Digital Marketing

How to change the Ads you see on Facebook LoyicaBlog

Facebook comprises of over 2 billion monthly active users and unsurprisingly it’s collecting a huge amount of data as much as possible. This data collection helps

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Author
Loyica Team
Feb 21 2019
How to change the Ads you see on Facebook

Facebook comprises of over 2 billion monthly active users and unsurprisingly it’s collecting a huge amount of data as much as possible. This data collection helps the advertisers to target an advertisement at the right people, based on their interests, and what they have been looking for on the platform.

Loyica will explain how Facebook collects all the relevant data about their users, how they view their Ad preferences and ways to change them if they seem inaccurate.

What does Facebook know About You?

According to research conducted it is recorded that 74 percent of the American Facebook users are unaware of the fact that Facebook maintains a list of their interests and traits for their advertisement purposes.

However, Facebook gathers this information in the background and it can be seen on a page called "Your Ad Preferences". This isn't always accurate as Facebook figures this out from your activity. Moreover, about 59 percent of the people said that the Ads reflected their real-life interests and 27 percent said that it’s not relevant enough. Moreover, 51 percent of the respondents were not comfortable with this sort of activity of Facebook as it is interrupting their privacy again.

Facebook also assigned some of its users a political and multicultural affinity. Moreover, the accuracy of the data that Facebook collects would depend, not only on Facebook's formula for calculation but also on the activity that the users would do when offline.

Facebook Creates Your Ad Preferences

Facebook collects the data and makes the following assumptions which are depicted in the Ad preferences section. The assumptions, however, benefit the advertisers by knowing the user and their interests.

How do Advertisers Target You?

The advertisers would first detail the audience they want to reach and target. They would sort age range, gender, location, and interests. Facebook would then link this to all of its users to find a perfect match for the advertisers. 

For instance, a chocolate truffle company in Taiwan wanted to run an ad to get more people in their shop and buy their heart-shaped truffle for a perfect Valentines. However, the chocolate truffle company could target their Ad at chocoholic people who are aged between 18-35 years old and within 20 miles of their store.

How to Change Facebook Ad preferences

For anyone concerned that their data is being collected, Facebook has made it easier to check the ad preferences. Log in to your Facebook account and click the Dropdown Arrow from the top menu, then select settings and then Ads, this is the Ad preferences page.

Users can expand their interests to see what Facebook thinks that they like in various categories such as entertainment, shopping, and technology. They can click on interest and see a sample advertisement related to it. Moreover, they can also click the cross to remove something from their ad preferences. However, this action does not remove Facebook from storing that data about them.

The advertisers' section also shows which companies have added information related to the users and the websites they have been visiting, along with how many times they have clicked on the same thing.

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