that a bit and we’ll talk a little bit later about what impact that has on on your ability to target on Facebook.
And then finally, they’ve tightened controls — and this is something they’ve been doing over the last few years — you probably heard about the Cambridge Analytica scandal where you know we’re access to your third-party app was given to some consumer information… it really been tightening down the controls on how apps can access access and use consumer data. Next slide please.
So the biggest impact that all of this has is really around that the targeting capabilities within Facebook. So as they started to eliminate the matching of third-party data with with consumer data on Facebook, they eliminated what are called partner categories within Facebook, and this is where Facebook was taking third-party data from companies like axiom and matching that against Facebook data to to attach things like “income” and “home ownership” and other kinds of demographic and psychographic profile information against Facebook users, and allowing advertisers to use that data at the target.
Facebook has eliminated that as of about a month ago, and so now what’s what’s left in there is the ability for you to target around what’s called first party data within Facebook — that is, information that Facebook already knows about those users that you… those users have provided themselves within the Facebook experience. Now this isn’t actually a net loss to SMBs. What has happened in the past frequently is DIY users who are going in and setting up their campaigns on Facebook have often over targeted — that is, they’ve often seen all these things Facebook allowed you to do to target their ads and they’ve selected all of them that they thought were appropriate, and they end up over selecting… over targeting… which reduces the reach of their campaigns and ended up increasing the cost. We’ll talk a little bit more about new ad targeting and how this applies to making your ad campaign most effective on a later slide.
Here one important thing is, you know, this probably hasn’t all played its way out, so there’s still privacy