Lately I have been reading about online behavioral analysis and have started to realize its potential for advertising. To better understand its power, try this simple exercise. Open a new window, go to Google, and search “malpractice”. Then right away search “lawyer”. Look at the ads on the right. You likely will see ads for malpractice lawyers located in your area. *


What Google has done here is actually very sophisticated. The Google advertising algorithm geo-targeted you based on your IP address and combined your most recent search queries in order to show you incredibly well targeted ads. This is absolutely amazing given the scale at which it is performed. Go ahead and try this on the other search engines. If your results are like mine, the ad targeting technologies will fail in comparison.

This is especially true for less traditional search engines. Today, I was served an ad for the popular social networking and people search engine, Facebook. It is the first time I have seen this company promote itself outside of its own site. This social networking platform receives an incredible amount of press and is predicted by some to become the next big advertising platform.


Intrigued, I logged into Facebook to test how well its 'advanced targeting' system worked. The first page (Newsfeed) greeted me with an ad for wedding rings. Odd, Facebook has data from my profile confirming that I am currently single. The potential Facebook has to to use the personal data supplied by its users for targeted advertising is almost unparalleled. Could this possibly be based on the fact that some of my Facebook friends recently got engaged? If so, it is a little rude to use this information to target me.


I clicked through to user profiles and was served ads targeted at general college students. None of the ads utilized any of the data from my profile. What a tremendous waste. Where was the personal touch? I continued to read several friends' profile pages to see how they were doing. They were friends I hadn't talked to since high school and all happened to be male. As I continued to surf I was served the following ad:

 
This was pretty presumptuous for an advertising algorithm. From its perspective, I was a male who had just looked at several other males' profiles. It did appear to be targeting me based on my behavior but was ignoring the applicable information in my profile. The ads switched back to advertisements for 'local women' when I started looking at profiles of female friends. It appears that Facebook does take user behavior into account when serving ads. I finished off my rounds of the website by clicking on my little sister's profile. The Facebook advertising algorithm served me the following ad:


Really, Facebook?! Worst. Fit. Ever. My parents are her parents and I am pretty sure they don't have nice buns. Serving me an ad for pick up lines while viewing my little sister's profile is a complete waste of advertisers' money. Facebook was apparently utilizing the fact that I was a male looking at a female's profile, but it failed again to take into account the basic semantic data listed in my profile.

I tried this same set of tests three more times. In the subsequent tests I received similar results. Only once did it use any information from my profile (favorite TV show). Facebook's advertising system seems to simply rotate between ads targeted at specific schools while taking into account what profiles the user views and the sex of the user. This is sad based on the amount of information the website stores about every user. Facebook has algorithms that can suggest friends I might know if I don't add them as friends on the social network. Why can't it use the same general technology to serve advertisers?

I must admit that I am not an internet marketer. However, I do get frustrated and angered when popular companies fail to innovate. In order for search engine marketers to be successful, they need successful platforms. The advertising on the internet is what enables people like me to enjoy so much online for free. Facebook has done a lot of work to integrate stereotypical web 2.0 AJAX effects onto every page of its site, but it has failed to prove itself as a sustainable advertising resource. By letting down advertisers, Facebook is indirectly letting down its user-base. Facebook has so much potential. It pains me to see it failing so miserably.

Are other people receiving the same poor performance as me? Is it just limited to my location or school? Let me know in the comments.

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* This assumes there are malpractice lawyers that advertise on Google who are located in your area. For most Americans, this is a fair assumption.