Facebook Promises More Details on Why Certain Ads Show Up on Your Feed
Meta is promising(Opens in a new window) to give people deeper insight into how their activity on and off Facebook factors into the ads it serves up on their feeds.
Essentially, the Facebook “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool will give you an explanation more detailed than the equivalent of “the advertiser wanted to reach grown-up warm bodies in the US," according to Pedro Pavón, Global Director of Ads and Monetization Privacy.
When this rolls out on your account, you’ll click or tap the ellipsis-icon menu button at the top right of an ad in your feed and select the familiar “Why am I seeing this ad?" option. Here, you’ll see two new options: “Advertiser choices” and “Your activity.”
The former should cover what you see today, which often show a striking lack of precision. In my account, advertisers from United Airlines to the Van Gogh Expo reported in this dialog that they’d targeted people who “Set their age to 18 and older” with “A primary location in the United States.”
The latter, however, will reveal how your digital footsteps might have attracted an advertiser’s interest based on “Your activity on Meta technologies” and “Your activity off Meta technologies.”
In the first category, one screenshot shows that an ad for bath bombs came from the user interacting with Facebook ads about “personal care, nutrition and retail,” pages about “hair care and crafting,” and “products related to apparel in an ad or on Facebook Marketplace”—as well as a friend who engaged “with a related page.”
In the second, another screenshot says the user “visited websites about personal care,” “used apps about lifestyle,” and “interacted with products related to apparel on a website or app.”
Note that you can already set Facebook to stop
Read more on pcmag.com
