A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife) • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by lftl » Fri, May 14, 2010, 1:58 PM UTC

codejoust wrote: post #3

That's why you don't put in so much personal information. The oddest, though, is when looking at a site that has nothing to do with IT, there are contextual ads for IT stuff below.

I haven't used FB's ad creation in depth, but I don't think it would take much personal-type information to do this. One of the biggest ways FB offers to target is by the pages/groups a user likes/is a fan of/whatever they call it now. So you could narrow down pretty well just using the information that's available on most people' public search result pages.

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

#12

Post by hackermom » Fri, May 14, 2010, 1:59 PM UTC

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 also "tune out" and don't notice the really scary privacy issue at hand :)

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

#13

Post by ct4ul4u » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:15 PM UTC

I did this with a few people at work. It seems as if the ad is not served at all if the target population isn't over some threshold. I was not able to target 2-3 people, but was able to target 30.

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

#14

Post by natrius » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:25 PM UTC

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.

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

#15

Post by dpritchett » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:29 PM UTC

ct4ul4u wrote: post #13

I did this with a few people at work. It seems as if the ad is not served at all if the target population isn't over some threshold. I was not able to target 2-3 people, but was able to target 30.

I put in an ad for my wife around Valentine's day and specifically targeted it to her (it helps that she's the only Memphis-area fan of a fan page I run). She saw it early on the first day of the ad window. I think setting my cost per click at the high end of the range was important.

It wound up costing less than a dollar for the successful campaign.

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

#16

Post by glhaynes » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:36 PM UTC

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"

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.

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

#17

Post by Sukotto » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:37 PM UTC

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.

hmm... so if you were a divorce lawyer you could run a "looking for love" ad using a picture of a loved one and a "need a divorce?" ad right underneath it.

Evil, but possibly effective.

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

#18

Post by hoprocker » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:53 PM UTC

glhaynes wrote: post #16

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"

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.

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

#19

Post by WillyF » Fri, May 14, 2010, 2:54 PM UTC

I'm still astounded at how little Facebook has done with such a powerful targeted advertising platform.

There are some affiliate marketers making bank through Facebook ads, and there are some job seekers who have landed jobs through Facebook ads, but what other success stories are there?

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

#20

Post by chwolfe » Fri, May 14, 2010, 3:37 PM UTC

A college buddy of mine recently started a wedding photography business. He has had great success with FB ads. Word of mouth and referrals are starting to ramp up but FB was where he got his first 10-15 contracts (it helps when you can target "Women who are Engaged in Metro area"). The only thing that drives him nuts is that he hasn't figured out a way to not advertise on apps.facebook.com (games) because the bounce rate is obviously insane.