Facebook’s Clinically Precise Advertising

No matter what you think about Facebook (), I think that nearly everything they’ve done can be described with one word: precision.

In contrast to MySpace ()’s messy profile pages, Facebook looks like an interior of a Swiss bank. Their privacy options are very precise: you can choose exactly which users can see which parts of your profile. Their ads are very well targeted (especially for users out of the US; Google AdSense ads I’m seeing pale in comparison).

Now, they’ve introduced some very interesting options that I haven’t seen elsewhere: language and radius-based ad targeting for advertisers.

Sure, you were able to target your ads by country before; but in some countries, several different languages are spoken. Now you can choose a certain language withing a country; for example, you can focus your ads on Spanish-speaking users in the United States.

Furthermore, you can target users by radius, which means that you can select a city and include all other city within a 10, 24 or 50 mile radius. This is perfect if you’re advertising an event or anything that’s related to a certain location and its surroundings. Unfortunately, the feature currently only works for citites in the US, UK, and Canada; hopefully, Facebook will add support for other regions.

This is a very clever move from Facebook which puts them ahead of most other advertising systems as far as precision goes; however, as of yesterday, Google offers interest-based advertising, and Facebook does not. The epic battle of online advertising continues.