Can Facebook Targeting Be Inaccurate?

Facebook Targeting

Facebook targeting is used by millions of marketers worldwide, however a new study reveals something shocking!

A team of researchers in North Carolina examined the specific performance of Facebook’s interest tracking, and how it allocates behaviours and topics to each user.

As per the recent study –

“To obtain insights into how Facebook generates interests from a user’s Facebook activities, we performed controlled experiments by creating new accounts and systematically executing numerous planned activities. We found 33.22% of the inferred interests were inaccurate or irrelevant. To understand if our findings hold for a large and diverse sample, we conducted a user study where we recruited 146 participants (through Amazon Mechanical Turk) from different regions of the world to evaluate the accuracy of interests inferred by Facebook. We developed a browser extension to extract data from their own Facebook accounts and ask questions based on such data. Our participants reported a similar range (29%) of inaccuracy as observed in our controlled experiments.”

“Researchers created 14 new user accounts on Facebook. Researchers controlled the demographic data and behavior of each account, and tracked the list of interests that Facebook generated for each account. This experiment allowed us to see which activities were associated with Facebook inferring an interest, and the key finding here is that Facebook takes an aggressive approach to interest inference – even something as simple as scrolling through a page led to Facebook determining that a user has an interest in that subject.”

Facebook Targeting Study can be downloaded here.

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