face it: Third-party data is still the bread and butter of advertising, especially when it comes to new-customer acquisition. A first-party strategy simply won’t achieve the results needed by many of today’s Facebook advertisers. 

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Marketers of all stripes and across business categories use primarily third-party data to get in front of new potential customers, and prospecting represents the lion's share of marketing spend. For some marketers, such as those in the entertainment space, this is especially the case. According to Donnie Williams, chief digital officer at Horizon Media, studios often don’t have much first-party data available. It simply isn’t a priority for them.

The removal of Partner Categories is particularly problematic in a highly anticipated election year. Brands, agencies and especially marketers behind political campaigns are going to have to fundamentally rethink how they reach their audiences across the globe.

The Future of Third-Party Data Relationships

With the recent changes at Facebook, today’s marketers face a complex web of challenges when it comes to targeting their audiences on the world’s most popular social media platform. Given the importance of prospecting and the shortcomings of most advertisers’ first-party data assets, it’s clear that third-party data is still a must-have for the modern marketer. Therefore, in rethinking their approaches to advertising on Facebook, marketers must also rethink how they partner with third-party data providers. 

Going forward, brands and agencies must seek to build one-to-one partnerships with third-party data providers that can help solve their Facebook advertising woes. Likewise, these partners must rise to the challenge of restoring the ease of using their data within the platform. 

At present, getting third-party data into Facebook can be time-consuming. In general, marketers can request an audience segment to be built and activated by their data providers into Facebook via an onboarding partner. However, this process can take up to two weeks, stalling the launch of campaigns while also diminishing the match rates of the audience. Having previously been spoiled by the ease of creating audiences within seconds using Partner Categories, this new process is far from ideal for marketers.  

By establishing stronger relationships with data providers, marketers can not only reinstate the ease of Facebook advertising to which they’ve become accustomed, but they can also open up deeper targeting capabilities for their campaigns. While Facebook’s Partner Categories offered demographic and behavioral data such as lifestyle traits, interests and purchase behaviors, its segments came up wanting in terms of deeper consumer motivations that can be revealed via psychographic data. Now that brands and agencies are getting more hands-on with their Facebook targeting data, they can seek to fill in the gaps that Facebook left open with its own offering.

Without a doubt, the removal of Partner Categories by Facebook has serious implications for advertisers on the platform, but it’s not the end of the line. This shift represents an opportunity for marketers to get more deeply involved with their data partners in order to better leverage third-party data not only on Facebook, but also across the entirety of their media buys.

1 comment about "The Loss of Facebook Partner Categories: How Marketers Can Cope".
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  1. Dan Kidd from Datawallet, July 19, 2018 at 1:29 p.m.

    The removal of Partner Categories is just a symptom of the larger change in the data ecostructure. The data produced on these platforms is inherently owned by the creator, the consumer. There is a data revolution in process as shown with the demise of targeting such as Partner Categories. Individuals are taking control of their data and deciding who can utilize this data and for what purpose. There is a large need for platforms to empower this awakened consumer and Datawallet is filling this need. Consumers can discover, control and provision their data directly to the brands of their choosing for approved use cases.  The brands then have direct access to the first party consumer data, ethically sourced directly from the consumer.  This issue for marketers can be solved and the data revolution has begun. 

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