Advertisements and their impact on Facebook users

After being skeptical about web advertising, Yahoo! followed web advertising to make money out of the web. A more refined method of web advertising was used by Google to make more money out of it.
A study about web advertising in Facebook by a team at Facebook shows that merely the presence of an ad in Facebook has an influence on the users. Two data sets were compared. One was the number of users clicking the ad in Facebook. Second data set is the purchasing pattern from an analyst firm Datalogix. On comparison, the people at Facebook and Datalogix observed that  the presence of an ad makes users buy the product even if they don’t click on it. According to Rick Robinson a freelance writer "Big Data analytics show that mere exposure to Facebook ads does indeed influences users' purchasing patterns." Facebook suggests ads based on the likes and interests of the user. So it is evident that web advertising has an upper hand in determining the sales of a product than conventional advertising methods. This shows the power of web advertising over conventional methods.

Reference: http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/article/big-data-analytics-takes-web-advertising