Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukethomas | Hacker News Reader

I did a similar process when house-shopping. Setup ads for a particular location, specifically targeting people who owned in the area, but who lived out of state.

1. Personal FB ad copy 2. Landing page w/ more information about what we were looking for. 3. Contact form

I received ~5 leads from people willing to sell their house with about $100 in ad spend.

View on HN

How do you target owners in FB (A bit time since I don't use it, but don't remember any particular filter allowing this)

Not only is there a "homeowners" category in the "Demographics" targeting section, but there are specific sub-categories like "Home value" $50,000-$99,999", "Home type: Condo", etc. IIRC, they get it from a data broker like Experian.

And the data broker, in turn, compiles that information from public records.

LexisNexis is actually the big one who resells that information, you can request a copy of your report from their site for free to see what they got on you. Mine listed my house, I believe the day I bought it, and the source of that information (in my case my town hall).

> LexisNexis is actually the big one who resells that information, you can request a copy of your report from their site for free to see what they got on you.

How? Their site has a physical form and instructions to mail it - which is so fucking ironic given they freely sell our data in digital form but we need to mail them forms to get a copy ourselves.

I believe I mailed in the form with a color photocopy of my ID.

Yup - I do believe that FB is severing their relationship with these data brokers shortly, so unsure if this will continue to be available.

Are they? This would really surprise me- Custom Audiences (FB brand name for the tool that integrates data from 3rd parties like Acxiom, etc.) is VERY powerful and makes FB a whole bunch of money.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/shutting-down-partner-categor...

Ah ok, they're closing Partner Categories (not Custom Audiences). Appreciate the link

Without the data brokers they may try to instead compile that information themselves straight from the source like Zillow does.

Wow, that's kind of creepy. I tend to feel like that every time I go down the rabbit hole of just how much the advertising world knows about us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com