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A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#21

Post by ivankirigin »

This is really easy. I did the same thing a few months ago, and made the ad picture something I knew my wife would recognize. I made a landing page where I set a chartbeat alert for even a single visit. Then I made a form on the page to ask who the person was.

I didn't tell anyone about this, and hoped my wife would say she saw this funny ad.

Turns out she had seen it for months and just didn't click it. She thought it was some spammy ad that had a personal photo of us. It was hilarious to learn it worked right away, but that targeting an individual doesn't actually matter.

The ad system is actually awesome wrt privacy. Advertisers never get personal information, but can still target with agility.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#22

Post by benmathes »

lftl wrote: post #9
TomOfTTB wrote: post #5

I guess I'm just a cynic but my take away from this was "regular users of Facebook get so good at ignoring ads that you can literally put pictures of their own children in an ad and they'll still take forever to notice"

One issue with this may be that for awhile FB let you use create ads that would pull from a user's and their friends' profile pictures. This led to some pretty amusing ads for dating services with people's signifcant other being protrayed as looking for love. Not sure if FB still lets advertisers do this, but it may signifcantly contribute to ad blindess for ads like this.

They don't let you use social information in your ad code anymore. There were a couple of facebook ad networks (ads on game pages, not facebook ads) that got hit by that.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#23

Post by nfnaaron »

natrius wrote: post #14
hackermom wrote: post #12

Stuff like this just creep me out. I do have an account on Facebook (required for viewing certain albums etc.), but each and every privacy/marketing issue with FB that pops up really deters me and pushes me one step closer to erasing the account. As has already been noted by people in this thread, FB users really seem to just "tune out" and not notice the ads. My observation is that the people making that observation…

How is this a privacy issue? This exposes no personal information. You could create separate ads with different settings and use the differences in the URLs they point to to connect visitors with demographic data from their profile, but you still wouldn't know their name, friends, etc.

It may not (or may) be a privacy issue, but it still feels creepy when the Eye focuses on you, even if the Eye doesn't know who you are.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#25

Post by dalore »

lftl wrote: post #10
vaksel wrote: post #6

the reason facebook CTR is so low is because people go on facebook to use facebook. They aren't in a buying/browsing mood, so they tend to tune out the ads.

I definitely think thats part of the picture, but I feel presentation is part of it too. Google has spent a TON of time testing their ad formats to get the right measure CTR without annoyance. I don't get the feeling FB has invested as much time in their format, and that they have a lot of options on improving ad performance while still not MySpacing themselves.

Actually it's not google doing that, but the advertisers on Google. Any advertiser worth his salt runs variations of the same ad. After a while you drop the one with lowest CTR and create another one. Keep doing this and you get a feel for what gives you the best CTR for you.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#26

Post by smokey_the_bear »

lftl wrote: post #10
vaksel wrote: post #6

the reason facebook CTR is so low is because people go on facebook to use facebook. They aren't in a buying/browsing mood, so they tend to tune out the ads.

I definitely think thats part of the picture, but I feel presentation is part of it too. Google has spent a TON of time testing their ad formats to get the right measure CTR without annoyance. I don't get the feeling FB has invested as much time in their format, and that they have a lot of options on improving ad performance while still not MySpacing themselves.

If I see an ad I'm interested in on Google, I'll click it. That happened to me once on facebook, and I got dozens of pop up windows that popped under more when I try to close them. I don't trust then enough to click on one of their ads again.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#27

Post by WiseWeasel »

natrius wrote: post #14
hackermom wrote: post #12

Stuff like this just creep me out. I do have an account on Facebook (required for viewing certain albums etc.), but each and every privacy/marketing issue with FB that pops up really deters me and pushes me one step closer to erasing the account. As has already been noted by people in this thread, FB users really seem to just "tune out" and not notice the ads. My observation is that the people making that observation…

How is this a privacy issue? This exposes no personal information. You could create separate ads with different settings and use the differences in the URLs they point to to connect visitors with demographic data from their profile, but you still wouldn't know their name, friends, etc.

Think of the targeted social engineering attacks you can do with this. If you know that an individual has access to a sensitive computer network you want access to, you can make them a targeted offer they can't refuse and point to a site with some malware rootkit or something. I'm sure there are endless devious tricks that can be pulled with this system, beyond your harmless pranks like these. Now that I'm aware of the possibility that an ad I see is only seen by me, I'm much less likely to trust them with a click.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#28

Post by DaniFong »

vaksel wrote: post #6

the reason facebook CTR is so low is because people go on facebook to use facebook. They aren't in a buying/browsing mood, so they tend to tune out the ads.

So if Facebook had a search engine, or Google had Facebook's data, an ad platform could be even more targeted, and targeted to when people are looking for something.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#29

Post by anigbrowl »

ivankirigin wrote: post #21

This is really easy. I did the same thing a few months ago, and made the ad picture something I knew my wife would recognize. I made a landing page where I set a chartbeat alert for even a single visit. Then I made a form on the page to ask who the person was. I didn't tell anyone about this, and hoped my wife would say she saw this funny ad. Turns out she had seen it for months and just didn't click it. She thought…

targeting an individual doesn't actually matter

But is that because your ad was funny? Suppose I target an individual with a very serious message: say, 911 ABDUCTION ALERT! and a photo of their kid - that could well generate a reaction, especially if said kid were away at camp, or the subject of a custody dispute. Someone with ill intent might be able to leverage such a tactic to great effect, though I imagine FB probably has some filtering in place to prevent such obvious abuse.

But suppose I take a more subtle approach...say, I target members of a FB group for sufferers of a particular medical condition, but only those who don't have a college degree and are also in a group devoted to some dumb conspiracy theory. People like that might be quite vulnerable to social engineering attacks.

Re: A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

#30

Post by tienshiao »

hoprocker wrote: post #18
glhaynes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be interesting to see, though, how much users notice ads that have pictures of people they know vs. how much they notice 'regular' ads that don't have familiar people in them: Facebook shows lots of pictures of friends' photos around the edges with reminders to "Get back in touch", etc. and so people have been trained to tune those out, too.

Mashable.com uses your Facebook friends' pictures in their "Mashable on Facebook" advertisement (main page, right-hand side). It definitely draws my attention like a lightning bolt to see people I recognize out of the blue on random websites. I'd wager that there's a lot of primate-brain potential in this.

Mashable isn't responsible for that. Facebook is.

When you view any sort of "group" on Facebook, Facebook will randomly (or maybe not so randomly) show one of your friends if your friends are in that "group". Quite effective and clever.

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