This week on latest digital marketing updates: New study finds Facebook’s Interest-based targeting inaccurate around 30% of the time, new Google Trusted Store badge to roll out, Instagram tests new full-feed user interface for posts, stories, and reels, LinkedIn now lets pages publish newsletters, Instagram adds new messaging features like quick reply, and Twitter experiments with three new ad formats.
Here are the latest news, trends, and updates in detail:
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New Study Finds Interest Targeting is Inaccurate 30% of the Time
A study from North Carolina State phone number database University found Facebook’s inferred interests are inaccurate or irrelevant around 30% of the time.
As explained in the study, “To obtain insights into how Facebook generates interests from a user’s Facebook activities, we performed controlled experiments by creating new accounts and systematically executing numerous planned activities. We found 33.22% of the inferred interests were inaccurate or irrelevant. To understand if our findings hold for a large and diverse sample, we conducted a user study where we recruited 146 participants (through Amazon Mechanical Turk) from different regions of the world to
evaluate the accuracy of interests inferred by
from their own Facebook accounts and india business fax data list ask questions based on such data. Our participants reported a similar range (29%) of inaccuracy as observed in our controlled experiments.”
However, it is worth noting that the study is of a relatively small scale of only 146 test subjects when Facebook has over 2.9 billion monthly active users.
The researchers also note that Facebook’s system often doesn’t distinguish between positive and negative interactions, leading to inaccuracies. “For instance, we commented negatively on a Harry Potter page and received interests in Harry
Potter and Daniel Radcliffe (the lead actor in the Harry Potter movies)”
The study also showed that, at times business sale lead system will incorrectly attribute entities, “For example, upon visiting the Apple (Tech company) page, Apple (fruit) was inferred as an interest.”
Despite the very minimal number of participants, you can get varying degrees of errors with this type of matching. And this new finding may have significant implications on ad spending.