4 ms·

I find it more annoying when you get bombarded after buying the toaster. Surely they know I made that purchase and don't have a need for multiple toasters.

• Rebelgecko 5y ago
  (disclaimer-I work at Google but have no hidden insights here) If you randomly show ads, what are the odds someone just happens to be in the market for a new one toaster? 1 in 1000? On the other hand, what are the odds that someone who just bought a new toaster ends up returning it and being in the market for a new one? Probably much higher.
  • hiq 5y ago
    This! All these comments about how bad ads are at targeting a proper audience really miss the point, you have to make comparisons to conclude anything. If an ad is relevant for x% of users and x is very small, that's still better than 0.5*x%. I don't think it's a mistake if after you bought product P, you get ads for P, it probably does work in practice.
    • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      It really doesn't, it's just the lack of a common interchange format for purchases that would allow the advertisers to remove you from the audience.
      • hiq 5y ago
        Information you don't have is by definition not relevant to compare targeting strategies, which are based on information they do have. Either you have this information, then Rebelgecko's comment explains why it would make sense to still have such ads. Or you don't have this information, then other information (such as "you searched for P") probably leads to this result as well. In both cases this strategy makes sense intuitively, and I'm pretty sure that ad-tech knows what it's doing to maximize returns, if only by looking at the metrics.