I often hear about this slightly creepy internet experience: you’re looking at a product online, and a day later see an ad for the same boots or whatever that you were looking at. This is called “retargeting”, but how does it actually work exactly in practice? In this post we’ll experiment a bit and see exactly how Facebook can know what products you’ve looked at online! I’m using Facebook as an example in this blog post just because it’s easy to find websites with Facebook tracking pixels on them but of course almost every internet advertising company does this kind of tracking.
How tracking pixels work by Julia Evans