For a few days, more precisely since October 5th, Facebook has started a small but not entirely insignificant change at the ad group level. In the future, instead of the “Potential reach”, an “Estimated target group size” in the form of generalized potential reach categories will be displayed.
Facebook justifies this as follows:
“To make the presentation of these estimates consistent before the campaign, we’re changing the potential reach and interests into areas rather than specific numbers like the estimated daily results are already presented. Reaches also match how estimates are presented on other platforms in the advertising industry prior to the campaign. As part of this update, we will also be changing the name from Potential Reach to Estimated Audience Size.“
Estimated target group size ranges
Before this change, when you create an ad group, you will see the potential reach. The potential range looks like this …
The numbers are a bit misleading. Potential reach is not an estimate of how many people will actually see the ad and can change over time. Potential reach estimates how many people your ad can potentially reach, depending on the targeting and placement options you choose when creating your ad
To make that clearer now, Facebook will move from showing an exact number to a section in the form of estimated audience size. The estimated audience size looks like this:
The estimated audience size is how many people meet the targeting and ad placement criteria that advertisers select when creating an ad.
As you can clearly see, the display of the estimate will be quite broad and given as a range. How wide these areas will be is still difficult to estimate, but as it turns out, the range estimate will become much more general!
The switch to reach categories also affects the use of interest categories and custom audiences (see Facebook developer message).
Conclusion
Overall, these changes are more of a minor and cosmetic nature. But with this change, Facebook is sharpening the understanding of these metrics, that they are exactly what they are: estimates. Whether this change has something to do with the iOS14 update is not out of the question!
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