Social Distancing: Facebook Integration Opt-out is here on CBC.ca
tl;dr:
- CBC/Radio-Canada now supports Facebook integration, for advertising purposes.
- You can opt-out of the Facebook pixel for CBC here, by setting the “Agree to Facebook Integration” toggle at the bottom of the page to ‘No’.
- “What does all this mean?” — Read on for details
What do we mean by Facebook integration?
CBC/R-C has experimented with Facebook and other social media integrations in the past, from allowing comments on some content through a Facebook plug-in, to signing in on CBC Gem, as shown below:
If you’ve been around the internet, you are likely familiar with one or both of these types of Facebook integrations, not just from CBC but also many other commonly used websites today.
But of course, there is another type of Facebook integration. One which, though likely far more common than these examples, often goes unnoticed by many users. This is the Facebook integration for advertising, commonly known as “the Facebook pixel”. This is the Facebook integration we are talking about today.
In Facebook’s own words, the Facebook pixel is:
“A piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns.”*
*see: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-pixel for more information
To put it in my own words, this Facebook integration is simply a cookie that is stored on your web browser which identifies you as a Facebook user, as well as some code that runs while you browse the website. It is even likely that this cookie already exists in your browser if you either 1) have a Facebook account or 2) have visited one of the many other sites which have already integrated with the Facebook pixel.
The pixel creates the cookie and the cookie allows information about your actions on the website to be sent back to Facebook. Finally, those actions you’ve taken can be linked back to advertisements that were served to you via Facebook. Practically speaking, this just allows marketers to better measure the success of their marketing campaigns.
Why are we doing this?
A real-world example may go as follows:
- While browsing your Facebook feed, you see an ad for Schitt’s Creek.
- You ignore it and keep scrolling.
- Later that night, you decide to stream the final season of Schitt’s Creek on gem.cbc.ca.
With the Facebook pixel, marketers can link these two events together and make some assumptions as to the effectiveness of that advertisement on you, even though you have never interacted with the advertisement itself. You didn’t click on it, but presumably, just by having it been shown to you, you may have read it and that alone may have made an impact on your decision to stream the show later that night.
Without the Facebook pixel, Facebook will still serve you the ad in your feed, however, Facebook will not know that you streamed Schitt’s Creek that night. Through our first-party data sources, CBC will know that you streamed the show that night, but we would not be able to determine that the advertisement had been shown to you and may have prompted the viewing. In this scenario, all we know is that we paid for an ad to appear on Facebook, how many pages that ad appeared on, and how many times users clicked on it. We cannot link the two events together.
By integrating with the Facebook pixel it allows us to garner more accurate information around our advertising campaigns and attempt to create more relevant advertising segments.
When did this happen?
Radio-Canada integrated the Facebook pixel back in January of 2018. More recently CBC integrated the Facebook pixel as of February 2020. Now, in December of 2020, we have released an opt-out feature for those who do not want to participate in this Facebook integration.
Who else has integrated with the Facebook Pixel?
Many other websites and organizations have decided to integrate with Facebook. If you’d like to know for a specific website, a simple check is to:
- Remove your cookies in your browser (on Chrome try chrome://settings/siteData)
- load the website in question (and only that website)
- and then check your cookies again for a “facebook.com” cookie.
If you see a facebook.com cookie, the site you visited has integrated with Facebook.
You can read more here on managing your browser’s cookies. Please note, removing your cookies may log you out of services on other websites.
Here’s a shortlist of some other sites which currently (as of December 14, 2020) have integrated with Facebook, tested simply by doing the process described above:
- Time Inc: time.com
- NBC: nbcnews.com
- The Globe and Mail: theglobeandmail.com
- National Post: nationalpost.com
- Canadaland: canadalandshow.com
- CNN: cnn.com
- The Wall Street Journal: wsj.com
- NPR: npr.org
- Fox News: foxnews.com
- PBS: pbs.org
- and many more…
Where can I opt-out of this Facebook integration?
You can opt-out of the Facebook pixel integration for CBC here, by setting the “Agree to Facebook Integration” toggle at the bottom of the page to ‘No’.
After opting-out, information about your usage will not be sent to Facebook. Note that after setting the toggle to ‘No’ you may still see the Facebook.com cookie in your browser, as we cannot control its deletion, only its use on CBC.ca and its domains.
To join our teams at CBC, check out our current openings here.
