Facebook ads — Dark side or Jedi?

You’re chillin on the couch, surfing the web, cruising through your 2nd hour of Pinterest and all those projects and you find this cool looking garage door on a house. Sweet! You think to yourself, I’ve got to see what this costs so you start searching for garage doors. Okay, I’ll admit it, I lead a really exciting life here, but I digress.

You get up off the couch and do some other stuff and go to post on Facebook and check what’s happening and all of a sudden, there are all these garage door ads in your feed or sidebar. Creeeepppyyyy…. From this aspect, they are totally on the Dark Side of things. It’s a bit stalker like to be searching for something away from Facebook only to have ads for those products show up on your feed hours later. It doesn’t make me click on them, but maybe being in this business, I’m onto them. Now give me a fresh, never before seen item, and I’ll bite, sometimes, if I have interest.

I can understand when I “like” something on Facebook and then ads start showing up that were generated from that, but outside searches are different. It’s invasive.

That being said, it’s totally a Jedi, because it’s a powerful tool for advertisers, as they can track what you’re looking for on the web and then put themselves right in front of you. How convenient for a company to have access to that information and be able to plug directly into someone’s feed. Pretty invaluable from a marketing aspect.

Now if we could just take care of the stalking aspect…