Tracking Your Data: Targeted Facebook Ads

Recently I began looking into paid advertising options for promoting my new book, The Social Event. In my book I offer a fictional perspective on the increasingly improving and ever evolving art of targeting goods and services to their most likely consumers based on said consumer's web and social media data. While my novel, The Social Event, may take this practice one step further - I stress may - an Associated Press piece I read today offered a closer look into the current state tailored ad targeting services offered by Facebook and other mega-data collection companies.

Services like Facebook do not utilize any data that reveals you or your specific identity. An advertiser can, however, choose from a veritable buffet of demographic data that will insure their add will be in front of those people who are most likely to care.


"...Besides the obvious attributes such as location, age and gender, advertisers can select languages, "ethnic affinity" and life events such as people who have recently moved, are living away from their family, got a new job and so on. Advertisers who want to target the newly engaged can narrow that down to engagements within one year or within three months. There are even options to target baby boomers, video game console players, early or late adopters of technology, fans of specific sports teams or people who go on cruises..."

And to further insure you are the ideal target for the ad you receive,

"...Facebook even considers your offline shopping behavior. Facebook's advertisers can see, for example, whether the ad for detergent you saw on Facebook led you to buy that brand in a drug store the following week. Facebook works with outside analytics firms to match what Facebook knows with what the retailers have on you and what you bought. Your name isn't attached to this, but it may still feel creepy..."

Facebook's easy-to-use self-service ad purchasing interface. As you can see, my somewhat general criteria chosen here allows me to target approximately 130 million people in the U.S. and the U.K.

 
As I've said, I have looked into this service and I must say that when I do choose to use it - yes, I did say when - I feel confident that the most receptive of potential targets (that would be you) will see my add. Did I mention that they offer this via a self-service portal and as such it's extremely affordable?

The news article goes in to say what you as a data repository can do to protect your demographic identity. As a person with a product to market, I will leave it to you to discover what, if any, recourse there is. You can find the entire article at the USA Today web site.

How much longer until they can predict what we want or need before we realize we want or need it? Not long I suspect. 

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