Facebook primarily collects two types of data which helps it improve its various services, behavioral and demographic data. Demographic data relates to a user’s life outside of Facebook, basically information about their work, school, hometown etc. Behavioral data is collected in real time as the user browses Facebook, this is data about their interactions with their friends, likes, comments, shares and more. Facebook’s head of analytics Ken Rudin tells WSJ that the social network is currently testing a broader system that tracks deep behavioral data, such as tracking how long a user hovers their cursor over an ad before they decide whether or not they are going to click it.
Rudin also says that the system will be able to ascertain if certain elements on the News Feed were in a visible area or off the page. Facebook is currently conducting tests, which are part of a broader technology testing program. Rudin doesn’t promise if these user-tracking features will ever be rolled out, he says it could take a couple of months before this becomes evident. So what would Facebook do with this user-tracking data? It would use it to improve its services, offer advertisers greater insights into users’ behavior with regards to their ads, it may also use the data to improve News Feed and even add more features to it.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook.