The Truth About Instagram Advertising
Have you ever noticed that the pair of Nike shoes you were discussing with your friend has popped up on your feed, or your online shopping appears as you go through stories?
Have you wondered if Instagram targets ads towards your interests? Why they are sometimes so scarily accurate to what you’ve been looking up online or what you’ve been talking about in private conversations?
Lots of people around the world have been contemplating these theories. Here is our investigation...
What does Instagram say about how they advertise?
This screenshot is taken from the Instagram business website. It appears that Instagram admits to looking at the apps that you have installed on your phone and target you to show relevant adverts to your interests. It also says that they track the age, gender, address location and what the user is doing when the app is closed.
Another feature that we found is if you go into your Instagram settings, you can find what Instagram thinks your interests are. It shows a list of things ranging from online shopping to heavy metal music. We found that at the top of the list things were fairly accurate, however the further we scrolled down the more obscure and inaccurate things got.
What we Think
Does Instagram Listen?
Recently the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, was asked by Gayle King why he gets ads for products which he has been talking about in a private conversation but never searched up online. Mosseri tells him that there are two ways these can happen, dumb luck or the second being this stuff may be top of your mind because you may have been interacting with that kind of content recently. However, Mosseri insists that they don’t listen in on your microphone.
We ourselves had experienced having private conversations about something and then getting an ad on Instagram for it sometime later. We did an experiment testing this theory but were unsuccessful. This made us believe that when something like this does happen it is just purely a coincidence like the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said.
We ourselves had experienced having private conversations about something and then getting an ad on Instagram for it sometime later. We did an experiment testing this theory but were unsuccessful. This made us believe that when something like this does happen it is just purely a coincidence like the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said.
Does Instagram track what you’re doing online?
A source says that if you are logged into Facebook on any computer, it can track what you are doing online, therefore, targeting ads towards what you’ve been looking up online. Because Facebook owns Instagram they share their data with one another meaning you would get these ads on Instagram as well. Personally, we have experienced ourselves that when we google something, things that we have searched for ended up as ads on our Instagram feed. We wanted to test this theory, so we did our own experiment. For the experiment, we searched up dog products on google (specifically dog toys) while we were logged into Facebook on another tab. At first, we had no luck, however, after a few days, we got this...
An ad for dog accessories. It wasn't exactly what we were looking up online, however beforehand we have never gotten any ads related to dogs. So, we believe that this is definitely somehow related to what we looked up.
Our Conclusion:
In conclusion, after doing our investigation, we believe that Instagram does track what you're doing online. We think this because our experiment was a success and Instagram openly states that they look at your location and apps to give you the most appropriate ads for your interests. We think that to prevent this the best thing you can do is turn off your location on Instagram and delete your history on google both on your laptop and phone. However, we do not believe that Instagram listens in on your microphone because if people found out that they did, it would not end well for the company.
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