Recently at the Kenshoo K8 Summit in Sausalito, California, Facebook’s Advertising Research Manager of Marketing Science, Rob Creekmore, talked to attendees about the ways brands are using intent-driven search data in concert with Facebook’s advertising offerings.

Inside Facebook: What are some of the most exciting ways search and Facebook are coming together?

Rob Creekmore: I think we’ve seen some of it in the research we’ve presented today. It’s an opportunity to understand consumer behavior on a deeper level and how consumers are crossing channels and crossing devices seamlessly. The research that we’ve done to date has focused on the cross-channel aspect, particularly on how Facebook makes search work harder. Kenshoo has more recently come out with an amazing product that uses search intent data — the IDA (Intent-Driven Audiences) product — to make Facebook work harder. So I think there’s more opportunity to do more research there.

Inside Facebook: What are some ways that search helps Facebook serve more relevant ads?

Rob Creekmore: This goes into highlighting the search signals that people have and are giving us. Talking about the IDA product that Facebook and Kenshoo have created jointly, which basically allows you to create a custom audience around the search signal. If someone has searched for shoes, then they are part of this larger custom audience, in a privacy-safe, anonymous way, that lets marketers who tagged that search keyword of shoes retarget them on Facebook with shoe-related content, or maybe purses that match the shoes.