| Role | Product Designer |
| Company | |
| Projects | Expanded Targeting, Inline Lookalike Audience Creation, Interest Selection Component Redesign |
| Platform | Web |
In my first role at Facebook, I worked on the powerful system that helps advertisers target the right people for their ads. I primarily focused on interest-based targeting, the ability for advertisers to have a finer control of reaching people on Facebook.
Many advertisers inadvertently constrict themselves because they've chosen interests that have too few people than they had in mind. With Expanded Targeting, advertisers can allow Facebook to look beyond the strict set of users in a defined interest and see if there are opportunities to find similar people that could lower the cost for the advertiser and are more likely to convert on the intended action.
Although the final solution to add a checkbox in the Detailed Targeting section seems obvious, it certainly wasn't along the way. We iterated through several ideas before coming to this solution, as we wanted to balance transparency without overloading the thought process that goes into creating an ad. The team also waited until the performance at the right place where we felt comfortable with a checkbox defaulted on.
When advertisers want to find potential new customers, they can create a lookalike audience from an existing audience. Facebook will attempt to find people similar to that audience. Traditionally, the creation of lookalike audiences was a multi-step process that required leaving the ads creation flow. By allowing the process to be streamlined in the creation process, it enticed more advertisers to use this feature.
