The world’s largest social media platform has just implemented a feature that allows it to track consumer behaviour across platforms. Facebook announced on a blog post yesterday that it would now allow advertisers to track consumers who had clicked on mobile ads and subsequently moved to a desktop to make a purchase. While the idea is for brands and stores to better understand how people use the internet to shop, it might not be so enticing for consumers to be consistently watched while on the internet.
Cross platform tracking is nothing new for Facebook, but this will be the first time they are providing a detailed consumer behaviour report to advertisers. This moves away from the traditional tracking of consumer behaviour by device (which was done via cookies), to a more dynamic identity based tracking. Essentially, logging on to Facebook makes you easier to follow around the internet.
It will undoubtedly allow these marketers to fill in the gaps left by current metrics that track consumers. Although some may wonder how the social media service is tracking people across so many websites. Even while they are not logged into their accounts. Facebook’s privacy policy allows this sort of thing, and in theory this should make targeted ads better. Kind of like what Google has been doing in the last few years.
[Source: Facebook For Business]
