Does Interest Tagging on Facebook Increase Traffic?

When Facebook replaced its old Interest Targeting feature with Audience Optimization in 2016, there was plenty of speculation about whether the new feature would improve on the limitations of its unpopular predecessor. After the release of Preferred Audience Optimization, Facebook announced to publishers that the new interest tags “do not limit reach.” Moreover, the social network, which generates well over 10% of all organic traffic to online publishers’ websites, promised that the use of the new interest tags would increase click-through rates. However, following initial excitement, no definitive independent study ever managed to establish whether adding interest tags to organic posts had any positive impact on traffic or engagement. Using extensive data from publishers’ Pages with millions of followers, we are now able to provide clear evidence that adding interest tags does not lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTRs), suggesting that audiences reached by carefully tagged posts are no more likely to click on a link share than audiences reached by posts without tags.