Facebook Launches Partner Categories
Facebook has launched a new self-serve targeting feature called partner categories: over 500 distinct categories to help advertisers better target users based on their action offsite.Using partner categories, a supermarket could target parents who purchase a lot of children’s cereal online with adverts offering deals on boxes of Lucky Charms or Cap’n Crunch. The example given in the announcement post on the Facebook Studio page is even more impressive: with partner categories, a car dealership can target local users who are likely to be looking to buy a specific style of car in the near future.
Partner categories are available to United States-based advertisers through either Power Editor or the ads API, using data provided by three third parties: Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. Facebook assures users that any data shared between the user, the site and a third party will remain anonymous, observing users’ privacy privileges.
Facebook goes into more detail on the privacy pages, explaining how the company’s partnerships with the third party data providers are set up to make the data transfer and advertising process completely transparent:
- Inline Transparency. When you see a Facebook ad, you can click the dropdown menu and then choose "About this Ad." This will bring you to a page that identifies the company that was responsible for including you in the audience for the ad -- whether that company is Facebook or one of our partners. We also provide a centralized list on our own site of the third parties we work with to help us with advertising and with other efforts, such as measuring the effectiveness of Facebook ads. See here: https://www.facebook.com/help/133547810119620/
- Comprehensive Control. Within the dropdown box associated with an ad, you can ask Facebook not to show you that ad again, or not to show you any ads from that partner. Partners also have agreed to provide on their "About this ad" page a comprehensive opt-out of future targeting by that company, not only on one website, but across the web.
- Enhanced Disclosures. Our partners have agreed to expand their public knowledge centres so that anyone can learn how they collect and use information. This includes clearly explaining what types of information they collect and what their policies are relating to the sharing of that information.
- Data Access Tools. Finally, each of our partners is working to develop tools that will help people see audience segment information that the partner has associated with them, and to exercise control over that data. These tools are new to the industry, and we hope they'll meaningfully improve the transparency people have into how information is used to help them see relevant ads. We look forward to working with our partners to make these tools available in the coming months.
Facebook are yet to confirm if and when partner categories will get a worldwide release.
What do you think of partner categories?
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Will Sigsworth
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Facebook Launches Partner Categories
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Thursday, April 11, 2013
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Anonymous
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