Facebook wants to improve their advertising targeting, but needs more information to do so. Where will this new information come from? Your web history. Something we reported two months ago.
This week, at Facebook’s F8 developer event, Facebook is expected to roll out a new advertising system and series of social buttons. These buttons will mimic Twitter and Digg buttons that are ubiquitous online.
Users can click the Facebook button while off-Facebook, signaling the giant with new information about their preferences that will then be fed into algorithms for advanced, and dead-on, advert targeting. More and better information will allow Facebook to boost its CPM and CPC rates significantly.
As mentioned, we called this back in February, naming the new advertising product “Facebook’s adsense.” Facebook denied it.
While we were not perfect on every small detail, we got the important part dead on: behavioral targeting is the future for Facebook, and that your listed interests and loves are not enough to fully nail down ad targeting. Facebook needed more data, and now they will have it.
Privacy?
If you put Facebook and advertising in to the same sentence, everyone thinks the same thing: privacy debacles. Beacon was bad, and this could follow.
From what we understand, Facebook will note when a user makes an action on a third-party website, and use that information. That makes the collection of data very active, not passive. If instead Facebook sets up the buttons to note any logged in Facebook user, and save that data hit without alerting them, we are going to see class-action lawsuits.
Still, this could be done very well. New Facebook buttons, if incorporated with perhaps advanced sharing functions would be picked up very quickly by every major website. That is, this informational spigot could be turned on in a matter of days.
It’s All About The Money
If Facebook wants to hit the IPO mark, it needs to have its advertising platform mature. A company cannot go public on the type of advertisers that Facebook seems to attract.
By improving their entire ad platform to include bucketfuls of new data, Facebook can chase and hold on to the largest ad budgets in the world, and with that stability move towards a major liquidity event. Not before.
Last week was Chirp, this week get ready for a Facebook deluge.
Just to clarify, the Financial Times incorrectly suggested that Facebook is launching a behavioral ad targeting at f8, our upcoming developer conference. Their story has been corrected. As we have said previously, we are moving from ‘Become a Fan’ to ‘Like’ to make the language on the site more consistent but we have no announcements or changes planned to our ad offering or ad policies.
Barry Schnitt
Director, Policy Communications
Facebook
barry@facebook.com
650.543.4979
Facebook is placing immature contain in there ads so i think that they must have to give warning about this kind of ads putting on the user profile then must look further for this kind of history ads..
They already did, all the ads I see on Facebook are related to something I was looking for online earlier.
Facebook already tracks our online behaviour partially. Even on this thenextweb-Site.
The small “f-Share” button is loaded from faceboook servers. They get my IP and thus know on which sites I am (as long as these sites also have the “f-Share” button). I believe that facebook already makes profiles including the off facebook surfing behavior.
Great! Thanks for sharing this story.
Without any offense, i just wonder why Facebook is more often prone to having their messages mis-communicated? But correct me here, if Facebook plans to to follow up with the World Wide Like option, don't you think it would actually be implementing what this post calls – targeted advertising?
I will be glad to hear your response to this. Thanks
If you're on facebook then you have to realize by now that your privacy is not really the priority (plus look at how much you share just because). This is just another way to use your actions online for or against you (depending how you look at it).
That's right.
Use it for your purposes or you're abused for their purposes :)
I couldn't agree with you more on this. It's sad how we don't realize the bulk of information that we are sharing about others and yet are so concerned about it.
What everyone needs to do is give Facebook some time and learn the new features/improvements being made and quite a lot of confusion will be taken care of.
I think that they must have to give warning about this kind of ads putting on the user profile then must look further for this kind of history ads.
Meh this is what Google has been doing with your gmail/google account on its search engine. People need to realize that it is in fact a computer program taking note, not a person.
On this note,”Google knows more about me than the government and my family does”I actually don’t mind being targeted, at least I may have some interest in ads. Which are usually beyond irrelevant … But then you mentioned the ads would assume all my links I post a positive correlation?! Bugger. Often I post links out of outrage and disgust, and cause for protest not “like”ing. Boo.