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Comment by facethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Sites using the like button are dumb to begin with, especially if they are in e-commerce. You’re handing your competitors an ability to do lookalike targeting of your customers via Facebook ads. This is one of the biggest advantages of that platform. Surprised nobody writes about this while gasping at Facebook’s profits.

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People are writing about it - saw this trending on HN just yesterday:

https://prospect.org/article/how-digital-advertising-markets...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20596697 (prospect.org)

How would you do that? You can only do lookalike of an audience you upload yourself (ex: your customer list). How would you do a lookalike of your competitor?

You can target by purchasing history either through "Partner Categories", or "Purchase behavior". Facebook knows what anyone is (interested in) buying through pixel or aforementioned widgets.

Yeah but you cannot target specifically a competitor's customers just by the fact that they have a like button on their site, which is what OP was mentioning.

I don't think he meant a specific competitor rather than a whole category. Aka you buy a shirt at one site and then every e-commerce site that sells shirts can target you.

Don’t Facebook buy purchase history off credit card companies anyway though if you actually get as far as purchasing?

The data from the Facebook javascript integration is much richer as it lets Facebook see each customer's complete journey before purchase. This helps tremendously with ad targeting as it tells FB (for example) what other products the customer viewed before purchasing, and possibly even how they got to the site in the first place.

This is primarily to help with offline conversion tracking and impact of FB ad spend.

What, credit card companies sell customers' purchase history?

Yes, absolutely.

It gets worse. I know a startup that works on targeting people using their bank statement data.

It depends if you think the likes you get are worth more or less than however Facebook can use the data against you.

> Surprised nobody writes about this while gasping at Facebook’s profits.

Those who understand what you wrote are busy making money via Facebook ads, milking the gravy train while it lasts.

Except that are all using them. Like, literally, all news sites.

Why don't you write about it, you seemed informed and we would like to know.

E-commerce, possibly, but less true for journalism. Nobody browses news site front pages anymore. They visit news article links directly from their Facebook feed of other people sharing/liking stuff, Reddit, HN, or other social media.

When was the last time you typed in nytimes.com or some similar foo into a browser?

I do that regularly with local news websites. Convenient to go though stuff I might have missed.

Well, since you’re asking - Daily - news sites’ front pages are bookmarked on my mobile but often typed as well.

It has been a long while since we've had usable news sites.

There are so many mixed in signals when it comes to the "decline of news" that it's hard to pinpoint causes or use it in arguments.

For me the exact opposite. When did I last even go on facebook? Probably over 10 months ago.

Nobody? What about 1B Chinese?

Daily.

Also, I don't use Facebook. Most of the people I know navigate to the news site directly, as social media is just an echo chamber, there are lots of links to obscure news sites publishing fake news, etc.

A long time ago, because I've got bookmarks for 5 or 6 news sites that I regularly visit (usually daily). And of course those bookmarks go to the front pages.

Facebook for news...seriously? Even HN, though I sometimes follow links to news sites, is primarily of interest for me as a source of links to obscure blog posts and similar non-news stuff. The news links are usually colored as "already visited" for me. Nevertheless, quite often the comments to these news articles are still worth reading. Which stands in stark contrast to Facebook comments on news articles...

I literally typed nytimes.com into my browser moments ago, right after typing in news.ycombinator.com.

Granted, I'm sure I'm an outlier but it was an entertaining coincidence, especially as I don't typically read the NY Times.

Most e-commerce sites use the Facebook pixel - they'd be crazy not to. Retargeting is actually where most e-commerce profits through Facebook ads come from. Advertising to cold traffic is often a loss leader, just to get an audience to retarget to. They lose money getting people into the top of the funnel, and then make it back as a smaller number of people progress to the end of the funnel.

So no, sending your data to Facebook isn't dumb, and in fact, it would destroy most smaller e-commerce businesses if they couldn't send their data to Facebook.

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