Facebook knows what you left in your shopping cart last week. Here's how:


In the world today social media seems to slowly be growing more and more each day. With new ways to stay connected around the world developing into these platform sites people never would have even thought was possible almost 20 years ago. According to Priit Kallas in an article posted in November of 2017 he stated that the top social media platforms currently were: Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter. With each site having a wide spread of users from different demographic backgrounds, these sites can be a way for companies to be able to advertise towards their specific target audience.  Have you ever logged onto facebook and as you are scrolling down your timeline mindlessly looking at posts made by your friends an advertisement pops up on the side of your screen for an item that you had been looking at earlier that week? This process is called retargeting.
Retargeting is a strategy many companies use to try and get shoppers back to their sites and continue the purchase of an item they maybe forgot about.

How does it work?
With Facebook there is a small tool that you add to your website and it allows you to follow specific actions of users across your site, this tool is called Facebook Pixel. Although Facebook Pixel has a wide variety of options for the purpose of retargeting, there is no need for a heavy tracking of users. Instead it is a pretty basic action. A main area of focus is on shopping cart abandonment. For this looking at the add to cart page visits, add to cart button clicks, and purchase/thank you page visits.

Now what do companies do after all that work? They use custom advertisement to manage the audience and create personalized ads that come back to you as you are scrolling down your home page. While Facebook Pixel is just one specific example for retargeting there are definitely more sources and platforms out there.

It is crazy the ways companies are able to directly advertise to you, specifically, based on your social media platforms.


Facebook’s slogan might be: “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you” but I am thinking it is a little more than just that.

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