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No, it's not selected criteria. Your POV seems focused on an easily explainable classification style model. However, Ads (or any recommender) ML models have bee

by yunohn 2y ago

No, it's not selected criteria. Your POV seems focused on an easily explainable classification style model. However, Ads (or any recommender) ML models have been using black box neural networks for a long while now. Lookalike audiences are most commonly used when the Advertiser does not know the criteria - instead hoping FB/Google can magically match their ads with users who are "similar" in web activity or whatever, and hopefully lead to conversions. It's hard to explain a black box, but for eg, a Todo list SaaS company uploads a list of customers most likely having a diverse set of interests and behaviors. The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors, or have the same apriori but unrelated actions as someone who ended up doing the above or a combination of all of these.

bastawhiz 2y ago
> The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors If the audience you provide has none of these attributes, there's no way for it to magically intuit that you want these things from your customers. The neutral net doesn't know what a to-do list is or who uses one. It doesn't know the price of your service. The only thing happening is it's determining which of the signals about the users in your source audience are the most impactful. By supplying the source audience, you're supplying criteria for who your ads should be shown to. Whether you're explicitly setting those things or not, you're still supplying criteria. You can't swap this system for a recommendation system, they don't work the same way at all.

by yunohn 2y ago

bastawhiz 2y ago

> The NN matches more users that all seem like they'd be likely to buy such a SaaS because it figured they're in the market, or have disposable income, or maybe have searched for productivity solutions, or maybe have browsed some competitors If the audience you provide has none of these attributes, there's no way for it to magically intuit that you want these things from your customers. The neutral net doesn't know what a to-do list is or who uses one. It doesn't know the price of your service. The only thing happening is it's determining which of the signals about the users in your source audience are the most impactful. By supplying the source audience, you're supplying criteria for who your ads should be shown to. Whether you're explicitly setting those things or not, you're still supplying criteria. You can't swap this system for a recommendation system, they don't work the same way at all.