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By Felicia Schwartz 

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration, which has struggled for years to combat the social-media lure of Islamic State, is experimenting with new ways to put its online anti-extremism messages in front of would-be terrorist fighters overseas.

A revamped media effort is making use of targeted advertising, to put video messages on Facebook to reach the young men and women who have given digital hints that they could be thinking of traveling to Syria or Iraq to join extremist movements.

The campaign -- which is being run by the Global Engagement Center, a multiagency initiative housed at the State Department -- is seen by U.S. officials as one of the most promising new initiatives aimed at reaching and dissuading would-be fighters, though many acknowledge that messaging has always been a tough effort for the U.S. government and one whose true outcomes are impossible to know.

"This isn't easy work," said Michael Lumpkin, who earlier this year left his post as assistant secretary of defense for special operations to run Global Engagement Center. "There clearly is no silver bullet as we move forward."

But early results have been encouraging. The center spent $15,000 on a pilot four-week Facebook advertising campaign that targeted 13- to 34-year-old unmarried men and women in Morocco, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia and who expressed an interest in Iraq or Syria or Islamic State-related topics, as indicated by their Facebook activity. The pilot campaign, which ended Oct. 1, reached 6.9 million people and generated 781,000 visits to external sites.

Different phases of the campaign included varied content and redirected viewers to different sites, allowing officials to judge which types of ads had the best results.

The most successful part of the pilot made use of a native video ad, which blends in with a site's editorial look and feel. The video ran on Facebook for a week and reached 2.4 million people who watched for a total of more than 1,050,913 minutes, or two years' worth of streaming.

The pilot campaign marked the first time that the U.S. government has turned to targeted ads as part of its effort to disrupt Islamic State recruitment. With the pilot complete, officials are turning to a broader $50,000 campaign in 12 countries, including Egypt, Indonesia and France.

The results compared favorably with nongovernmental campaigns. A pilot earlier this year by Google's Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, placed advertising alongside results of searches for keywords and phrases entered by users with an interest in Islamic State. The ads linked to Arabic- and English-language YouTube channels with videos intended to dissuade would-be fighters by featuring Islamic State defectors and other themes. More than 300,000 people were drawn to anti-Islamic State YouTube channels over two months, according to Google.

The ad featured in the one-week U.S. campaign was about two minutes long and used a cartoon portraying a man messaging with an Islamic State recruiter. The recruiter encourages him to go to Syria to fight. The man asks questions about Islamic State: Is it true that the group kills Muslims, and takes women as slaves? The faceless recruiter offers defenses to each question, urging the man to "trust us."

Ultimately, the man concludes that joining Islamic State wouldn't meet his expectations and decides against it.

The Global Engagement Center's campaign aim is to get focus-group-tested content in front of the right people, in hopes of planting seeds of doubt as they consider whether to join Islamic State.

"We're shifting from what I call meat-cleaver messaging," Mr. Lumpkin said. "We're focused more on what I call scalpel messaging -- highly precisioned toward targeted audiences."

Center officials acknowledge they can't directly measure how many people they've persuaded not to join terrorist organizations. But an analytics team led by two former National Security Agency scientists who recently joined the center, Nash Borges and Paul DiOrio, is assessing statistics to determine how effective the campaigns are. For example, they are examining how long people engage with the content and whether they fill out surveys when prompted.

One big challenge is keeping the U.S. sponsorship from eroding viewer confidence in the campaign. There is no U.S. branding on the videos themselves, but they are currently being pushed out on Facebook through the U.S. Digital Outreach Team, which is a State Department-run Facebook page. So a person who sees the video in his or her feed would see a small U.S. government logo identifying the publisher.

Ali Soufan, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who worked on high-profile terrorism cases, said he worried that the visibility of the U.S. involvement in the campaign could set it back.

"They are doing a great job. However, among the targeted communities, the U.S. government is not a credible messenger," he said.

The fresh push to reach would-be foreign fighters comes as Islamic State's overall media output has plummeted, according to a study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

It also comes amid a decline in the number of foreign fighters attempting to reach Iraq and Syria. U.S. officials and experts attribute this decline largely to Islamic State's changing fortunes on the battlefield.

Despite the promising initial results, some terrorism experts and former officials questioned how meaningful the new effort is.

Will McCants, a former State Department official who helped launch the original version of the center, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, and is now at the Brookings Institution, said academic research shows that recruitment is driven primarily by politics and identity.

"Nobody wants to cop to the fact that [messaging is] pretty tangential from stopping fighters from carrying out attacks," he said. "It probably helps at the margins."

Write to Felicia Schwartz at Felicia.Schwartz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 20, 2016 10:35 ET (14:35 GMT)

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