How Facebook knows that I need a Blue kurta!!!

It was just a week before my friend Arun’s marriage that I logged into a well known ethnic wear online store for a kurta. After searching for a while I slipped into an afternoon siesta. After waking up, sipping my evening tea I logged in to Facebook . It was then when I was glancing through my Facebook timeline, a blue kurta caught my attention. Surprisingly it was an Ad sponsored by the same retailer, whose online store I was searching in the morning.

  

I was intrigued and out of curiosity, I searched about Facebook Ads. The more I researched, the more I got fascinated by Facebook ads. It’s a very powerful tool for sending the exact message to a targeted segment or even a single customer. If it comes to demographics, who else can provide you credible and real time data than Facebook (even more accurate than the Census data !! ;) )

 A builder when he places an Ad of an upcoming project, can target all people who live around a 50 km radius to the city. He can also segment further based on the age, Lifestyle, work and other interests of people in that locality. Facebook even provides user an option to set his/her ad preferences which he/she would like to see in their timelines.

  

Facebook also helps a marketer to re-target their customers. When I log in to an online Kurta store, information about me is collected via cookies and the pages I visited are also tracked and recorded. When I close the session without making a purchase, the marketer of the kurta store starts targeting their ‘lost customer’. A  Demand side platform,DSP enables advertisers, agencies and ad networks to buy display impressions across multiple ad exchanges using single interface. Facebook has a real time bidding FBX which sells the advertising inventory (ad spaces are nothing but your fb timeline and the right bottom corner of your facebook page) DSP of Online kurta store will bid with FBX for showing ads to their lost customer when he/she logs in to Facebook. DSPs share necessary data to Facebook to identify the person. When the person logs in to Facebook, Facebook informs DSPs and will bid for displaying ad. Ads will be shown to user on winning the bid(Real time bidding transactions typically happen within 100 milliseconds from the moment the ad exchange receives the request.)

Facebook Ads are either shown in the right column (domain Ad) or in the news feed. Facebook released a new Ad Format called Multi-product ad which can be extremely useful for all the eCommerce advertisers looking to promote multiple products from their store.