Behavior Targeting

“Companies know the power of social media and they are exploiting it.” – Essena O’Neill, former Instagram and Youtube celebrity [Source]

I open up Google and search up sites to find new glasses. A few days later, as I'm scrolling through my Facebook feed, I see a couple advertisements pop up to buy… you guessed it, new glasses. If you’d asked me a few years ago whether I would have noticed anything about this ad or whether I’d be able to connect it to something I’d searched up earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer. But now, with an awareness of what goes on between social media and advertising, it’s become obvious that companies have been able to use what people look up on search engines to target specific ads to them.

Behavior targeting, or what Danesi calls “search engine targeting,” is exactly this form of advertising. With the growth of the Internet and popular use of social media sites, companies have moved to advertising online and specifically on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, where millions of users are online every day. It’s an effective yet subtle form of marketing because more than likely, people will scroll past it not realizing the effort it took to get that one specific ad onto that specific person. And this is just one of many ways advertisers have optimized use of the Internet and social media.