One of the major problems with FB ad targeting is that a lot of it is keyword-driven without regard for context.
If I'm on Google searching for a product or service, the context is very likely "I want one of these" or "I'm curious about this", so displaying ads strictly by keyword works fairly well.
But if I mention something on Facebook, it's as likely to be negative as positive. If I've just said something critical about a particular ideology, an ad for "date [ideology] singles" is as you say "horrifically wrong" (especially since I'm happily married.)
Another contextual issue FB gets wrong is timing. Often I'm mentioning something I already own or something I've just completed. Telling me about a restaurant right after dinner, or tax software right after I finish my taxes, is not likely to be relevant to me (whereas if I type "restaurant" or "taxes" into Google it almost definitely is.)
Sometimes it comes down to advertiser stupidity (forgetting to check if I'm married, for example.) But the fundamental problem is that judging intent is a hard problem for a computer. It's easy to write a filter that figures out what I'm interested in when I type a query into Google; it's hard to write one for a status update I type into Facebook.
Facebook advertising isn't keyword driven, it's interest driven. AFAIK Facebook doesn't parse your status updates to find keywords -- they look at what you have Liked.
They certainly do look for keywords in statuses (though I don't know if they use them for advertising). At one point they grouped statuses by subject ("Alice and Bob both mentioned Christmas"), and it suggests groups/pages based on your statuses (I mentioned reading something in French in a status, and it suggested I liked "French language").
Yeah I was referring to advertising purposes. Even if they did use keywords in statuses for advertising I would imagine the the weight of those keywords verses the weight of a liked object would be significantly lower since the relevancy would be low.
If I'm on Google searching for a product or service, the context is very likely "I want one of these" or "I'm curious about this", so displaying ads strictly by keyword works fairly well.
But if I mention something on Facebook, it's as likely to be negative as positive. If I've just said something critical about a particular ideology, an ad for "date [ideology] singles" is as you say "horrifically wrong" (especially since I'm happily married.)
Another contextual issue FB gets wrong is timing. Often I'm mentioning something I already own or something I've just completed. Telling me about a restaurant right after dinner, or tax software right after I finish my taxes, is not likely to be relevant to me (whereas if I type "restaurant" or "taxes" into Google it almost definitely is.)
Sometimes it comes down to advertiser stupidity (forgetting to check if I'm married, for example.) But the fundamental problem is that judging intent is a hard problem for a computer. It's easy to write a filter that figures out what I'm interested in when I type a query into Google; it's hard to write one for a status update I type into Facebook.