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Finer and Finer Targeted Ads

Facebook has come a long way from simply being an innocent social network. I always knew that Facebook was using my data to pinpoint what adds to show to me, but the extent to which advertisers can select by data is quite frightening. Options available to businesses that advertise with Facebook are publicly available: https://www.facebook.com/business/a/online-sales/ad-targeting-details. Among the options are:

  • Location, based on a person’s IP address
  • Demographics, including age, gender, relationship status, education, and work
  • Interests, based off of the pages and people you like on Facebook
  • Behaviors – activities people do on or off Facebook –  data gathered from behavior both on and off Facebook through Facebook’s partners.

As Facebook and other social networks become more and more widely used it becomes more and more difficult to restrict what information you want available to advertisers and what you don’t. To see how it fares, I disabled my adblock for a moment and refreshed Facebook a few times. Some adds that appear:

  • BusteedTees (relevant) – I’ve shopped there recently
  • WebEx (relevant)- I’ve used it
  • Adobe Creative Cloud (relevant) – I repeatedly put off updating it
  • Billy Idol (not relevant)
  • IBM Cloud Marketplace (not hugely relevant)
  • Discover – (relevant, I suppose) I do use credit cards, though at the moment it’s a Visa.
  • Hoover Vacuums – ????

Even more interesting is that Facebook provides a “why am I seeing this” option for adds. Hoover’s add claims that I am seeing it because “You’re seeing this ad because hoover.com wants to reach people on Facebook through Quantcast, an advertising company that uses Facebook’s ad exchange.” Looks like Facebook’s ad service has a long way to go.

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