We live in a time where data sharing and privacy is making news headlines and has become a regular point of conversation. In the world of advertising and marketing, this has and will continue to be a hot topic for years to come. The iOS 14 update that was released in late April was the first of many steps companies like Apple are taking to protect individuals on their devices. The implications of this update go far and wide in terms of user privacy – but what is often not talked about is how social platforms like Facebook (Meta) use this data to help businesses of all sizes around the world.
What is Ad Personalization? Why Should You Care?
Personalized ads are targeted ads that show you businesses and products that are the most relevant to you, thus showing you items that you may be interested in or more likely to purchase. You are going to be shown ads regardless of your privacy settings, so wouldn’t you want them to be relevant anyway?
While understanding why data privacy is important, an often less talked about topic is how it affects millions of businesses. This does include small businesses that rely on social advertising platforms, like Meta, to keep their business alive and growing. A recent Meta article stated, “Over 10 million advertisers use Meta’s personalized ad tools—the majority of these are small and medium-sized businesses.” Personalized ads can help these businesses reach potential new and previous customers by using these personalization tools.
If there is anything we have learned from the past few years, it is the importance of supporting small businesses. Some of these businesses could be local to you or even across the country. Regardless, these ad personalization tools are extremely helpful to advertisers in reaching their desired target audience. Highly targeted ads produce some of the best returns for these businesses. Post iOS 14 update, advertisers’ jobs have become much more difficult due to the gap in reporting and limitation on certain audiences.
So how does this benefit you? We are all shopping online – now more than ever. Allowing social platforms like Meta to show you personalized ads can help you in more ways than you may initially have thought. Maybe you will come across the perfect gift for the person impossible to shop for, find your new favorite boutique, or perhaps find a new local restaurant. Personalized ads can help you discover new products, reduce irrelevant ads in your feeds, and make online shopping easier and faster!
What Information Does Meta Use for Ad Personalization?
How You Can Help Businesses of All Sizes
Updating your ad preferences is the easiest way to help these businesses and will help improve the relevancy of the types of ads you are shown. Visit your Ad Preferences, and turn on your data sharing settings to ensure you see ads from relevant businesses.
You can do this by visiting the link above, or simply open your Facebook app and follow these steps:
1. Open the Facebook App.
2. Click “Menu.”
3. Scroll down to “Settings & Privacy” and select “Settings.”
4. Scroll down to “Permissions” and select “Ad Preferences.”
5. Select the section “Ad Settings.”
6. From here, you can click into each category to update your preferences.
As the world continues to discuss data privacy, it may be hard to see why anyone would want to share any data at all. But to put this into perspective, we already share so much information. We share our name, home address, email address, phone number, and credit card information – just to make a purchase online, and don’t think twice about it! There hasn’t been much discussion about why businesses need this information, especially for marketing efforts. Perhaps understanding why it’s needed is the first step.
