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Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?
99 points by jpm_sd on Feb 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 153 comments
I'm too lazy to run ad blockers. So I see plenty of advertising on the internet. Here's the thing: all the ads seem to be for things that I already bought. After I placed an order with Select Blinds, I started getting relentless Select Blinds ads on YouTube. After I made some charitable donations to Mercy Ships and Heifer International, their ads started following me around everywhere. My wife recently got on a new immunosuppressant medication, and now I see ads for that all the time. Great job targeting! But I already spent the money? So what is the point of all this?


Yes. Brands, third parties, google, etc have all ran incremental sales lift tests, brand lift studies, customer lifetime value tests, etc and determined how successful tactics are and moved budget accordingly. There is a reason google/etc are worth billions.

I’ve posted this comment before, but:

1. It’s hard to tell when someone has bought a product. You buy it at a reseller and the brand will never know. Or you buy it on mobile, but have researched the brand on desktop. Or you purchased it at work, but were researching it at home. Advertisers suppress known buyers but they don’t perfectly match you to all of your devices.

2. Just like there are not so good developers and not so good code, there are not so good marketers who aren’t that great at their job. Or they have too much work and didn’t set it up correctly. DSPs are extremely extremely complicated, so it’s to make mistakes.

3. Retention and advertising to previous purchasers drives more additional purchases. Maybe you only purchased blinds for the main floor of your house but not the basement.


> It’s hard to tell when someone has bought a product.

How about, "I've literally got it in my last-day purchase history on eBay and they keep showing me the same thing and a bunch of related stuff to the item that hasn't even arrived yet, but that they've taken my money for"?

... and then eBay follows me around showing the same stuff on other sites. The thing I've purchased. From eBay. At least, they did, until I got more aggressive blocking ads and started using the internet a ton less.


A certain national bank which I shall not name had a banner on top of its app. The link opens a web page that goes to double click and then opens the bank's website. Why would a bank app take me through a double click link just to take me back to their own website? My guess is this is the same reason why eBay shows you ads for things you just bought. There are massive inefficiencies in these large organizations. I'm sure everything they do is locally optimal but not even close globally.


Wow...I think you just discovered a hole in Apple's draconian app store policies. They don't let you link to your website from your app if the site has a way to buy a subscription without paying the Apple tax. But what if you sell ad space in your app through an intermediary, and then turn around and bid on ads for users that have your app installed? You might be able to get them to notice you and sign up on the web instead of through the app.

Genius.

(I'm only being half-facetious)


Thank you for your reply. I went back to look at where I had mentioned that I had used an iPhone but you're right. I have an iPhone and and Android phone but I use banking apps exclusively on the iPhone.

Interesting idea. Probably still would be cheaper than paying 30% tax to Apple.


In-app analytics is done through a “mobile measurement partner” which have limitations in tracking so sometimes you need workarounds like using a redirect.

Also likely the app is a totally different team and getting them to change a link is difficult, but giving them a link where the web team can change the redirect is easy.


It's called a "house ad" and is generally free for the publisher. They appear when there's no other inventory (like insurance ads). Usually double-click stuff is all negotiated by publishers and has little to do with AdSense or bidding.


if it didn't do the round trip, it would leave a hole in the analytics. They get paid on the analytics, so the analytics must be kept whole


At least it’s a thing you bought. I wanted to sell a thing, so I went onto newegg to copy the description and paste it into my eBay listing and I got ads following me around the internet to buy the thing for weeks.

Like, I’m the opposite of interested in buying it, I’m trying to get rid of it.


My standard response to this: Prior purchases do have predictive power. They can very well be positively correlated to further purchases.

I've often bought stuff that didn't work for some reason. It was broken, or it had something that was bothering me. Maybe the power adapter was annoyingly loud (looking at you, Kyocera).

So I sent it back. But before I managed to go to the postal office a few days later I was already searching for a replacement online.

If I buy a TV set, I have indicated that I need/want a TV set. The rate of returns is broadly known (and maybe even specifically for me the return rate is known).

So Amazon et. al. do well to recommend similar stuff or things from the exact same product category to me.

Even right after I have bought a graphics tablet I'm infinitely more likely to buy a graphics tablet tomorrow, compared to my parents who have never bought one in their lives, and never will.

Or maybe the new TV turns out to be great, and I realize it would be nice to have a second one in my sleeping room, and why not buy a third one for the bathroom? ;-)


But before I managed to go to the postal office a few days later I was already searching for a replacement online.

While plausible, that sort of situation doesn't sound common enough that it should underpin the entire online advertising industry.

Even right after I have bought a graphics tablet I'm infinitely more likely to buy a graphics tablet tomorrow, compared to my parents who have never bought one in their lives, and never will.

But you're more likely still to buy another stylus, or art software, or an accessory, or physical art materials, etc. Why don't advertisers understand that?


None of this sounds super frequent?


Doesn't matter in the slightest. You've identified yourself as someone who is definitely interested in that product. And not "just looking", but actually paying money. That's super valuable to businesses.

I still maintain that people who have bought a TV yesterday are more likely to buy a TV today than people who haven't bought a TV yesterday. Very few people buy a TV today. Or in the coming days.

It seems like a straightforward application of the base rate fallacy. Sure, most people who bought the TV yesterday keep their TV and don't need a second one.

But unless you have specific information about other people's interest in buying one, they may still be your best shot at selling another one.

Also, both you and sibling commenter argue as if there were a scarcity of ads. Amazon showing me a TV ad doesn't preclude Amazon from showing me a kitchen utensil ad on the next page.


But what you described does not match my behavior at all. Not the one of my friends. It sounds like logical theory, sure.

And it is completely at odds with how I buy things. Or how people I know buy things.

> I still maintain that people who have bought a TV yesterday are more likely to buy a TV today than people who haven't bought a TV yesterday.

I never ever seen anyone buy second TV shortly after buying first one. Never.

> Amazon showing me a TV ad doesn't preclude Amazon from showing me a kitchen utensil ad on the next page.

I get monothematic ads. There is always that one thing that follows me everywhere. I don't get mix of ads. It is as if their system thought I buy only shoes. Or only TV.


I'm not married to my theory, "It sounds like logical theory, sure" is pretty much all I'd like to get out of my comment.

I simply cannot believe that this superficially irrational behaviour is as irrational as always asserted on HN.

The big companies are spending a gazillion dollars on ad tech, and while I believe that there is lots of stupid money floating around, I don't believe it's so obviously irrational. Just look at behavioral biology or psychology how much of seemingly irrational or downright stupid behaviour makes a lot of sense when you find the right vantage point.

Unfortunately, there will probably nobody come forward and tell us how it really is, so we can only speculate and build our own pet theories.


> Just look at behavioral biology or psychology how much of seemingly irrational or downright stupid behaviour makes a lot of sense when you find the right vantage point.

Yes, but those tend to make you notice that "yep I have actually seen this". This one does not make me think that. Not when it comes to TVs, chairs, beds or other durable items. If we talked about beer or chocolate, sure. Someone who bought beer might want to buy exact same beer.

Someone who bought book might want to buy another book. But, not that exact same book again, that person might want to buy another similar book. With TV, no, nope.


As far as I know, the convention about this is that when you buy a thing, the most likely next purchase statistically is in fact the same thing because you are unhappy with the one you bought.


Ever seen really weird combinations in "people who bought X also bought..."?


This doesn’t seem like a genuine discourse, but purchase suppression can occur in batches. So that purchase data may not get fed back into all the advertising systems for days/weeks if it’s using a poor set up.

For example, sometimes for suppression brands literally just export a csv of customers and upload it to google. If your marketing guy does it once a week..

I’d assume eBay’s doesn’t work like that, but it’s possible. Also possible they just don’t suppress recently bought items !


If you buy a product and you're dissatisfied, you're more likely than the average person to buy a similar product.


Just give me a button "I already own this".


It is entirely possible that large corporations measure the effectiveness of their advertising by comparing it to sales, and are confusing correlation with causation on a massive scale. They spend more on advertising, and point to sales in the same time frame, as a cause, even if reality disagrees.

There are zero incentives for anyone to figure this out and fix it within corporate structures. I'd be thankful it makes advertising easy to spot, and less effective in real life. ;-)

Imagine if you're in the middle management of Google and you realize that target ads don't work, and the results to this point are just luck. You'd want to do something like "Improve your advertising spend" by making the ads "more efficient", and selling targeted ads to people that you know have already purchased, but the advertiser doesn't.

Eventually you could advertise that your ads are measured to be more than 80% correlated with a rise in sales. (Leaving out the reversed causality).

If this IS the case... shhhhhh... don't tell anyone. It would crash Google's stock price. Nah, who am I kidding, the market stays irrational for decades. ;-)

Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.


Reminds me of this urban legend:

The VP of marketing of ebay realized that the keyword for which they spent the most money was "eBay". He thought this was nonsense and that people who looked for eBay should know how to get to their website, so he decided to save some marketing money and stopped putting money on they keyword. Result: no changes in the amount of visit to the website. However, the click-through rate, which is the metric by which marketing department was measured, decreased significantly. So the VP was fired and they even increased the money spent on the keyword.


And never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by hundreds of individually intelligent people optimizing for their own short term benefit (ie career growth).

We see this in the software industry all the time. Large organizations act inefficiently or against their own interests because large organizations don't actually have consciousness, instead their decisions emerge from the sum of a lot of little decisions and actions, each of which might be individually reasonable.

As an aside, I believe that's how large organizations can come to be evil even if the vast majority of members are not evil.


Agreed. Online advertising measurement remains opaque and there is no incentive to fix it.

The book Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang does a good job covering this! (It is a solid bear case for fb,g,etc as well :p)


You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Entire business are built on testing the effectiveness of online advertising, and providing that as a consulting device to brands. Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”.

Nobody is confusing correlation and causation. These are rigorous studies completed by literal data scientists and statisticians. They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study, and showing positive outcomes where they do not occur would be hugely detrimental to their business.

And to your point, realizing advertising does not work happens all the fucking time. I see it literally all the time. It’s why you run studies. Then you take your budget, move it somewhere else, and run a test to see if it’s effective. Every major brand does it this way.


> Every major brand does it this way

This is not completely accurate in my experience. Some brands do, particularly emerging brands.

However, I can assure you there are a few major established brands that I could drop on here (but cannot due to NDAs) that everybody on HN regardless of their location worldwide would recognize. If I was to tell you the inner workings their marketing operations you would be surprised at the lack of measurement and analysis they actually perform on campaigns. The words “indiscriminate carpet bombing and assume the enemies are dead” are probably the best analogy I can think of to describe their efforts.


I suppose it’s probably worth rephrasing as every major brand I’ve worked with, in that case :). Unfortunate to hear that but I guess not surprising


Honestly I think after you reach a certain point of brand awareness your marketing becomes just about maintaining name saturation and letting brand loyalty and affinity do it’s thing. Watching it in action is strange to people like me that put a great deal of value into measuring campaign value.

As much as I am critical of the approach, I can’t really says it’s a bad strategy, as these are brands that had worldwide reputations long before I became involved and most of my involvement was pretty narrow to a specific product or product vertical.


It's true. At some point you do hit the maximum brand awareness, and after that point, you're just paying to stop your competitors from doing the same.


And then there's the example of P&G, or Unilever or some other FCMG company that stopped advertising and saw no change in their business

Bob Hoffman's take on advertising e.g. Advertising for Skeptics, is well worth reading - he's an ex-adman who thinks the ad industry and particularly the personalised ad industry is full of shit

When you look at the online ad industry it's reasonably clear that the people who are making the money are the ad tech companies and not the advertisers


Coca-Cola's advertising is so good, the sugar water literally tastes better if you know it's Coke, compared with a blind taste test.


So their advertising influences taste, but does it actually influence sales?


The basis for every DTC brand is paid advertising. Advertising definitely works, especially in B2B contexts when you can directly track activity to a sale. But there's definitely marginal returns on it once you saturate your market.


> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”.

It's fairly known in the industry (worked in a range of different ad-tech/marketing companies for around a decade), that more or less this is what makes Nike happy.

> They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study.

This is a bit naive. Same is true for home appraisers, funny how it always works out that the house appraised for just over what you offered (even in insane markets).

This issue is you might get paid this time for being honest, but you won't get paid again.

> completed by literal data scientists and statisticians.

I'm both of these. Saying that "adtech is bullshit" is absolutely too reductionist but you are wildly too naive about the reality of the industry.

Take A/B testing as an example. I've helped people run A/B tests for many years. I establish rigorous testing setups, make sure people understand confidence in the results, distribution of possible outcomes, etc. I'm honest in my work and so are the people running the tests.

But the truth is that A/B test on customer populations are not controlled experiments. One thing that literally no one in the industry does is go back and review the results of the past years A/B tests. The reason why? People don't really want to know. However, it's obvious these results can't be quite right because teams will run 10 A/B tests in a year, each claiming a 5% improvement in conversion, but clearly you don't see this cumulative impact of a >60% increase in conversion over time.

No one want to know this though, because knowing this helps nobody. Nobody is outright lying, but nobody wants to ask. The one time I worked outside of adtech but saw a problem where model results were almost entirely random noise I got in huge trouble for pointing this out.

Same is true across the board in the adtech world.

Someone else recommended "Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang" and I very strongly recommend that you read this. It's very well researched and was so inline with my experience that I found it so obvious as to almost be dull.


You seem really defensive about all this. The question at the top of the thread was a little too binary. But the notion that advertising is overvalued would not surprise me at all, nor would it surprise me that many in here depend for their livelihoods on it continuing to be overvalued.


> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”.

No, which is why advertisers are theatre.

Many large businesses have entirely halted online advertising and found little effect, but much saved money.


Honestly, after lifetime of working in companies on capitalist market, the theory that they/we make decisions based on rigorous studies strikes me as unplausible. So does the idea of effective neutral third party. I have seen how consultants work too.


You are going to have to provide sources for these claims. Freakonomics podcast did an episode on the topic of online advertising and argued largely the opposite of what you’re saying, that there is massive overspending on online advertising, and increases in sales often get misattributed to ad campaigns when they have other causes.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising#:~:text=I...

Markets are imperfect and irrational, but you really don't think that there is a trillion dollar misunderstanding about the efficacy of the practice? Idk jack about advertising but it seems unlikely to me.


Selling homeopathic medicine is also a huge market, so big that every single pharmacy in Austria has an huge range of homeopathic medicine on display.

Just the fact that people buy ad campaigns doesn't mean that they have any effect at all.


That's fair but homepathic medicine is dwarfed by regular medicine in the industrialized world. There's no homepathic Pfizer or Bayer. I think if there was another practice that was way better than targeted advertising, targeted advertising might exist as a distant woo-woo second.


> Advertisers suppress known buyers but they don’t perfectly match you to all of your devices.

And in case of doubt ... they found that it is more advantageous to them to just keep bothering you.


Every time there's a thread on HN about advertising, there's at least a few comments (there are already some in this thread) that claim, loudly, "Ads don't work on me! I never buy things based on ads!".

The thing is, they're all wrong. Advertising is a trillion-dollar business because it works. The human mind is susceptible to suggestion, and it's been demonstrated over and over again for basically as long as we've had civilization.

What is ALSO true, however, is that ad dollars are exceeeeeedingly inefficiently deployed. Which is why you experience things like weird retargeting on things you've already boight. I experience this too -- there are several brands that for which I'm a happy paying customer and I still see their ads 1-2 times a day.


> Claim "Ads don't work on me! I never buy things based on ads!". The thing is, they're all wrong.

All you've said is "A big industry does this. Therefore it works on everyone".

Which doesn't follow at all. The industry doesn't have to work on everyone to be profitable, and could operate effectively even knowing that. Whether they'd be able to take peoples' money as effectively if they said "our ads work on 73% of people, making them 0.45% more likely to buy the advertised product"... doesn't matter.

The existence of whales on the online gaming market suggests a counter-strategy might be more effective: some people are very, very susceptible to ads. Targetting them is likely to be both cheaper and more effective than trying to get the attention of people who are minimally affected by ads.

It's hardly shocking news that the advertising industry might lie, though. To the clients as well as their targets.


Ads don't work on me because I block all ads*. I sent through my wife's Instagram account earlier today (with her consent of course) and the amount of ads is mind boggling. Sometimes it's not easy to figure out what's an ad and what's not.

* where I can. I still struggle with "sponsored" content, or fake review sites. It's becoming harder and harder to figure out what isn't an ad, and I hate it. If I see a good review, I don't know if it isn't an ad. If I see a bad review, I don't know it's not a competitor's doing.


Review sites are probably all ads these days. Its better to search reddit or something like that for recommendations, but of course those can get astroturf'd, but for smaller brands that likely isn't an issue.


>>> The human mind is susceptible to suggestion, and it's been demonstrated over and over again for basically as long as we've had civilization.

I don't doubt that advertising works on me at some level. This is all the more reason to limit my own exposure to it. I'm one of those people who reacts with surprise and revulsion when we see what the Web looks like with ads.

>>> Which is why you experience things like weird retargeting on things you've already boight.

My favorites so far are the e-mails I get from online vendors, that say things like:

"People who bought shoes have also bought these items..."

"Here are some things to go with your batteries..."


It depends where and when, I find that Instagram/Meta ads sometimes work for me, and Amazon related items occasionally do too. But more often than not (I wrote in another comment) I get ads in a category I am interested in, but from one of the many brands that sell a marked-up "recycled polyester fabric! 50% off!" type of thing that's clearly worse than "real" brands, like a backpack worse than the one I'm trying to replace.


I've been looking for a certain home improvement product for roughly six months. I've searched on-line dozens of times, I've been to stores, nobody wants to sell it to me, show me ads, nothing.

>Advertising is a trillion-dollar business because it works

How many months in the corporate world did you spend before figuring out that money = results and substance takes precedence over appearance?


What is the strongest signal that someone will be buying blinds the near future?

a) Someone recently bought blinds

b) Someone bought blinds 5 years ago

c) Someone hasn't bought blinds ever (maybe they're renting, or just tape newspaper to their windows)

Turns out, on average, the answer is a. Either because you're returning blinds you don't like and are in the market for replacements, or because you're doing a home remodel and once you fix up one window you'll need blinds for the next one. Even if most people who bought blinds won't be buying new ones in the next week, those are still better odds than advertising to someone who will never buy blinds in their entire life.


I often wonder how various products sort out on this question because while this example makes sense, other ones would not. A common example is ladders. I might buy more than one because you need two lengths, but I can't imagine many people are frequent return customers for ladders the way they may be for blinds, and I can't think of any instances where they would be back in the market for a ladder that are also realistic (e.g. probably not a lot of people buying all their friends new ladders).


Back of a napkin calculation: showing OP 100 ads of blinds probably costs 0.1$ in the US. The cost of a blind is 100$ (I have no idea, don't live in the US). So if the probability of buying a second blind is at least 0.1% it was worth running the campaign.

The fact is, online ads are super cheap.


You can target ads in US at $1 CPM?


Where does this data come from?

What do you think if you included the option d) Someone recently made a search that included the word "blinds" ?


A person in category a probably also searched. The thing is just that a recent purchase isn’t a strong enough signal to not retarget. It’s a too big risk to take because the probable recent buyers are fewer so it’s not worth filtering them out. At least that’s my impression of how it works.


If you're doing this from a chrome browser that you're logged into, then it's the advertiser that is at fault. Clearly, if you bought the item, then they should now have you in their system as a conversion. With that information and you not clearing your cookies, they should have setup their campaign to not target you for the same item. It sounds like lazy advertisers.

To answer your initial question, it works and it works really well. As advertisers, we see a significant difference in sales when we don't advertise online. This is especially true for search advertising and retargeting. ToFu first touch display advertising doesn't necessarily work as a sale generator. It's the subsequent advertising / display retargeting we do afterwards that works. Unfortunately for advertisers, the days of doing the way we do things will come to an end with third party cookies essentially going away. It'll be interesting to see how digital advertising changes (specifically for open garden platforms like Google ads) without the third-party cookies.


I use an ad blocker so don't generally see ads. However, I own a Kindle Voyage which I use to read sci-fi and fantasy novels. I have not paid the extra $20 or whatever it is to disable the ads. The ads are definitely targeted, as I only see ads for books related to what I've already purchased and read. In fact, all I see is ads for books in the series I happen to be reading at the time. For example, I'm finally getting around to reading the rest of the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series. I started over and now I'm on book 5, all purchased through Amazon so far, all directly through the store on the kindle. And it just keeps advertising books 1-5 (which I've already purchased). It makes no sense.

I have a list of authors I follow on amazon.com. It would be a better use of everyone's time if they just picked a random book from any of my favorite authors, made sure I hadn't already purchased it through amazon, and only then show it to me. It's like they're not even trying.


FYI, you can just ask them in a support chat to remove the ads and they'll do it for free.


Authors and publishers can buy ads on Amazon, including on kindles, and the targeting includes the ability for people to pick their own keywords or advertise on other specific words, as well as letting Amazon choose. As such, Amazon earns money on a whole lot of those ads whether or not you buy anything, and a lot of the people involved are likely not very experienced at targeting.


So In my experience on the advertiser side of these suggestion widgets—The algorithms generally aren’t all that smart behind them, and it’s possible in Amazon’s case the items you are getting recommended might have a different SKU number than the ones you have already bought, but of course it is the same author and genre to your reading interest. Doubt it’s looking at book title to be honest.


> The ads are definitely targeted, as I only see ads for books related to what I've already purchased and read.

Maybe you do. I'm subscribed to Asimov's and SF&F electronic editions digitally via the Kindle store. Not even once have I noticed an ad for scifi/fantasy books on my Kindle. Most of the time it's fluffy bestsellers.


Amazon advertises and recommends with a notification books that I have already read on Kindle all the time. But they aren’t paying for these so not the same problem as the purchase based targeting.


Yes, yes they absolutely do, although not quite at the levels and extent you might think. I worked with an ad network DSP, who's entire business was figuring out what crap to put in front of what users.

All I'll say is that they used pretty low down ways to get to people, one example that sticks out was the amount of targeting that went on late Friday, late Saturday night in APAC when folks would stumble home drunk and go online.

Everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at these people, and it often resulted in multi thousand dollar sales, including a few automobiles!


Two questions:

- if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid?

- how is that in any way ethical?


I don't think selling things to people while they are drunk/high/otherwise is invalid. Otherwise Walmart would have to breathalyze visitors.

However, it's massively, objectively, unequivocally unethical, and part of the reason I quit that place. And for the record, selling crap to drunk people in APAC was probably the least morally suspect tactic this company got up too.


Walmart will let you return an item the next day. Meanwhile, I believe that a contract signed while drunk would be unenforceable.

What does the acronym APAC mean?


> What does the acronym APAC mean?

Asia-Pacific


> if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid?

Under what law? Am I not allowed to drunkenly order food at a restaurant? What's the threshold for a purchase that should be invalid?


Lots of laws to pick from depending on the jurisdiction, e.g. see https://www.quora.com/If-you-sign-a-contract-while-drunk-or-...

> what is the threshold...

Far past the threshold is glaringly obvious, far below as well. If it is close, you do what is always done about any threshold question.


> if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid?

Sadly, we don't hold capitalism to consent standards


One more reason for why you’re seeing the same ads.

Buyer’s remorse and post-purchase confirmation: You’re seeing ads for products you bought because the brand or marketing team decided to spend some more money to have you avoid buyer’s remorse and to reaffirm to yourself that the purchase was a good one.

This may or may not work, depending on the person and the product, but some of these things are probably not measured well enough to decide who should see the same ad and who doesn’t need to.


I run adblockers for the same reason. I’m not against ads or supporting sites via ads, and I actually want something new to try. But all ads I see fall into two categories: already bought it for a couple of weeks. Or completely irrelevant, which I never click.

They have everything on me: my age, sex, social state and circles, location, life habits, profession, work hours, sleep hours, movie and porn preferences, which non-entertainment topics I’m interested in, which medical issues I have, and probably 50 more properties I never thought about.

But I never clicked on any nonsense they tried to advertise to me. I see nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing relevant to my life in ads. None of my new interests ever came from these flashy boxes.


To me, it's completely pointless. I don't buy from ads. Never ever. Not on Tv, not on the web. If something is advertised on me, I tend to hate it. I start my shopping on Amazon, then look for alternatives in shops I know, then compare the prices. Quit the phone, zap the TV, install an adblocker. Beware, I'm not saying I'm a robot, I just distaste the ad language, and prefer comparisons. Remember the Bill Hicks sketch about ads people? That's me.


That’s the thing, you probably have.

There are ads that want you to buy something, and there are ads that, when you are making a choice between products, you’ll go with the brand you’re most familiar with.

Ads build that familiarity.


Or maybe I won't and go for the competitor... it often works this way. So many times I see something expensive being advertised and I go for a cheaper one I never heard of. So again, I might be a rare case, but ... I'm not saying that I never bought snacks that are also advertised, because everything is advertised. But I come from a "hard discount" family, and I'm a very hard target, I don't even like being given presents for Christmas. I'm just saying that if everyone was "castrating" like me, we would see much less spending on advertising.


Exactly this for me, too. I make lattes and cappuccinos pretty often at home. I don't drink dairy milk, so I'm constantly on the lookout for decent alternative milk brands. I've tried pretty much every brand I can find at local stores, and some that I have to order online...

Except Oatly.

Because when I lived in NYC, their subway advertising was so aggressive, in your face, and annoying, I swore I'd never buy the product. Because no brand that spends that much on advertising can possibly be price-efficient for their actual product.

I've actually tried it at a friend's house recently, and really enjoyed it. But I still refuse to support a brand that advertises so heavily.


>Except Oatly.

Reminds me of this scene from Pirates of the Caribbean..

Norrington : You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of! Jack Sparrow : But you have heard of me.


Honorary shout-out to JIRA, the product that always makes me think of this line when it login thrashes, or spins out moving a ticket between columns, or starts displaying small portions of inscrutable errors and java stack traces in a tiny dialog box at the top of the screen.


> I've tried pretty much every brand I can find at local stores, and some that I have to order online [...] I've actually tried it at a friend's house recently, and really enjoyed it.

Aggressive subway advertising can indeed be annoying, yet it has been quite efficient in this case: the milk of a brand advertised in the subway of a big city just got mentioned in a positive way on a tech website read worldwide.


This is a hallmark of a religion. Even the failures are spun as successes.


> Because no brand that spends that much on advertising can possibly be price-efficient for their actual product.

I believe that might not necessarily be true, in fact the opposite might be true.

A brand that can afford to spend a large amount of money on advertising cannot afford to sell bad products, as otherwise people would buy it once and then never again.


Besides the fact that it's a fake ESG Blackstone play...


Ads can also provide value when served to those who don’t buy. I would not buy a Rolex, but when I see someone wearing one, I know they have a lot of disposable money and dispose of it on things like Rolexes, which is what the buyer wants. The buyer is paying for the ads to convey the value to others.


I don't think you realize just how insidious advertising is. Repetition builds awareness, which will infiltrate almost any thinking about the product or whatever. Every time you recall an earworm jingle, the ad is serving its purpose. The only way to not be influenced by them is to screen them out.


I feel that the advertisers really want to justify their salary and glorify their existence, by telling you their work is valued in years and that they never fail. It's a delusion. Here I am, after 37 years of advertising of everything, from shoes to games to food, to cars... in every single media... and? What are the results?


You own things, yes? How did you choose them? How did you even discover that they exist?

That's what advertising addresses.


Going to a supermarket, or to Amazon. Trying them one time and seeing if they're good. Reading unsponsored comparisons, or asking to a friend. And... no?


I don't think anyone truly does that 100% of the time.


It's more common than you think: when you dont have the money, you buy off-label. And if occasionally should I buy something that is advertised, is that worth decades of ad bombing every 5 minutes of every tv show and every web page? To me, it looks like there's a huge disproportion of effort vs the actual gain. I mean, I can sing all the ad jingle of my teen years. Maybe I have some strange anti-ad gene, but that's just a lie. Or probably not having tv channels, just helps.


Doesn’t matter if you buy, advertising is as much about creating brand and product awareness. You see my company name enough in a favorable ad, you create a positive association in your mind eventually.

Sometimes it takes years…


This was pretty true for me till I started getting ReMarkable ads on Insta last year. It is exactly the sort of thing I like and after reading some HN pieces on it, I now own it. Still getting adverts for it in Insta.


I recently started dabbling in Google ads for my side project. And I have learnt a lot about advertising through actually running campaigns:

- Different countries have drastically different CPA (cost per action). You can acquire users easily in low-income countries but not US or Canada. So you have to set different CPA target for different countries. Currently Google ads doesn't seem to do adjustments automatically for app campaigns.

- It might take more than one impressions to convert one user. I looked at the conversion paths analysis in Google Analytics and found about 25% of conversions had two or more campaign impressions. Also there's a term called "touchpoints to conversion", basically how many interactions it took for a user to convert. Mine is about 2-3 touchpoints for all campaigns.

- Running ad campaign for my app feels surprisingly similar to the experience of hyper-parameter tuning of ML models. Google in fact does use ML to run campaigns internally. That might also be the reason why the initial phase of campaign doesn't work very well with limited training data and bad initial weights.


> Running ad campaign for my app feels surprisingly similar to the experience of hyper-parameter tuning of ML models.

Maybe becouse most adclickers are bots?


Mostly no, it does not. Actually there is nothing wrong with targeted advertising, products and ads are meant to target specific people in its nature. But online advertising are a scheme for tech companies to make money.

Adtech was created to make the buying and selling of online advertising so much more efficient. Today, about $350 billion dollars is spent on online advertising. 70%+ of it is bought programmatically. And according to the ANA and PwC, 70% of advertising dollars spent on online programmatic advertising never touch a human being. Of $200 billion in annual programmatic ad spend, $140 billion disappears in "ad fees, fraud, non-viewable impressions, non-brand-safe placements, and unknown allocations".

See The Programmatic Poop Funnel: https://i2.createsend1.com/ei/d/DD/DB6/ACD/030147/csfinal/Sc...

I love reading Bob Hoffman about this subject.

"The lovely fantasy of online advertising -- in which the same person who was frantically clicking her remote to escape from TV advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with online advertising -- is going to go down as one of the great marketing delusions of all time. It has been undermined by an unfortunate fact of nature -- no one in his right mind volunteers for advertising.

By a factor of about a thousand to one, people who can interact with media do so to avoid advertising -- not engage with it."

https://www.bobhoffmanswebsite.com/newsletters


I can't follow your comment. You say it doesn't work, then you say there's nothing wrong with it, then you list a bunch of things wrong with it. Also, a few things:

- Products and services are make to make money for their creators. They generally try to achieve that by creating something of value others will buy. So this isn't really an argument for or against it. A Prius works and it is a scheme for Toyota to make money.

- The fact not every ad is viewed doesn't mean it doesn't work. It's just the nature of the delivery. It could be a problem or inefficiency at least, but presumably it's factored into pricing. If one company figured out out how to reduce that waste, they should be able to charge more or take more market share.

Not to say it does work, but your post hasn't explained how it doesn't.


> I can't follow your comment. You say it doesn't, then you say there's nothing wrong with it, then you list a bunch of things wrong with it.

Where is the part where OP says "there's nothing wrong with it" ?


Second sentence.


Advertising and online advertising are different things. Advertising was a thing, long before technology. Great ad people (like David Ogilvy) was created effective, targeted advertising and achieved success.

How to Create Advertising That Sells Ad by David Ogilvy [1972] https://boraoztunc.medium.com/how-to-create-advertising-that...

What I meant was, there is nothing wrong with advertising, or targeting right people to deliver value, products, services to them with creative approaches. Online advertising though, especially programmatic, is totally a different scheme.

I suggest reading more about; "Surveillance Capitalism"

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of “[The Age of Surveillance Capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita..., who coined the term surveillance capitalism in 2014, defines it as;

" …the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later."

In an interview with The Gurdian, Zuboff explains how surveillance capitalism is a human creation;

>It lives in history, not in technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism.

>Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.

>Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.

>The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.

Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.

The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.

Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app.

---

Further sources if you are interested:

VPRO Documentary Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw

The Intercept The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4Y-uZG5zk

High tech is watching you https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-profe...


It depends heavily on how 'what is being advertised' can be related to 'what people are interested in'.

For example, I ran a small business creating posters from cyclists GPS data. I created FB ads that targeted people that used Strava (I'm a little rusty on the exact terminology but it was "had an interest in the strava.com website") and got lots of clicks with people that tried the service.

However there are topics - window blinds is a good example - that people aren't (in general) interested in for very long - so once the algorithm comes to the conclusion that you like blinds you've probably already made a purchase. Similarly I subscribe to the economist magazine and keep seeing Economist ads - infuriating.

Facebook allows advertisers to remove groups of users (for example those that have purchased a product already) - I don't know why more companies don't use this.

You mention charities - I remember reading that most charitable donations come from people that have already donated to that charity before, although I can't find proof.


Since everybody on HN never ever sees an ad, much less would actively buy something based on one, let me confess to having spent thousands of dollars on products seen in ads.

For example, I have many pairs of awesome Portuguese shoes, and I originally found this vendor via their Facebook feed ad. That’s over $1000 of revenue over several years from a targeted ad which (I assume) cost them a dollar when I clicked on it.

I’m genuinely happy I saw that ad and found a shoemaker I like without having to research it.

Ads within the FB app still remain much more relevant than the stuff Google shows me on third party sites, which is much more random and often an eyesore. (Yes, I know nobody on HN uses the FB app either. What can I say: I joined at the age of 38 and was surprised that I genuinely like browsing FB because it’s so chill, just old friends and relatives. Nobody is angry or picking a fight, unlike Twitter where that’s 50% of the traffic.)


I just don't see how you actually know you're going to get a good quality product without research. Since you have to research to know if the product seen in an advertisement is good anyway, if you do your research well you will come out of it with some good quality products in mind, and can then simply search for vendors. Nobody ever puts the negatives in their ads - why would they - so at best they're triggers to buy a product you probably don't need (after all, otherwise if you needed it you wouldn't wait for an advertisement, you'd be researching, or just buying whatever was at the top of the online store.)

Basically I don't see how a targeted advertisement ever helps me. I find myself in these scenarios:

- I need a product, say a new pair of shoes. Since I need these, for example in the situation where my current shoes are literally falling apart of inadequate for the weather, I will simply start doing research, asking people, etc. I don't need targeted ads here, and they don't target me based on product quality, so there's no point paying attention to them anwyay.

- I don't need a product: well, then I don't need an ad for it either.

- I'd like a product, say a new luxury pair of shoes I don't need. Well, why should I trust an ad? Upon seeing an ad I'll just go and research it anyway, since again, nobody will list the negatives of their own product in any advertisement.

- I need a product, but am unaware it exists: the only area where a targeted advertisement really makes sense, since it saves me time (I don't know I should be researching it because I'm unaware it exists). But, uh, I've literally never had this happen ever in my life, and I'd be curious if anyone has any examples.


Interesting, Instagram ads have convinced me to buy several products. However after 3 bad experiences I have concluded that most ads are for absolute junk.

Without a doubt I'm sure there are some ads that are for decent products, but it feels like a gamble to even consider buying something being advertised to me on these social platforms.

If you find something you actually enjoyed at random, I think that is the equivalent of winning the advertisement lottery.


What on earth did the ad say that convinced you "I want to buy shoes from some random Portuguese company online?" What did the ad look like? What did it claim?

I have no idea why I would trust that company to deliver a product on par with, let alone better, than my current shoe supplying options.

I also wonder if you're in the EU or not, as that changes the story. But I understand a lot of people wouldn't want to say on a forum.


The ad and pitch on the website was typical for a European higher-end brand that has local history but not the name recognition to really qualify internationally as luxury. They told a credible story of the artisanal tradition and so on. I knew already Portugal had a good reputation for leather products. The risk of buying a pair and maybe having to return it didn’t seem high.

I think I was living in London at the time (pre-Brexit). There’s obviously no shortage of nice shoes in England, but I was new there, so finding a physical store I like was a lot more work.


I turned off ad targeting wherever possible, but Meta is one of the few that don't allow you to and I still see targeted ads on Instagram.

I've been thinking of getting a new backpack, and I got backpack ads. However, while I get "ads" -- plural -- they're all from the same single vendor selling a "last bag you'll ever need" that doesn't look all that good. It's frustrating more than helping, the exact reason why I turned off ad targeting in the first place.

Years ago I turned targeting back on in Google, and it just meant I got spammed with Pebble ads (>50% of the banners everywhere were Pebble) because I kept checking their website for a sale (at the time they did occasional 2-3 day sales without advertising them, weird given the banner budget). I just turned it off again after that experience.


There had been more then one or two stories about ad "not getting delivered to the target audience" and companies not noticing it through changes in sold products. (Not delivered in the broad sense, from accidentally not bought over misconfigured audience to problems with ad networks.)

So I'm but sure about the (micro) targeting aspects.

What I'm sure about is that ads work, especially if you do them well.

And it's hard to keep the quality separate from the delivery method, as you can't do clean a/b testing or similar (as things like "seen before" or even other ads can have noticable effects as far as I can tell).


I guess the effectiveness is related to an individual's overall online habits and interests and I would be quite surprised if it did "not work at all" at scale. Besides, if it did not work they would know by now...

For example, maybe you do not browse a lot before spending money because you know what you want more or less?

I have the habit of clearing my browsing data often, all the tracking options in my Google account are off, and the ads I get seem pretty generic in general, but I sure get ads related to my Google searches if there is something concrete to purchase, like hardware parts.


I have ad blindness. I never see the ads. Even the floaters, I just look around them till they're gone.

I do peruse ads in my muscle car magazines, because that's why I buy those magazines.

I enjoy the ad placements in those car hotrodding TV shows, because I am interested in how to do the projects they're doing, and the stuff needed to do them.

Amazon pushes ads to my kindle, but I couldn't tell you what they were for because they don't register on my brain.


Yea, this is pretty much my experience. Just kinda… don’t really see them even when they’re there.

Still use ad blockers a lot of the time but that’s cause of the insidious tracking not cause I’m against advertising as a concept.


I gave drop shipping a try at one point, just to learn something about the internet.

It more or less paid for itself, without much profit, using just FB ads. So basically if some amateur can break even with barely any understanding of how it works, someone with proper marketing experience can probably do well enough to make a living.

The thing is the purchase rate was something like 1%. So it may well be that most people by far never buy anything via ads, but the minority is enough to make it worthwhile.


“At one point”. You’re talking 2010? I don’t think an amateur still has a chance of breaking even in 2022. Am I wrong?


It was early 2020. Bought some stuff, made some adverts, saw how the interface works on FB, saw how Shopify works, watched orders coming in and get fulfilled.

I still don't really know how to do any of those things properly but it was clear that someone out there was clicking on ads and buying stuff from me.


I’m impressed and surprised. Can you share what the product was?


Gamer glasses. Reduce blue light kinda thing. There really wasn't much to it, I just borrowed the manufacturer's videos and pics, threw up some ads and then people started ordering.


Geez. Well done! So what made you stop? With so many tweaks untapped, it sounds like guaranteed profits.


Well it just didn't seem very obvious what would move the needle, plus moving up a notch would take some actual work, and actual costs.


Gotcha. Plus, I would imagine, selling drop-shipped plastics on Facebook probably isn't the most inspiring thing in the world. I can see how that can get boring very quickly. Especially to someone who is much more interested in figuring things out than in making money to lie on some boring beach. (I'm projecting, of course.)


Sure, I've definitely bought stuff before from targeted ads.


I have as well. I usually get pretty good ad recommendations on Instagram surprisingly enough.


I almost never pay attention to ads and have never purchased anything from ads.. until Instagram. The targeted ads on Instagram are unreal. They've shown me products from local creators/shop owners that there's no way I would have found otherwise.

I still get a lot of crappy ads and get bombarded with the same product I just purchased at times. But, it's by far the most customized/useful ad experience I've had.


You are being targeted with a type of ad campaign called Retargeting or Remarketing. It uses cookies to inform ad networks that you have recently a page with a particular retargeting campaign ID. Its popular among advertisers as it shows that you are "in the market" for a particular item, which is much more specific and valuable than a random person. If you would like these particular ads to stop, simply clear your cookies or click on the encircled I icon inside the ads to configure them to not target you. Alternatively you can block all ads. It's worth noting that some retargeting matches on the cookies of anybody sharing the same public IP, ie router/ISP, so others in your household may have to do the same. Also, often there are retargeting pixels set for multiple ad networks, so you may have to opt out multiple times.

People often ask why they are targeted after they have made a purchase. This is because of limitations of tracking. Merchants can add trackers that show on their checkout pages to associate ads with sales, and stop targeting browsers that have made purchases. Sometimes this works, but often either A. advertisers don't correctly configure these systems or B. limitations with 3rd party cookies make it so the "I've already bought it" signal never makes it back to the ad network.

What I don't understand is why consumers aren't offered a choice by ad companies to actually just tell them they bought it. I would assume a marketer would love to know feedback from buyers like when/where/why the purchase took place as well as commentary on the product, vendor etc. It seems like a missed opportunity to make the advertisee more empowered and advertiser more informed.


I scoffed at advertising all my life, assuming it works it’s magic subconsciously, if at all.

Last year I began using THC to sleep better. And last week I experienced developing a deep craving for a specific snack food I saw an ad for. And everything clicked for me: advertising is probably very very effective on more easily manipulable people. People who are thrall to their lower brain impulses. I felt like I was six again. I just had to have a Skor bar so badly.


Yes! I have hardly any friends on Facebook and I never post, but I only use it for the ads. I learn about tons of clothes companies and sales on stuff I like.


This is the most bizarre use of Facebook I've ever heard of


Actually it sounds brilliant. Certainly Facebook is a lousy way to actually have social connections. But using it as a coupon book is something it would be good at.

Reminds me of the now-periodic posts on HN grousing about how bad Google has become. The complainers expect too much. Google is the modern Yellow Pages, or Computer Shopper. You use it for the ads (and SEO stuff). It’s good to look for the highest bidder - that indicates a powerful bidder who can afford it. In the old days this was picking the plumber with the big Yellow Pages ad. At least they’re more likely to be in business with someone answering the phone. You’ll have much worse average luck calling the business with no ad that just has a one-line phone number listing.


Fuck it. Someone make a website that's sole purpose is to buy data from social media and then give you relevant ads. Literally no actual purpose other than that


I love catalog shopping. Facebook is like that but even better!


YouTube ads are so well targeted for me that I almost regret upgrading to Premium. If I had the time I would toggle the option to see the ads. I used to spend way too much time watching all the ads before the content.


I think what's hard to deduce with advertising, especially for small projects or people who don't have much experience is the activation energy needed to see any results from what seem like relatively large ad spends.

To be clear, I suck at this. I've attempted to buy instagram / facebook ads and had little luck. For FaceBook ads you basically have to spend around $6k before the algorithm even starts to care about what you're doing. This is essentially because it has to first serve enough ads to figure out if people are actually clicking before actually targeting the demographic you set.

That said, as much as I hate it, I have no clue how to do social media marketing (TikTok or otherwise) and it's astonishing how much energy and time this takes. I used to joke that it'd be a better use of my time to find a college girl who likes TikTok and has a stimulant prescription to run social media for my bad side-project. (this is a joke)

However, targeted ads definitely work. I still get ads on instagram for the rapid-test clinic that just opened up across the street from my apartment. I can literally see the clinic from my window.


> However, targeted ads definitely work. I still get ads on instagram for the rapid-test clinic that just opened up across the street from my apartment. I can literally see the clinic from my window.

How is this working? I mean, I didn't think the claim was that targeted ads don't understand geography. The question was about if they drive behavior. And since you've seen the clinic every day, how does the advertising help?


There are lots of companies that have no idea what they’re doing in terms of targeting and are just throwing away marketing dollars. The platforms are just extremely accessible to people with no knowledge of efficient targeting methods. They said, it can be done in a way that is extremely effective if you know what you’re doing.


They are targeting users who were at a product page (simply looking) which means they are interested for sure. They can't always know whether the users purchased it.

On Facebook, you can let the system know that you have purchased it by clicking Hide Ad => Already Purchased. If companies use Facebook pixels to track orders, Facebook does know whether you purchased it... but maybe not all companies use Facebook pixels for order tracking so Facebook doesn't know.

Regarding YouTube, YouTube ads are simply not worth it. Get YouTube premium.

You can ofc disable "personalized ads" in these platforms if you don't want these ads to follow you.


Absolutely yes.

I did both academic research (recommendation engine algorithms) and industry work (leading online advertising at a large e-commerce ). I can confidently say from my background that the targeted advertising works.

In fact, it works so well that it is almost awe-inspiring to see it in real action. Any e-commerce or advertising firms, including my former team, have internal data to support this claim. For our case, the difference between a highly optimized traditional adverting vs a crude targeted advertising algo is a still factor of N in favor of the algo (N >> 1). As the algo is optimized, N grows larger.


I was somewhat involved in (relatively early days of) real time bidding and targeted advertising, circa 2010 or so.

My data at the time led me to believe that there is a small-ish part of the population on which targeted advertising is effective, and all the effort (information-theoretic wise) is locating this group, when your only tool (in real time bidding, anyway) is bidding on random ad impressions.

I’m sure the world is different now, and this inight might not be relevant to today’s world. But it does explain why re-targeting is way more effective than most people assume.


Yup. I've discovered and bought things on Instagram countless of times from ads.

I can't say the same for YouTube or Google: all ads I see on Google and YouTube are crap. Ads I see on Instagram/Facebook are actually high quality.

YMMV.


I feel advertising only really works when the person paying goes for a monopoly , remember when every small youtuber was sponsored by square space , then ExpressVPN. After you have seen 50 square space plugs and you want to setup a website with no programming skills you will go to square space. Outside of that everyone one pays for advertising to stop their competition from having this aforementioned monopoly so its less of the advertising working and more stopping your competition from having a monopoly.


>My wife recently got on a new immunosuppressant medication, and now I see ads for that all the time. Great job targeting! But I already spent the money? So what is the point of all this?

this might be an example of the targeting knowing you need the medicine but not that you have it, I recently searched for something I would need a medicine for, I already have the medicine which I got during holiday but the online companies have no way of knowing that, thus I get advertisements for the medicine. Great job targeting indeed.


Yes. I run ads for some clients on Google and Social media and they have amazing results. If you know what you are doing with targeted ads you can make a big difference.

What you refer to is called re-marketing to people who visited the website, engaged with ads, but did not buy. The problem is that there are lots of advertisers that do not exclude people who already bought their products and this is bad marketing because people getting bombarded with ads for products that will never re-purchase.


I have learned to ignore ads in general, except when I use a search engine and the top results are ads. When that happens, I spitefully avoid clicking the sponsored links, even if they are pointing to where I want to go. I will intentionally scroll down further and click into the unsponsored links. Maybe I'm just weird, but at the very least, I'm confusing the algorithms.


This article argues that it doesn't work:

https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

Discussion on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873


6 years in adtech, lets say advertisers can distribute a lot of budget and waste it just to get 1 sale and cover for the losses so the numbers make sense. I have seen conversion rates increase 40% with purchase intent (if we know that a user added something to basket).

So what you see is an adtech tax - partially wastage but people will overlook this if they are still profitable on their marketing ROI.


The ads are very effective, but ad agencies are not filled with top tier people, you can train someone to run ad campaigns in a day. As a result, much of the button pushers at small agencies are recent grads with backgrounds not well suited to optimization.

A remarketing ad can be set up using exclusion lists to stop display after a purchase ( checkout page cookie), also most should be set up with limits. These are basic,obvious and easy things to implement. Attribution isn't always perfect but what you observed is more of a reflection of the high frequency of low tier ad managers. Many don't know any better, many don't care, many have no access to actually edit a client website (or know how)

It's the wild west still.

The example you used is also of a brand that I am overmarketed to, whoever is spending their money has some belief or knowledge of very broad targeting that I don't understand. I have not nor ever will buy blinds and my browsing behavior does not align with the obvious interest groups one would pick.

It's not just the small agencies that blow money, someone is patting themselves on the back about the 100,000,000+ impressions they are generating daily for selectblinds, but that funnel is going to be ugly when it's time to jazz up their presentation to show off that success!


My uneducated opinion: those ads may appear stupid and are useless 95% of the time, but 95% is more profitable than whatever else they would've shown you (as in they're still right 5% of the time), so failing a better option, the practice continues.


I work on the engineering side of ads.

Yes, targeted advertising consistently produces higher conversion rates. Your personal experience might have been "poor", but in aggregate it works.


It worked on me. I was looking for shoes one day and after 3 months of wasting money, they finally showed me an ad with shoes I liked.


As an advertiser, yes, modern algorithmic digital advertising is night and day better performance than dumb digital targeting.


Do you do a-b testing? I think one reason people keep asking, is because most answers are opinions and anecdotes.

Especially something like remarketing must be hard to do a-b testing on, as the control group is basically not tracked/targetet at all.


It works on my mother-in-law. I have the “I have a great mother in law who loves knitting” T shirts to prove it.


The ads you are talking about are called "remarketing".

Generally they work very well, better than audience category targeting. To work the best you have to set them up so.

If they are following you post purchase it often (but not always) means the marketing personal have not built a negative audience on a purchase confirmation flag to exclude this behaviour.

It may or may not matter depending on the ad pricing. Some ads you only pay on a click, others on views shown. Obviously the latter wastes more money while if click cost its not such a problem however if volume is great enough to effect your ads likelihood of being clicked it might effect how the ad network displays your campaign.

Basically ads are only as good as the product & implementation. And without trying to sound elitist many of the people setting up and running these campaigns are less technical than they should be and a bit useless at their job. In the same way there are amazing coders vs guys that do the bare minimum pasting other people's scripts as all they can do.

Odds are these campaigns are still making money overall on following the people that didn't initially convert so the companies are happy to keep them running as is.

TL:dr Most likely the ad manger has done a poor setup in remarketing.


Adblock Plus for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-plus-free-...

It takes 2 clicks to install, definitely less than writing on Hacker News.


For the most part my experience is the same as yours, but Instagram is legitimately great at targeting me with stuff I might actually be interested in. I've bought 2 or 3 things as a result of ads on their site, probably the only times ads have led to purchases for me.


Yes




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