Facebook has boasted about its powerful ad targeting technologies for a while now. A large number of companies and entrepreneurs rely on this social media platform to promote their products and services. According to recent research, the ad-targeting system of Facebook may not be as precise as many marketers have hoped.

Over recent years, there has been a lot of talk that Facebook seems to know more about you than anyone else. The social media giant has access to a lot of information about users based on what they like, their groups, posts they make, and more. A team at North Carolina State University conducted their research and based on their information, about 30% of interests that were figured out by the Facebook algorithm were inaccurate.

The team created new Facebook accounts and also compared the obtained data with that of 146 participants. The inaccuracy of 29% in controlled experiments coincided with the results received by participants from different parts of the world. The only problem with such findings is the small scale of this research. There are millions of active Facebook users, so the experiment should be significantly more extensive to get the most accurate results.

Researchers used different approaches to notice how the algorithm analyzes a person’s interest. For example, they left a negative comment regarding Harry Potter on a fan page while the site offered more pages regarding this topic. And this is only one of the experiments. It is important to note that the targeting system is improving over time, so it’s possible that such mistakes will be less frequent as the technology improves.

What do you think about such research? How do you assess the accuracy of ads based on your personal experience? Please, share your thoughts with us in the comments below.