Large-Scale Analysis of User Exposure to Online Advertising on Facebook

Online advertising is the major source of income for a large portion of the Internet Services. There exists a body of literature aiming at optimizing ads engagement, understanding the privacy and ethical implications of online advertising, and so on. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work analyzes, at large scale, the exposure of real users to online advertising. This paper performs a comprehensive analysis of the exposure of users to ads and advertisers using a dataset, including more than 7M ads from 140k unique advertisers delivered to more than 5k users, which was collected between October 2016 and May 2018. This paper focuses on Facebook, which is the second largest advertising platform next only to Google in terms of revenue and accounts for more than 2.2B monthly active users. Our analysis reveals that the Facebook users are exposed (in median) to 70 ads per week, which comes from 12 advertisers. Ads represent between 10% and 15% of all the information received in the users' newsfeed. A small increment of 1% in the portion of ads in the newsfeed could roughly represent a revenue increase of 8.17M USD per week for Facebook. Finally, we also reveal that the Facebook users are overprofiled since, in the best case, only 23% of the active interests, Facebook assigns to users for the advertising purpose, are actually related to the ads these users receive.The work of A. A. Galán and R. C. Rumin was supported by the European H2020 Project SMOOTH under Grant 786741. The work of J. G. Cabañas was supported in part by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Spain, through the Project TEXEO, under Grant TEC2016-80339-R, and in part by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Spain, through FPU, under Grant FPU16/05852. The work of A. Cuevas was supported in part by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Spain, and in part by the European Social Fund (EU), through the Ramón Y Cajal, under Grant RyC-2015-17732. The work of M. Calderón was supported by the European H2020 Project TYPES under Grant 653449.Publicad

Integration of Online Social Network and E-Commerce Business through Facebook Pages

The aim of this paper is to explore Facebook page options through which e-commerce companies can establish relationship with online social networking users. It explores the various options available on Facebook page like audience building, data analysis, paid promotions etc. Techniques for organic and paid promotion discussed to build the page audience. Comprehensive study on data insights provided by Facebook is tabulated. This paper highlights the factors for integration of Online Social Network and e-commerce to help ecommerce companies to focus on building audience and converting them into sale. A step by step implemen-tation starting from page setup, audience building and data analy-sis is presented

Systematic Literature Review of Critical Success Factors in Online Advertising

Online Digital advertising is one method that is increasingly popular in the era of digital transformation that is currently underway. This causes companies to compete in developing digital business strategies, especially in terms of marketing. Online advertising aims to be effective in a cost-effective manner to effectively reach the intended target market segments. Previously, there had been a lot of research on online advertising that could help research or companies in developing their marketing strategies. It is necessary to review the literature on online advertising from these previous studies so that information is classified and categorized systematically. This study aims to provide information by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the latest research on online advertising from 2015 to 2020 in order to find out online advertising indicators that are still relevant and objective to achieve marketing strategy goals. Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach which includes research questions, journal sources, preparation. Researchers analyzed the factors that determine success in the latest online advertising using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method. This research is useful for reviewing academic literature for online advertising research and as a reference for companies in increasing advertising effectiveness as part of a business strategy or marketing advantage in market competition.Â

Analyzing and testing viewability methods in an advertising network

Many of the current online businesses base completely their revenue models in earnings from online advertisement. A problematic fact is that according to recent studies more than half of display ads are not being detected as viewable. The International Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined a viewable impression as an impression that at least 50% of its pixels are rendered in the viewport during at least one continuous second. Although there is agreement on this definition for measuring viewable impressions in the industry, there is no systematic methodologies on how it should be implemented or the trustworthiness of these methods. In fact, the Media Rating Council (MRC) announced that there are inconsistencies across multiple reports attempting to measure this metric. In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, we conduct an analysis of different methods to track viewable impressions. Then, we test a subset of geometric and strong interaction methods in a webpage registered in the worldwide ad-network ExoClick, which currently serves over 7 billion geo-targeted ads a day to a global network of 65000 web/mobile publisher platforms. We find that the Intersection Observer API is the method that detects more viewable impressions given its robustness towards the technological constraints that face the rest of implementations available. The motivation of this work is to better understand the limitations and advantages of such methods, which can have an impact at a standardisation level in online advertising industry, as well as to provide guidelines for future research based on the lessons learned.This work was possible thanks to the support of “Plan de Doctorados Industriales de la Secretaría de Universidades e Investigación del Departamento de Empresa y Conocimiento de la Generalitat de Catalunya” and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Juan de la Cierva Formación program (FJCI-2017-34926). We also want to thank ExoClick for their support in conducting thisresearchPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Between social and promotional appeal: a study on the impact of communication content in times of COVID-19

Este estudo explora as implicações do conteúdo de comunicação face ao contexto pandémico e à relevância das redes sociais durante esse período. O objetivo foi verificar de que forma a manipulação do conteúdo de uma publicidade online em uma rede social influenciaria a intenção de compra, o quociente emocional e o envolvimento dos consumidores. Foi levada a cabo uma pesquisa causal, através da realização de um experimento de um fator, entre-sujeitos, em que a variável independente – conteúdo da comunicação – foi manipulada em dois âmbitos: social e promocional. Ao obtermos suporte para as hipóteses, torna-se perceptível que a implementação de uma estratégia de conteúdo de comunicação que considere as preocupações contextuais emergentes pode tornar-se uma vantagem competitiva, pois os consumidores valorizam mais um comportamento pró-social e responsável da empresa do que as suas ofertas promocionais.This study explores the implications of communication content given the pandemic context and the relevance of social media during that period. The objective was to verify how the manipulation of the content of an online advertisement in a social network would influence purchase intention, emotional quotient, and consumer engagement. A causal research was carried out, by conducting a one-factor, between-subjects experiment, where the independent variable – communication content – was manipulated at two levels: social and promotional. The results support the hypotheses, making it evident that implementing a communication content strategy that considers emerging contextual concerns can become a competitive advantage because consumers value a company's pro-social and responsible behavior more than the value of its promotional offerings.Este trabalho é financiado por fundos nacionais através da FCT –Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., no âmbito do projeto UIDB/00736/2020 (financiamento base) e UIDP/00736/2020 (financiamento programático)

Collaborative Ad Transparency: Promises and Limitations

International audienceSeveral targeted advertising platforms offer transparency mechanisms, but researchers and civil societies repeatedly showed that those have major limitations. In this paper, we propose a collaborative ad transparency method to infer, without the cooperation of ad platforms, the targeting parameters used by advertisers to target their ads. Our idea is to ask users to donate data about their attributes and the ads they receive and to use this data to infer the targeting attributes of an ad campaign. We propose a Maximum Likelihood Estimator based on a simplified Bernoulli ad delivery model. We first test our inference method through controlled ad experiments on Facebook. Then, to further investigate the potential and limitations of collaborative ad transparency, we propose a simulation framework that allows varying key parameters. We validate that our framework gives accuracies consistent with real-world observations such that the insights from our simulations are transferable to the real world. We then perform an extensive simulation study for ad campaigns that target a combination of two attributes. Our results show that we can obtain good accuracy whenever at least ten monitored users receive an ad. This usually requires a few thousand monitored users, regardless of population size. Our simulation framework is based on a new method to generate a synthetic population with statistical properties resembling the actual population, which may be of independent interest