Facebook has introduced a new feature, where the social media giant will track “non-users”.
Previously, the site could only display ads to Facebook users, but this new idea will allow the company to reach even more people.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Bosworth, VP of ads and business at Facebook said: “Publishers and app developers have some users who aren’t Facebook users. We think we can do a better job powering those ads”.
He then went on to explain how this will work with Facebook now enabling a previously unused feature.
“Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users’ browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn’t use it. Now we’ll use it to better understand how to target those people”.
It basically means that if a person who doesn’t use Facebook happens to visit a health website, Facebook will then use this data to target them with similar ads across the internet.
Although this is common in online marketing, Facebook believes it can go one step better.
Why? Bosworth has the answer.
“Because we have a core audience of over a billion people [on Facebook] who we do understand, we have a greater opportunity than other companies using the same type of mechanism”.
The internet is a crazy place.