In its quest to bolster the growth of its digital advertising, Facebook is slowly breaking down its walled garden for advertisers.
On Wednesday, the company announced it would begin testing a new advertising mechanism using a technology called real-time bidding, which allows advertisers to place bids on ad space at specific times.
For the new system, called Facebook Exchange, the company is working with a number of ad networks that will be able to use cookies in Web browsers to track users after they visit Facebook and show them ads based on their Web browsing habits – a process known as retargeting.
So a Facebook user who visits a travel Web site to buy airline tickets but does not complete the purchase may see an ad on Facebook that will allow them to do just that. Facebook is only displaying the traditional thumbnail ads that users see in the right hand column of the page and not other ads like sponsored stories or mobile ads.
The company stressed that it would not share its vast trove of user data with advertisers and that it would not build user profiles to sell to advertisers. Users can opt out of being tracked by any of the third parties by using the privacy settings on their browsers that manage tracking and cookie data collection. They can also opt-out by going to the “About Ads” page on the Facebook Web site.