Yes Facebook is more loose with targeting then it represents to its ad buyers, but also as buyers are notoriously bad at selecting clever targeting. There is a

Yes Facebook is more loose with targeting then it represents to its ad buyers, but also as buyers are notoriously bad at selecting clever targeting. There is a case of misaligned incentives. The more highly-targeted ad, the more likely it leads to a sale, yet for Facebook or really any ad seller they want to maximize the revenue of every impression, and broadly targeted (irrelevant) ads fill that demand quite nicely. Less filters = more potential revenue, even at the expense of their advertiser’s ROI. It’s a balance. It’s also why if you are buying ads you never try the platform-provided tools, which claim to optimize for ROI but generally tend toward yield. Google’s liberal suggestions of broad-match keywords are not to be trusted.