Targeted Advertising Survey: More Than Half Worried About Privacy Issues

Twitter has just begun a new advertising initiative where it will utilize people’s email addresses and browser cookies to better target ads from businesses. Other sites have used such strategies before, but users have expressed concerns about privacy issues. How do people feel about these targeted ads now?

Targeted Advertising

In Ask Your Target Market’s latest survey, just 5% of respondents said they always pay attention to ads on social media. 38% said they sometimes pay attention to social media ads. 31% said they rarely pay attention. And 14% said they never pay attention. The remaining 12% don’t use social media at all.More specifically, 26% of social media users said they are definitely more likely to pay attention to social media ads if they are targeted to their interests. 54% said they are somewhat more likely to pay attention to targeted ads. 18% said they aren’t any more likely to pay attention to targeted ads. And 2% said they are actually less likely to pay attention to targeted ads.

Privacy Issues

But the effectiveness of these ads isn’t the only issue at hand. 52% of social media users said they think using cookies and browser information to target ads is an invasion of privacy. Just 17% think it is a good idea for sites to use this info for advertising purposes. And 31% said they don’t care either way.

Opting Out

Twitter has mentioned the possibility for users to opt out of the advertising program that uses browser info. 39% of social media users said they would definitely opt out of such an advertising program. 43% said they would probably choose to opt out. 16% said they probably wouldn’t opt out. And just 1% said they definitely wouldn’t opt out of a targeted advertising program.You can view the complete survey results in the widget below and be sure to click “Open Full Report” to take advantage of all the chart and filter options.Photo Credit: Twitter launches promoted Tweets at Ad Age Digital Next from FlickrWhat do you want to know? If you need some consumer insights on a particular topic, let us know in the comments below and we’ll consider it for an upcoming survey post.

Results were collected on July 4 via AYTM’s online survey panel.