the only games in town, advertisers selected the publication or TV show they wanted to advertise in and perhaps the specific section or program. For a national publication or show, they might be able to specify a certain area of the country, but that was about the extent of it.
Ads on Facebook are several orders of magnitude more specific. The company constantly collects information about its users, including age, gender, education and income level, job title, relationship status, hobbies, political leanings, favorite TV shows and movies, what kind of car they drive and what kinds of products they buy. In addition, Facebook tracks the pages users like, the ads they click on and the sites they browse.
Some of the information is collected directly by Facebook, some of it is purchased from data broker companies that use public records and buying behavior to learn about you.
Facebook then uses that information to decide to whom to show a specific ad. If you clicked on an InstaPot ad, you might be shown ads for other types of pressure cookers, or more generically, cooking. If your interests were the Bible, faith or Christianity, you could have been shown an ad placed by the Russians showing Jesus and Satan arm wrestling, with the caption, “Satan: If I win Clinton wins! Jesus: Not if I can help it! Press ‘Like’ to help Jesus win!”
What’s the difference between a post and an ad? Not much, sometimes.
When an organization posts something on its Facebook page, its Facebook friends see it as simply content that appears in their News Feeds. The organization also has the option of “boosting” the posting by paying to have it seen by people who are not friends of the page. In that case, their posting gets a “Sponsored” note, so the people whose News Feeds it appears in know that it’s an ad.
The same is true if someone buys an ad on Facebook: The “Sponsored” note will be attached to the content.
But there’s a catch. If someone who sees that ad, or that boosted post, decides to share it with their Facebook friends, the “Sponsored” tag no longer appears because it’s no longer a paid ad.
It’s this kind of ad, one so compelling that people begin to forward it along to their friends, that advertisers (and the Russians) aim for.
It’s known as “‘hacking the attention economy” and social media has made it even easier to do, said Jeff Hemsley, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University who studies viral social media.
How much does this cost?
Pricing for Facebook ads is somewhat non-intuitive. The more popular an ad is, the less the organization placing it pays. That’s because Facebook is always trying to balance making money from ads with showing people what it thinks they will want, on the theory that if it shows them a lot of content they don’t like, they’ll leave.
In the aggregate, the price of an ad depends on how much demand there is, how many advertisers are trying to reach people with the specific requested profile (new moms who live in the Pacific Northwest, say) and even what time of day it is, said Logan Young, a vice president of strategy at BlitzMetrics. Facebook uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to make all these determinations on the fly, looking at what the specific user has done in the past and also what people who fit the same profile of interests have done when they’ve seen the ad, or a similar ad.
As we scroll through our News Feeds, Facebook is running instant, computercontrolled auctions in the background, deciding what ads to show us and how much to charge for them. In the case of the Russian ads, pricing may not have mattered because the desire appears to have been to create feelings among the electorate rather than to make money.
Each ad posted on Facebook is as- signed a “relevancy score.” Say there were two companies each selling baby blankets. Both decide to place $1,000 worth of ads on Facebook and each makes an ad. But Company A’s ad features an adorable baby while Company B’s ad features just a folded blanket.
When the ads first go up, Facebook’s algorithm looks at what kind of user engagement each gets — do users stop to look at it or do they just scroll by? Do they click on the ad, do they share it with friends, do they “like” it?
The cute baby ad might get a relevancy score of 8 while the folded blanket ad just gets 4. So Facebook charges less for the cute baby ad and more for the folded blanket ad, because it believes the cute baby ad gives a better user experience, said Young.
Can I change what ads I see?
Users have the power to influence the ads they see not only by how they interact with ads in their News Feed, but also by changing their ad settings. To do that, go to your Facebook Profile, then click on the Settings link. From there, look for the word Ads and click to see and set your “Ad Preferences.”