As advertisers focused on paid search, we have to make sure we are up to date with the latest details surrounding Google & Facebook's privacy updates. Google and Facebook have been rolling out significant updates in 2020 to help protect consumer's privacy and improve overall data transparency.

Facebook recently released their HEC Policy Update which required advertisers to specify their housing, employment, or credit ad as a "special ad category". Since this release Google has now finally followed suit with a similar update to both their ad creative specifications and targeting.

Google just released their update to their Personalized Advertising Policies. This update reflects the same approach Facebook implemented into their HEC policy.

The policy update requires housing, employment, and credit opportunities cannot target audiences based on gender, age, parental status, marital status, or ZIP code.

This policy update goes into effect on October 19th 2020.

Impact of Google's HEC Policy

Google's HEC policy update will cause some near term pain points for advertisers who have territorial concerns in Google ad auction. This will mean that advertisers will have to adjust their targeting settings from zip code targeting to city, DMA, and radius targeting.

At a glance this may seem like a significant change for many advertisers who deal with brands that have multiple retail locations in a specific DMA. In the past it was advantageous for advertisers to mitigate auction overlap through zip code targeting.

Now that this update will be moving towards radius targeting it becomes more important to evaluate the potential overlap from this new campaign targeting adjustment.