Facebook quietly announced a new feature coming later this month that will allow users to control whether or not an advertiser can show ads to them using a Custom Audience list.

“People have always been able to hide all ads from a specific advertiser in their Ad Preferences or directly in an ad. But now they will be able to stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list,” Facebook wrote the corporate blog.

Why we care

Custom Audiences are often comprised of a company’s active and best customers. Not being able to show ads to a critical mass of those users could potentially hurt campaign performance. However, this kind of control could be a net positive for advertisers as well as users. When users have the ability to opt-out, marketers have greater incentive to think carefully about the relationships they have with the customers on their lists and the messaging they’re serving them.

Facebook has made a number of changes to how Custom Audience lists are managed in the past year. This latest update is a more proactive feature — moving beyond simply giving users information on why they’re being targeted and letting them control if they see the ad or not.

The announcement was included in news related to allowing users to hide political ads, but the soon-to-be released feature applies to all campaigns using Custom Audiences.

More on the news

• With the new control feature, users will also be able to make themselves eligible to see an ad even if the advertiser has excluded them from the Custom Audience list.
• Last April, Facebook added information on when a Custom Audience list had been uploaded to the platform to the “Why am I seeing this ad?” feature.
• The company later updated the terms around how advertisers and their agencies could use Custom Audience list for transparency purposes.