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As with Facebook’s other targeting ad-tech, it has announced that Datalogix, Epsilon and Axciom will be among the companies providing data to power the service. This is one of the first official products to come out of the partnership with these ad targeting data specialists, which were first tested in September 2012 and then officially announced in February. (Two other stories looking at how these partnerships are progressing are here and here.)
While Facebook has been rolling out some features in ads and in its user services by platform — for example, mobile-only and desktop-only — it’s perhaps a measure of how important this is to the company that it is being rolled out across both desktop and mobile ad serving today.
This is a big progression on Facebook’s existing advertising services, which targeted ads as well but only with data that was picked up on Facebook itself (although that’s an area that is also expanding). Ad targeting techniques like the ones being introduced today are used on the wider web, so it is important for Facebook to have them as well if it wants to continue to pick up ever-larger parts of businesses’ online marketing budgets.
As you can see from the screenshot for how it looks below, Facebook’s providing a number of interesting details for each category — but not any information about specific users. The details include how many people are included in a category — 14.8 million for kids’ cereal! — and some of the purchasing history that goes into them getting put into that group. That includes how often a product is bought over the last year, and details of where the information got sourced.
For users, there are the inevitable pros and cons. On the one hand, you will be seeing ads that, in theory, will be based on things you are interested in (if you could call “children’s cereal” an interest, that is). On the other, it’s always slightly annoying and menacing when you’ve browsed online for, say, plane tickets to Guatemala — and perhaps even purchased them already — and yet continue to get served ads for related plane tickets everywhere you visit on the web.
Indeed, while this gives advertisers a lot more detail about how and where and to whom to serve ads, what it does not do is ensure that advertisers will necessarily be the most relevant matches. For example, it’s not a guarantee that the kids’ cereal buyer category will only be used by Kellogg’s or Quaker Oats. It might be a vitamin or toy company, or any kids product company, or any company selling things to parents, who may opt to serve an advert to that particular product category.
As with other targeting services on Facebook, a user can opt out of getting ads from specific advertisers, or from targeting altogether.
