Analysing Facebook’s new household targeting

It gives businesses a new angle to reach their desired audience. When you watch TV with your family, you see the same ads: This is essentially what Facebook are striving for. Family targeting allows brands to select a source audience and use Facebook’s data to understand where customers live and who they live with. To identify members of the same household, Facebook considers familial relationships and whether people share the same last name. There is a level of invasiveness to this new feature, but it makes sense from a business point of view. It’s part of Facebook’s plans to overtake advertisement on television networks, which has been the traditional way of showing ads to the whole household.

There are many instances for which marketers might want to use household targeting. For example, a retail brand might want to target households who purchase similar products. Also, travel advertisers could target each family member, in addition to the person paying for the trip, flights or hotel.

Facebook’s new feature essentially makes it easier for brands to reach the right people at the right time. The tool could be used to cut down wasted ad spend, because brands will know if someone has already bought a household specific product or service, like Netflix or an Apple Music subscription. Brands can see this information on their customer database. Also, Facebook is adding more measurement capabilities, which will show up in the ads reporting dashboard. They will show how well your ads are performing in terms of conversion rates and impressions, across family members.

Although households do have the choice to opt out of household marketing, Facebook’s new feature is overall good news for brands and marketers. It makes advertisement across the platform more specific, less time consuming and more likely to drive better results.