Curious if anyone can explain how this works. I understand for the most part how targeted ads work but this one has me stumped: I'm on my mac and using chrome to search and surf for various items and various sites. I'm not logged into facebook. However, when I look at facebook on my iphone it is very obvious by the ads I see that facebook knows exactly what I was browsing for on my mac. Almost instantly! Where is this information being exchanged?
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Random question about targeted ads:
- Thread starter Schmactor
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Called Retargeting and I do it in my business, cookies can have X date (let's say 90 days for example) and that let's a company keep their ad/offer/branding whatever in front of the consumer or business if b2b. Basically not everyone buys or makes a decision immediately, and maybe they were on a site and had to leave or a phone call came in or whatever, and in general could have forgotten about it, and now this puts the ad/offer/brandong/sale etc in front of them repeatedly increasing chance of a sale.
The other sites have retargeting code on them. These will both A) track your interests by IP and B) use cookies to more accurately track you.
When you hit facebook later, its ad service will look for any retargeting cookies, and if those don't exist it'll simply use your IP to look up any previously visited sites (that used the retargeting code).
In other words - facebook isn't looking at other cookies on your machine (that is difficult/impossible with modern browser policies) - they are just looking at their own cookies/data.