Meta’s Detailed Targeting Updates: What You Need to Know

In May 2025, Meta began rolling out significant changes to how advertisers can target users based on interests in Ads Manager. These updates consolidate multiple related interests into broader categories, reducing the granularity of targeting available. Here’s what’s happening, when, and how it may impact campaign performance.

What’s Changing?

As of May 2025, Meta has started to group similar interest categories together, limiting the ability to target individual, specific interests. For example, niche topics like “trail running”, “HIIT workouts” and “home fitness” may now be grouped under a broader category like “fitness and wellness”.

This means advertisers will no longer see some specific interests as standalone options in Ads Manager. Instead, they will be bundled with other related interests under a shared label. While Meta has not released a full list of affected interests, the change is being applied gradually across all Meta accounts.

The goal is to simplify the interest list and rely more on Meta’s algorithm to find the right people within these broader interest groups. Meta has been moving in this direction for a while, trimming obscure or overlapping interests to make targeting less granular and more aligned with its AI-driven approach.

Why Is Meta Making This Change?

Meta’s stated goal is to improve advertising performance and simplify campaign setup. Although narrow targeting has helped advertisers reach specific audiences, Meta’s internal data indicates that using broader categories can improve reach and give the algorithm greater flexibility to optimise performance.

In fact, when Meta removed Detailed Targeting exclusions in July last year, they cited a test where campaigns without exclusions had a 22.6% lower median cost per conversion than those using them.

By consolidating interests, Meta allows its systems more flexibility to determine who is most likely to engage or convert. This aligns with their push towards AI-driven targeting tools, like Advantage+.

This change also helps Meta stay compliant with growing privacy expectations by reducing the potential for advertisers to build highly specific, potentially sensitive audience segments.

How Will This Affect Your Campaigns?

At this stage, exactly how these changes will affect campaign performance is still unclear. The rollout is ongoing, and impacts may vary depending on targeting strategy and account setup. 

Current Ad Sets may need updating if they include affected interest categories. Meta may suggest alternatives in Ads Manager or prompt edits where targeting is no longer valid.

These changes to targeting emphasise the increasing importance of compelling Ad Creative and clear messaging. As Meta's algorithm plays a larger role in audience delivery, ensuring your ads resonate with a broader audience within the grouped interests becomes paramount.

At The Digital Stride, we’ll closely monitor these changes across all campaigns, addressing any disruption swiftly. Our team will adapt strategies as needed and continue to test performance under the new targeting structure to ensure our clients get the best possible results.

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