There are big changes coming to Facebook and hardly anyone has noticed, yet.

We take it for granted that major social platforms change a lot. As Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed has documented and others have noted, Twitter and Facebook are constantly trying out new layouts and designs. Once a new way of doing things improves the site, those platforms will roll out to all users.

Whether it’s the latest version of the News Feed, the addition of imagery or big acquisition news, lots of ink (mostly digital) gets spilled covering major changes to platforms that we all use.

But, what about the changes that most users won’t see?

Recently, Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, announced two significant changes to how ads are structured and delivered that have the potential to dramatically alter how advertisers are able to reach users.

“Set”

Facebook is changing the structure of the system advertisers use to create and deploy ads by moving from a two-tiered system to a three-tiered system. This has significant implications for ad testing, optimization, and analysis, and it helps resolve one of the more significant issues with the previous structure.

First, some background information. The old structure had two components: a campaign that determined duration and budget and one or more ads that contained both the creative and the targeting information. Ads within a campaign competed with each other, and Facebook allocated resources to the better performing ad to maximize the advertiser’s dollar.

This structure caused an issue for advertisers who wanted to test how different ads would perform when shown to the same audience; or how the same ad would perform with different audiences. Since targeting was tied to particular ads, in order to test how different creative fared with an audience, the advertiser would need to create multiple campaigns and ads to prevent the ads within a campaign from competing. There are two problems with this approach: it takes more time to set up these campaigns, and it takes more work to collect and compare the data.

Beginning early this month, Facebook is starting to fix this problem by adding a third layer of ‘new campaigns’ above the existing structure. What were previously campaigns are now ad sets, and ads still live within them. In this new structure [Campaign > Ad Set > Ad], campaigns will be geared towards an object (say, clicks to a website), sets will determine the budget and length, and creative will continue to determine what the user sees (images, video, text) and where they see it (News Feed vs. right hand side). Advertisers will now be able to group ads targeting one demographic into an ad set and have multiple sets within one campaign. As a result, advertisers will not have to set up multiple campaigns to test how ads will perform to different audiences, saving time and simplifying reporting. While it doesn’t completely solve the previous problem, this change certainly helps.

 “And”

The more intriguing change is the introduction of an exclusive ‘and’ operator for interest targeting. Previously, Facebook only offered an inclusive ‘or’ operator.

Why is this significant? In short, it enables advertisers to narrow down overlapping pools of potential targets to find just the right audience. In the past, advertisers without existing data sets (a Facebook page with many fans or a list of contacts they had acquired) would need to identify target audiences by setting demographic criteria and identifying certain interests those audiences might share.

Here’s an example: suppose Engage were helping a fiscally conservative group rally opposition to a new tax on pickup trucks. Without a pre-existing audience of supporters (Facebook page with many fans or an email list of anti-truck tax advocates), we would look to build one by trying to appeal to fiscal conservatives as well as people who are likely to buy or be passionate about trucks. We could build audiences of fiscal conservatives based on people who like other fiscally conservative causes and we could build audiences of truck fans by targeting users who like major truck brands or who like things associated with truck ownership. If we combined this targeting we would get a larger pool of fiscal conservatives and truck enthusiasts. While there is likely overlap amongst these groups, they are by no means the same.

This new targeting option solves this problem since we will now be able to target users who have fiscally conservative interests and who also are truck fans. Simply put: this is big. It’s something internally we’ve wanted for a while and starting in April, it should be available to advertisers.

Change is common in this industry, and these will not be the last changes to Facebook’s advertising platform. But these are two tweaks that we will be watching to help better serve our clients.