Social media advertising spend worldwide is expected to surpass $26 billion in 2015, a 33% jump from last year. The largest supplier of targeted social media advertising in the world today is Facebook, with their Facebook Ads platform.

The reason that so many global brands are adopting Facebook Ad strategies is simple: Facebook has the cheapest cost-per-click and most complex ad targeting options.

Businesses (especially local ones) can reach the specific consumers they want for much less with a well-targeted Facebook ad than any other form of digital advertising.

But, one thing that I’ve been thinking about recently when managing our company’s Facebook Ads is how accurate Facebook Ads really are. When I choose a targeting option like “Newlyweds,” how many of those users were really just married? How can Facebook know this about a user, and how accurate are their methods?

The accuracy of your audience segment becomes increasingly important the more complex your targeting is, since you’re paying more for CPM (the cost for showing an ad to 1000 people). If the accuracy of a niche targeting option, such as Job Titles, is low, meaning there are a lot of users in that segment that shouldn’t be, then you’re paying more money to advertise to consumers you’re not interested in. Which would make for a broken ad platform. 

It’s difficult to find any studies or blog posts concerning the accuracy of Facebook Ads targeting, probably because:

• Facebook doesn’t share exactly how all of their targeting options work

• There’s no way to verify on a user-by-user basis if your ad was shown to the right consumers

• Facebook Ads have been getting good results for marketers, so there isn’t any big reason for concern

Since there are no studies for me to read on this, I decided to do a little study of my own. It was a small study, with only one test subject: myself. You see, one really cool feature of Facebook’s ad platform is the “Ad Preferences” section. If you’re a Facebook user, you can view and edit the segments that Facebook’s ad platform has placed you in. In this way, you can control what ads you are shown. You can also check for any inaccuracies in the ad platform, which is what I did.

Here is what Facebook Ads got wrong about me:

For starters, Facebook apparently thinks I just returned from a trip one week ago. I believe I was added into this audience segment because I recently drove down to Long Island from Boston to move some stuff for my brother…which I wouldn’t necessarily call a “trip.” Yes, I was in another state, but it wasn’t a vacation and it wouldn’t factor into any of my consumer habits.

This is not technically an error in Facebook’s ad platform, in fact it is proof that their location targeting works. But if any marketer served me an ad because I just “returned from a trip,” then that would have been a waste of an impression.

Second, Facebook is convinced that I am a puppeteer. While this is very flattering, I am not a puppeteer and don’t particularly like puppetry. I think this was in my ad preferences because I liked The Jim Henson Company’s Facebook Page. “Puppetry” is a small niche interest, so any company looking to advertise to puppeteers will be paying premium CPMs. I don’t think I’ve seen any ads from puppet companies yet, but it’s very possible that I forgot them since I’m not interested in puppets…so hopefully no puppet company has wasted an ad impression on me.

The third mistake I noticed in my Facebook Ad preferences was this: apparently I’m a fan of Emerson Sheik, a Brazilian-Qatari soccer player – which is all I know about this person after Googling their name and reading the Wikipedia description.

Why does Facebook think I’m a fan of this soccer player? My guess is because I have liked the Emerson College Facebook Page, and the word “Emerson” makes the two interests similar. Facebook also thinks I particularly like Ralph Waldo Emerson:

You can see that Jim Henson is in there, since I’m so interested in puppets. The “People” section in Facebook’s ad targeting is one of the most niche options available, and Facebook was 1 for 4 in guessing what people I am interested in. James Clavell is one of my favorite authors, so I would probably engage with an ad for one of his books. But I’m not going to engage with an ad for an Emerson Sheik jersey.

The final mistake in my Facebook Ads preferences that I’m going to talk about is actually my fault. As you can see above, Facebook thinks I am interested in underwater welding. While it is an interesting field and I would definitely watch a documentary about it, underwater welding makes no difference in my consumer behaviors. But this ad targeting mistake is on me, since I have it listed on my Facebook profile that I studied underwater welding at Emerson College:

In reality, I studied marketing. I put “Underwater Welding” there as a joke at some point and never bothered fixing it, just like how my brother is listed on Facebook as my sister and my profile picture for a few weeks was Dark Helmet from Spaceballs…see, I don’t take my Facebook profile seriously. I’m guessing that you don’t take it 100% seriously either, which brings up my worry from before: Just how accurate is Facebook’s ad targeting? If my ad preferences page had so many mistakes, won’t everyone else’s? (You can check yours here.)

I will say that the majority of the items in my ad preferences were accurate. Facebook knows what brand phone I use, they know that I like dogs, and they know that I like reading. But those are general interests, not niche. It was the niche interests that I found on my ad preferences page that were wrong, which worries me about Facebook’s ad platform. It’s sort of a paradox: 

The more “niche” or specific an interest is, the more valuable it is to marketers. But, the more specific an interest is, the more room there is for errors in segmenting. 

This is not a challenge that is specific to Facebook or their ad platform, it’s more of a general challenge in digital marketing. The good news is that Facebook is constantly changing and improving their ad platform, just like all large and relatively new social media ad platforms, so these issues might get fixed and they won’t label me as a puppeteer/underwater welder who likes Brazilian soccer stars. 

I’m interested to know if Facebook Ads got anything wrong about you. If they did, let me know @KyleSGibson, and if you have any questions about social media targeting or content distribution, let us know at Streetwise Studio.