How Does Facebook Know What's In My Amazon Shopping Cart? | Hacker News Reader

How Does Facebook Know What's In My Amazon Shopping Cart?

thecodist.com

90 pointsojilles48 comments

This is called ad retargeting -- the basic premise being that conversion rates are much higher for items the user has actually looked at in the past. Usually it's only supposed to show abandoned purchases, but sometimes it doesn't work and shows you stuff you already bought. I personally feel retargeting to be a bit too intrusive for my tastes but the conversion numbers are excellent, which is why this industry has boomed in recent years. It looks like your browser's incognito mode can be useful for online gift shopping after all!

There are a few companies who do this like Criteo or Adroll, but I believe Amazon is using Triggit [1]. It looks like it's working for them: http://marketingland.com/triggit-facebook-exchange-36-better...

[1] http://blog.triggit.com/amazon-chooses-triggit%E2%80%99s-dem...

Retargeting typically uses Cookies, the scarier ones are Continuous Targeting, where Metadata is used to track you without cookies, or worse yet straight up user data sharing.

If you are John Smith of 1313 Mockingbird Lane no cookie is needed partners just share info about targeting.

Sometimes it is more general Someone at your IP shopped for an Xbox one, so you get ads for Xbox One. We see this at my office a lot. I shop for something, and the guys in the office start to see ads for it.

Then there is the really scary ones. Your referrer data comes along with a search from Google or where ever, the ad network uses that with your metadata, or user data to know what you searched for, now they store all of those to track where you live based on you doing things like "Near:1313 Mocking bird lane" from Google Maps, and they now have your physical address, (or they get it from somewhere you bought something). Now your paper mail gets "Current Resident" targeted Spam.

Go a step further. Your friend Bob plays Candy Crush on Facebook, the game gets all the friends of Bob and their cities. Using the data from above we now know you are friends with Bob. So we start sending you spam that uses Bob's last name in it, or We just plain send you spam that uses Bob's Full name.

As someone who has managed large online ad campaigns you don't want to know how much information I can buy about you. The NSA is not nearly as Scary as Google with regards to how much they know about you. And Google will sell that stuff to anyone with a big enough budget, with no care as to how we want to use that data.

A few key differences between the NSA and Google:

1) Google don't have the ability to take your life or limit your freedom.

2) Google maintains full control of your data. They will serve ads based on very specific criteria, but they're not going to give advertisers an Excel file with names and email addresses. That's bad for business.

Yeah, actually they will. It isn't in xls, it is typically in an XML format.

and since google provides the info to the NSA on demand does it matter which of them does the collection?

Also, would like to add that Facebook does not know what's in your shopping cart. For all practical purposes, it's just an advert from Amazon (using retargeting).

"This could be embarrassing if you ordered a gift for someone who then saw it on the screen."

This happened to me! Luckily the other person didn't realize there was anything special about that ad.

I don't get these ads though - I looked at a product and either decided to get it or not. Why are you still showing it to me? I'm done with that product.

Who do you think would be an easier sell for a new TV in real life--the person at BestBuy who just looked at flat screen TVs for 25 minutes or someone random off the street?

Wow! This is unfortunate because that person has now been primed for that gift. If it's a fairly obscure product that it was possible they hadn't heard of, then they may not be as surprised upon receiving it, and either way if they are able to remember they saw it while you were browsing facebook, they may be less convinced of the genuineness of the gift, thinking you just clicked on whatever ad jumped out at you rather than using your creativity to select something.

Even worse, if it's an obscure product that suits their taste, there's a chance they could decide to order it after seeing that ad!

They get 4X better CTR than other ads, and decent conversion. Even if they don't work for >99% of people, they can still be profitable.

> I looked at a product and either decided to get it or not. Why are you still showing it to me? I'm done with that product.

Especially annoying when I bought the product, and I still get ads for it.

sometimes I'll look up a product passively (someone mentions it on a site and I google it), but don't really look at the page long enough to think about whether to buy or not buy it (a specific instance of the more general "tabbed browsing has made me open tabs I don't look at")

these ads are probably targeting behaviors such as this, more than "decided not to buy"

Ad retargeting. Happens all the time.

http://www.perfectaudience.com/ http://www.adroll.com/

I'd be much less annoyed by this tactic if the retargeted ads didn't gang up on you like a platoon of Belarusian KGB agents.

Almost same thing happened with me today morning. I live in India and I was planning to buy a laptop cooler. So I opened homeshop18.com (a popular e-commerce site) and found the desired product there. I added it to the shopping cart. Facebook was open in another tab. Some time later I closed the homeshop18 website and continue to browse the Facebook. Later I found the first advert on the right hand side was exactly the same product on homeshop18 that I had earlier added to the cart.

I use different emails for Facebook and HomeShop18 website. So I guess this creepy thing has something to do with the Facebook's cookies. I think FB's cookies keep track of the other websites that we visit.

Anyway, I've decided to use "Self-Destructing cookies" addon on Firefox and remind myself to close facebook before opening any other website.

A more recent trend is to use several points of data assumed to be unique to a user, in place of cookies. Your IP address, browser, UserAgent string, screen dimensions, fonts, other factors, when combined together via simple hashing, usually provide a unique identifier. This unique identifier can now be stored at a data provider and a profile can be built against you. This approach breaks down when there are people are sharing the same computer, browse from offices with similarly configured machines, or even upgrade their system. But it's still very valuable information, and with so much money in play it'll only get more sophisticated. http://www.bluekai.com/audience-data-marketplace.php

Are people seriously unaware of this? Retargeting is so common it's like posting about Google adding ads to your search results.

The poster seems to be asking how it's possible technically, i.e. how it's implemented.

That creepy thing is called "ads retargeting".

Although this does sound like a case of ad retargeting (as a number of other commentators have mentioned), it's worth being aware of the 'data brokerage' industry, which may or may not become more closely linked with advertising in the future.

Essentially, with so many institutions collecting and storing (even fairly anonymous) profile/intent data (browsed this page, purchased these items), there's an ability and motivation to have back-channels between data-driven advertisers; buying and selling user data to inform each other's targeting.

Retargeting pushes the user experience in this direction while being arguably more benign; it is a little more transparent and simple to understand than data sharing.

This actually goes much further than you realize. There are companies buying credit card purchase data and plugging it into a Data Management Platform along with billions of data points a day and using that to buy their ad inventory from the real time ad exchanges. Were talking about mapping a purchase in a store back to a banner ad impression online.

I know of atleast one company actively doing this, and I am sure there are hundreds others.

Thanks Dave - I didn't know the function of a DMP (or the acronym), so that's an interesting thing to learn about. Sounds like there are some real-time data auction houses for advert targeting as well, which is interesting.

I expect the volumes and retention of this kind of data are fairly unregulated at the moment? I certainly haven't heard anything consistent as a consumer about how this data is collected/used (also bearing in mind international considerations in many cases)

well that prob explains how when I purchase some dev screencasts on ruby, I get an email the same day with ruby books. the freakiest however was amazon recommended parenting books 2 months into my wifes pregnancy, before we had even started telling ppl.

This might also be custom audience targeting. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/custo...

My guess is retargeting via AdRoll or something that Facebook uses for their ads platform.

Before anyone grabs their pitchforks and condemns ad-retargetng, the question has to be asked. How much did the OP pay to use Facebook as a social platform? With that said...

There is nothing nefarious here. This is standard internet marketing efforts.

OP wasn't neccesarily suggestiong anything nefarious, but was curious about the technical details of how this is done -- as are many of us.

Can anyone give a basic technical explanation of how ad retargetting works, of how the information on what you looked at on Amazon makes it to wherever it is that controls what ads you see on facebook?

Basically it works like this:

On amazon up they put an image or other code on their page that generates a random id and stores it in a cookie.

When you're on Facebook the id is passed back to Amazon which can generate an ad based on your history.

It works because the resource loaded on fb and amazon originates from the same domain. Eg. 3rdpartyretargettingadnetwork.com

For more detailed information: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/rtb/#...

thank you, this is super interesting.

I used to think this was the case, but I use chrome in incognito mode ( and only for fb!) and I'm starting to get retargeted ads. I suspect they are using some sort of 3rd party on the backend. Moreover, it's not only ads now ... I'm also seeing suggested groups that seem eerily creepy ...

Makes sense. Will disabling third-party cookies, as per relevant configuration in Chrome or Firefox, make this impossible?

> "How much did the OP pay to use Facebook as a social platform?"

Spare me the "pitchforks".

Nothing is free. We all pay for what appears to be free, the price is just very well hidden in the current case. Advertised products will have the cost of advertisement factored in their price.

I am happy to block these unwanted ads, and to give people the tools to do so. Let's see where the supply/demand curves for ads intersect when you give people the choice.

"How much did the OP pay to use Facebook as a social platform?"

As much as (s)he paid 5 years ago when there wasnt any as-retargeting.

Just like standard AdBlock + Ghostery... and other assorted goodies to block that crap.

Standard adblock would be adblock plus which is tied with advertisers through its infamous "acceptable ads" feature. see: http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-... https://medium.com/surveillance-state/cd2cb53bcaba http://www.infowars.com/google-reportedly-paid-adblock-plus-... http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/adblock-plus-accused-of-sha...

Ghostery works for the advertisement industry by building profile of blocked ads to allow them to tweak the ads so you don't want to block them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516156/a-popular-ad-blo...

> Ghostery works for the advertisement industry by building profile of blocked ads to allow them to tweak the ads so you don't want to block them.

From the wikipage and the copy I have installed, it look like only if you enable Ghost Rank. (And as ways to use data goes I can think of worse things than making ads less annoying.)

Yeah, just turn off the "acceptable ads" too.

I used to leave them on, until I learned that they were paid for.

Probably as much as they asked for.

I'm more surprised that after all this time the poster only now notices retargeting ads. The web is littered with them. This one is running on Facebook's own exchange.

This is exactly why I buy my gifts using an incognito window for researching gifts. Otherwise I'd go to Facebook or Fark and the sidebar would have exactly what I was looking at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting

This smells like it would be illegal in the EU. I have no idea about ads because I AdBlock... does anyone see this technique used in the EU?

google does it a lot. Try visiting the adwords page for your local google franchise and you'll be getting ads for a 100€ coupon at 25€ everywhere.

Criteo is french.

All the time.

if you click on the x in the top right corner of the ad, theres an about this ad link that will give you details on who generated that advertisement.

http://www.mikeonads.com/2010/02/22/rtb-part-iii-cookies-use... this describes roughly how they identify you.

I was wondering the exact same thing today

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