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A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

gabrielweinberg.com

31–40 of 45 posts

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

#31
post #17
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's so evil that I'm wondering why nobody has done it yet.

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

#32
post #17
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mega creepy ads may work for selling certain products and services, but nobody wants to trust a creepy lawyer

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

#33

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.

That's called retargeting. Not sure if the Facebook Ads platform offers any kind of retargeting options (besides targeting based on Liking something), but many ad networks do. For instance, I spent some time looking at Photoshop on Adobe's site. Ever since, I've seen a ton of ads for Photoshop. It's a really effective tactic, since you've already prequalified the user's interest from an earlier online action.

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

#34
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true. Social ads got banned and mobile payment ads got really restricted. A lot of facebook ad networks not only got hit by that but got put out of business by those changes.

Also, facebook is always tweaking what you can do on ads, business lines are always rising and falling on that platform.

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

#35
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.

It is not true that all CTR is low on Facebook. There's a wide range of CTRs for ads. Some of them are really low, but some are ridiculously high, a lot higher than what I've seen on a traditional high quality web-based ad network.

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

#36
post #33

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.

That's called retargeting. Not sure if the Facebook Ads platform offers any kind of retargeting options (besides targeting based on Liking something), but many ad networks do. For instance, I spent some time looking at Photoshop on Adobe's site. Ever since, I've seen a ton of ads for Photoshop. It's a really effective tactic, since you've already prequalified the user's interest from an earlier online action.

The way it works is that the ad network puts a pixel on the photoshop page. When your browser sees that pixel you get cookied by the ad network. Then when you see an ad placement from that ad network then you'll maybe see campaigns targeted to the BT profile.

With ad network pixels it is hard to get reach. This is were companies like BlueKai fit in. They make a deal with Adobe and lots of others to put their pixel/JS on Adobe's page. Then when an ad network gets a campaign that needs to target photoshop users, they buy profiles from BlueKai.

Basically, BlueKai will piggyback the ad network's pixel on the BlueKai placement, either by injecting it via javascript or by doing a 302 redirect. This has to run for a couple weeks until the ad network has got enough reach for that profile, then they can start the re-targeting campaign.

That's how it generally works, I don't know if BlueKai actually has a relationship with Adobe.

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

#37

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 pro…

The latter example has little to do with identifying individuals, but with targeting in general.

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

#39
So ad's in its current shape aren't working.

A business model for Facebook that just might: Offer insurance companies to pay for repeated privacy option changes which you have to opt out of.

Or heck, just sell a feed to the firehose to them.

Yeah, I guess this is a troll. But I must say I'm getting pretty damn fed up with all this Facebook noise everywhere right now.

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