Quickly becoming one of the biggest forces in targeted mobile and social advertising, Facebook is forging ahead with another major step in its blooming strategy.
On Wednesday, Facebook launched partner categories, a new way to target ads to more categories of people.
“For example,” Facebook explains, “a local car dealership can now show ads to people who are likely in the market for a new car who live near their dealership.”
To date, the social networking giant confirms, advertisers have been able to show ads to people based on their expressed interests on Facebook. But now with partner categories, “they can also show ads to people on Facebook based on the products and brands they buy across both desktop and mobile.”
Partner categories uses data from select third parties including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon.
To allay any potential privacy or security concerns, Facebook made it clear today that no personal information is shared between Facebook, third parties or advertisers.
Partner categories work the same way all targeting on Facebook works. The advertiser only knows the size of the audience and can’t access any information about individuals included in a category.
To learn more about what Facebook is up to now, click here.