Facebook yesterday announced that they are now providing more data to advertisers
Over on Mulley.net I’ve covered creating Facebook Ad campaigns before and in some detail. Facebook allows you to target people based on their profile data and you can get very granular with the data. Facebook sent out a notice yesterday letting advertisers know that they’ve added more metrics to their ad campaigns:
“Responder Demographics” report: Facebook users spend a lot of time
connecting with friends and family on Facebook – uploading photos,
writing on each others’ Walls, posting notes. Now you can find out
who is interacting with your ads. This report provides the aggregate
age, gender and geographic location of the users who have clicked
on your ad.
This is good. It gives you more feedback on how your add is performing which will allow you to write even better copy for the ads that you have.
“Responder Profiles” report: In addition to age, gender and
geographic location of the users who have clicked on your ad,
we’re happy to provide psychographic information of these same
users. This data is aggregated from user profiles and shows common
interests, favorite TV shows, movies, books and music.
This is probably a bit scary but you will now know more about the group of people clicking on your ads and will know that an ad that mentions X is liked by people who like Pearl Jam and The Wire etc. Like the above, the more data you have on these people, the better you can make your ads which gives value to you and those clicking on them.
Facebook have to be very careful with the manner in which they implement tracking and profiling on their site after the Beacon fiasco.
I can’t see Facebook making a major revenue from these ad campaigns though.
They’d be better off taking a similar approach to one which Last.fm implemented by making their ads appear as features of the site. Only problem is that Facebook is too open a platform for Facebook to adapt such a system.
Congratulations on the first post, Damien. Love the chunky design.