A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife) | Hacker News Reader

A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife)

gabrielweinberg.com

168 pointskylebragger44 comments

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I read that as "FBI" and thought it was pretty creepy.

Even having read it as "FB" it's still pretty creepy.

Or even FSB.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

That, and, very frequently when I'm looking to purchase something, I go to google, do a search find a vendor on the advertisements and go purchase from them. I suspect there is a not insubstantial part of the Google Community that uses their advertisements as a form of Yellow Pages. On my iPhone, I use searching in Google Maps all the time as though it were the Yellow Pager.

I wonder how much he ended up paying total. I may have to try this for an upcoming anniversary but i'll probably have to point it out like he did.

Essentially 0. $1 CPM.

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?

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 think the point is that it doesn't take a lot of personal information to target an ad very specifically. But even when that happens, banner blindness trumps ad targeting. Banner blindness is very powerful indeed if a mother will ignore a photo of her own child.

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.

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.

Do you know if Google does this with products other than AdSense?

I guess for search ads a user's intent is more explicit, but it's probably still a useful signal.

Analytics in particular seems like it could provide a lot of data to them. I hope they're not doing that.

I don't believe that they are doing this but I am not sure. They certainly have the reach to dominate the space if they switched it on.

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.

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.

With people using ads to target potential employers, surprising loved ones...

Is there a ad potential for User->Business targeting, User->User targeting complementing the current Business->user targeting?

Its just a matter of time before somebody proposes through FB ad (imagine if it ends up going to the wrong girl ;))

And of course the most important data he left out: did she actually click through and buy the baby?

talk about taking the Long Tail strategy to the extreme!

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 :)

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.

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.

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