Facebook Ad Retargeting: A Possibility for the Near Future

A new advertising method appears to be on the horizon for Facebook.

I have a feeling advertisers will get very excited about this…

Facebook Exchange is their first cookie-based ad retargeting solution. Josh Constine of Techcrunch explains, “A Facebook user visits a third-party website, such as a travel site where they view prices for a hotel in Hawaii. That website drops a cookie on the user’s browser, and then hands a demand side platform (DSP) the complementary cookie. The DSP identifies the user to Facebook and tells it it wants to advertise to them the next time they visit Facebook.

The user visits Facebook, which pings the DSP asking for a real-time bid for how much they’d pay per impression to show that user a Facebook sidebar ad. If the bid is high enough, the ad gets shown, Facebook charges the DSP, and the DSP charges the website owner.”

This retargeting solution could potentially be a huge opportunity for advertisers. If it yields similar returns to what our experience has been with Google Retargeting, then this could be the ad revenue stream Facebook is in need of.

Facebook continues to test new ad methods with questionable success (from the users’ perspective). This could be a winner though. Would users feel the ads are more relevant therefore potentially more useful?

Is Facebook retargeting the ad type that may draw the clicks at the cost advertisers are looking for?

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Image credit: oparrish