A great deal of Facebook advertising advice describes a tool that no longer exists. It tells you to target precise interests, stack exclusions, and rebuild a persona checkbox by checkbox. That way of working belongs to a version of Meta Ads that has been dismantled in stages since 2022.
Knowing what was removed saves you from two expensive mistakes: hunting for an option that is not there, and, more importantly, blaming targeting for a problem that actually lives in your creative.
What Meta removed, and when
The broadest cut took effect on 19 January 2022. Meta withdrew detailed targeting options tied to topics people may perceive as sensitive: health, sexual orientation, religious practices and groups, political beliefs, and social causes and organisations. In the same pass, it removed options it considered rarely used, redundant or overly granular.
Existing campaigns were given until 17 March 2022 to be updated, after which affected ad sets could no longer be edited without changing their targeting. The full announcement and migration path are on Meta's developer blog.
Other restrictions layered on top. Since 2019, ads related to housing, employment and credit fall into special categories with heavily limited targeting. And Meta stopped the creation of new Special Ad Audiences on 15 September 2022.
The direction has been consistent for four years: the platform is taking audience selection back into its own hands.
What this means for a local business
The natural instinct, when you sell an extension or a photography package, is to describe your ideal client and look for the matching checkbox. Homeowner, high income, project underway, recently engaged.
Those boxes are either gone or far blunter than people assume. The life events that remain available are few and broad. A bride planning her wedding is not identifiable in the interface with anything like the precision the reasoning assumes.
The conclusion is uncomfortable but useful: almost nothing that defines your best customer can be targeted directly. What remains dependable is geography, age and language.
What does the filtering instead
If the platform can no longer pick the right person for you, the filtering has to happen somewhere else. It happens in three places.
The message. An ad that names the customer's situation out loud filters by itself. An ad about quoting for the renovation of an existing conservatory will not be clicked by someone who does not own one. The copy becomes the filter.
The service area. For a local business, the geographic radius is the sharpest remaining criterion, and it has stayed reliable. A tradesperson who will not travel beyond forty kilometres should say so in the campaign and in the ad.
The form. The questions asked at the point of enquiry remove what targeting no longer can. Approximate budget, timing, nature of the project. One well-chosen qualifying question costs you some volume and saves a great deal of time on the phone. That is the subject of our comparison of lead forms and landing pages.
Should you just go broad?
Meta actively pushes towards broad audiences and automated optimisation. That is not a neutral position on its part, but it is consistent with how the system now works: it holds more signal than you do about real user behaviour, provided it receives usable conversion feedback.
In practice, on a modest test budget, splitting an audience into several narrow ad sets mostly produces dispersion. A clear geographic audience, one offer, and genuinely different creatives will serve you better. Our article on campaign budgets explains why concentration matters at that level of spend.
The takeaway
Detailed targeting is no longer the performance lever on Meta. It was one. It is not any more.
What decides the outcome of a local campaign today is the offer, the message that sorts people, the service area, and the quality of the enquiry you collect. Trying to rebuild a persona inside the interface means optimising the one part of the system you barely control.
Before your next campaign, check the options actually available in your own account rather than in a tutorial. It is the fastest way to find out what still exists.