How Google and Facebook makes money using you
"If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product".
This is a famous internet quote which suggests that when we use various online services including Google and Facebook we're actually being sold to the advertising companies, making us the actual product in the whole transaction. It may bother some, but most of us are okay with it because as long as we're able to access the services we enjoy for free we don'[t care what we're called. Anyway, online advertising has much more scope compared to other medias like television advertising, or print advertising. Now let's see what they are:
Targeted and non targeted advertising
Advertising done on the television and newspapers are generally non targeted in nature. That means, the advertiser have no guarantee that the audience of the advertiser is actually interested in the ad. For example, in a newspaper there may be an advertisement of a Churidar company. Almost the entire teenage boys who read this newspaper will not be interested in this ad and will not even look at it. This is because they are not a targeted audience for this advertisement. Now the advertisement given in a magazine which is invested in a specified topic gains more targeted audience. Consider a technology magazine, in this magazine an ad about a new computer is appropriate and attract almost all the readers because only the ones interested in technology buys the magazine and obviously he might be interested in computers too. And giving an advertisement of Plumbing tools in that technology magazine will not be a good idea, for the advertiser of course. Just like that an advertisement of School bags in a kids channel is more targeted than advertising it on a News channel.
So in simple terms, targeting advertising means such a type of advertising where the people being exposed to it is actually interested in the product or service it portrays. The more targeted the advertising is the better would be the results. And the amazing thing about the internet is that it is very easy to find targeted customers because of many aspects. One of the most important aspects might be - We simply share too much about us over the internet.
Targeted advertising of Google and Facebook
A major part of the internet uses the web to access a Google service or Facebook. And the scary thing is that both the Google and Facebook knows a little too much about you. Because you share too much about yourselves online, knowingly or unknowingly. And these giant companies use those information about you to understand about you and to display the ads about the product or service which you may be interested in. Let’s see how it works.
On Facebook, it's rather easy for the company to determine your interests because you share it with them directly. You fill out your profile page with all the information they need tp know about you. Your interests, hobbies, which movies you like, games you play and all those tiny little things about you you share it with them, With these data they can easily determine what kind of ads you might be interested in and what you wouldn't want to see. And can advertising get more targeted than this? I don't think so. And the above quote is almost true in this case because probably in the eyes of a business man Facebook is not a social networking website it's just an amazing and creatively designed advertising platform where people are exposed to hundreds of ads without they even knowing about it. I don't know if Facebook looks at your behavior on Facebook for the purpose of serving advertising like what type of pages we visit, like and share, whose profile we peek into from time to time etc. I hope they don't.... Naah, I don't care!
In case of Google, it might be much more complicated and scary. Because when it comes to Google, personalization is too much. You should watch this Ted Talk ,it shows how much Google knows about you and how Google tailors their content according to the user. It says that even the results yielded from a simple Google search varies from person to person because Google chooses which results might be more interesting or appropriate to a particular user based on his past activities. And the 'past activity' means your entire search patterns, visited websites and everything. And when Google knows this much about you, serving the ads that you might be actually interested in might not be a problem.
Also, their advertising program Google Adsense (Adwords, if you're an advertiser) asks the publishers about the niche of their website and also uses algorithms to serve the best and most related advertisements to the publishers.
When it comes to a Google search, there are too many ads for each search. All the results on the right sidebar are ads. And sometimes there are ads above the normal search results. These ads are related to the search terms and also they are text ads and is designed in such a way to blend with the actual results so that more and more people clicks on it. Since the ads are related to the search terms and designs with the font and color that are almost similar to the actual results more and more people will click on it and Google makes more money off it. And this was the first type of advertising that Google chose and probably is one of the best income stream of Google, even today.
So in this article, I’ve already mentioned the difference between targeted and non targeted advertising and the benefits of targeted advertisement. So the thing is that online advertising is one of the best media of advertising these days and if you have a business then do advertise it online, no matter how small or localized it is. Because online advertising is targeted and will surely increase your exposure. Another benefit of online advertising is that in most cases you don’t need to pay until somebody actually click on your ad. So you will not be spending any money as long as someone clicks and visits your ad link and other medias such as newspapers, magazines etc. can never guarantee that!
So go and advertise your brand online!
Image Source: http://unsplash.com/post/51495156548/download-by-alejandro-escamilla
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