Facebook tells advertisers how to (very) closely target users this holiday season
Ads are hard to avoid at the best of times, but it has a tendency to get a little worse in the run-up to Christmas. Advertising has become increasingly prolific on social networks, and this is certainly true of Facebook. As we enter the holiday season, Facebook is providing advertisers with advice that will enable them to deliver finely-tuned ads at highly specific sets of users.
If you picked yourself up a new tablet in the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, Facebook makes it possible for advertisers to pick you out of the masses. The social network is not only rolling out a couple of new features to help with targeted advertising, but also providing tips for more successful campaigns.
Advertisers want assurances that the ads they post are reaching the right people, and this is something Facebook says it can deliver. Or as a blog post announcement puts it, "advertisers can buy Facebook mobile app ads with highly predictable reach and frequency". Targeting can be incredibly specific: "advertisers can set their app ad campaign to reach 5 million people with a frequency cap of three impressions per person for one week".
What is especially interesting about Facebook's announcement is that it highlights the ability to target people who have bought a new device. It has been possible to target specific devices -- such as iPads or Samsung tablets -- and now the Amazon Fire has been added as a target device. But it is also possible to use the fact that a user has logged into Facebook using a new device as at trigger for delivering certain ads to those users.
Facebook's tips suggest making use of more video ads, so you can probably expect to see more of these cluttering up your timeline in the coming weeks.
How do you feel about this sort of targeted advertising? Assuming some ads are a given, would you rather see generated ads that are likely to be of no interest, or targeted content which may at least be relevant to your needs?
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