Ineffecient Facebook Advertising - From CBS to Keto Food

This month Columbia Business School has been targeting me for their "3-Month MBA-Inspired" management essentials program. Over the past few weeks I have seen these targeted advertisements showing up repeatedly on my news feed. This has led me to call to question which attributes of my social media profile or past activity have triggered this targeting. If it is because my profile says I am a "student of Columbia Business School," this would be very inefficient advertising spend as I would already be an enrolled student. If I once visited a CBS website, I would think the second trigger should be to check if I am a current CBS student. This inefficiency in advertising spend led me to call to question other targeted Facebook ads that I see on my news-feed.

Over the last few months I have been receiving many advertisements for Keto food products. What is strange is that I have never searched Keto food, I have never tried a Keto diet, I have never discussed Keto with anyone online, and I am still not interested in a Keto diet after seeing the ads! However, I suspect I started receiving these ads (which have now taken over my news-feed) because I was intrigued by the first food image that showed up on my news feed so I clicked on it. Ever since then 80% of my ads are keto food items. I was not interested in Keto foods, but I clicked once, so now it is too late, Facebook has pegged me as Keto dieting male.

I suspect they did the same for my CBS ads. Years ago I probably visited the CBS website, and now, years later, I am still in the same target group. Maybe it is time to update their algorithms to learn to fade their preferences when a user is not clicking on the content. Both of these examples are companies that are wasting money targeting me when they easily could improve their algorithms.

Because of this, I decided to look into what experts are writing about this topic, and found that the "How To" on Keto Companies is telling start ups to target people over Facebook. Maybe it works for some people, but there is always room for improvement.


https://www.optimum7.com/blog/business-strategy/how-to-successfully-introduce-and-market-keto-products.html