Facebook's not helping this conspiracy theory with their "why did I see this ad?" dialog. I'll see a clearly hyper-targeted ad (for example, a psoriasis medication) and click that button and it'll say "they wanted to reach people in the United States between 18-65!"
I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.
The dialog even obnoxiously says "There could also be more factors not listed here." Yes, I know, that's fairly obvious. I clicked the dialog to figure out what those were.
>I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.
How do you know this? I get ads for male pattern baldness all the time but I'm not even genetically at risk. Half my ads on hulu are for tampons, and no woman lives in my house. Ads really aren't that good. Facebook might've just gotten lucky...
Because if I head to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/, they have a wide variety of bits of info on me that permit this exact sort of targeting, and it'd be really dumb of them not to use them.
If I head to Facebook's ads manager and create a custom audience, typing "psoriasis" in the box gets me "psoriasis awareness", which consists of 19,402,670 "People who have expressed an interest in or like Pages related to Psoriasis Awareness". Chances are good I'm one of them.
Just because that's an option doesn't mean that the ad you saw used it. Advertisers might get a better rate with a wider net; everyone in that audience has done at least a little bit of research, and might be less willing to switch than a random male would be to start using any medication at all.
The advertisers are probably choosing to target everyone on FB in that age range, but asking FB to optimize for conversions. Then the FB algorithm finds more people who look like people who are clicking and converting.
Ok, so dumb question. Why _wouldn't_ you optimize for conversions then? Unless you want some immeasurable branding value type lift.
Sorry for the dumb question but if you're implying one particular bidding mechanism benefits from FB algorithmic experience in a way that's meaningfully more accurate (serving the ad to the guy or girl with the condition), why would anyone do anything different?
I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me.
The dialog even obnoxiously says "There could also be more factors not listed here." Yes, I know, that's fairly obvious. I clicked the dialog to figure out what those were.