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How Ad Retargeting Ruined Christmas
- bsirkia 13y agoInteresting, I never considered how that could spoil the surprise. I guess the most straightforward solution is to do private browsing when shopping for gifts. Pretty annoying since it won't have any of your saved data (logins, saved forms, etc.) but you don't have to worry about the ads.
- jeza 13y agoI find retargeting creepy to the point that I installed an adblocker. The first time I noticed it, was when I booked a holiday to New Zealand and paid a deposit to hire a camper van online. Suddenly started noticing ads for that company everywhere online, where as previously I hadn't noticed any. Even after I came back they persisted for a while but eventually ceased. When in reality I'm unlikely to repurchase something like that for another 1-5 years.
- woud420 13y agoIt will usually last 30 days.
- henryw 13y agoMore reason to justify the use of the AdBlock browser extension.
- aspensmonster 13y agoI can't wait for the day Firefox bakes it into the browser.
- colmvp 13y agoSerious question: What's stopping them from doing so?
- girvo 13y agoTheir large contract with Google, perhaps? That's my guess anyway.
- jeorgun 13y agoI'd imagine he only reason adblocking is still as effective as it is is because it's used by so small a number of users. If it would ship by default, advertisers would have a much greater incentive to work around it, and ruin it even for the small minority of people using it now.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoSo, retargeting is the process of focusing all advertising efforts on selling you something that you've already bought? Marketing people are like aliens.
- corin_ 13y agoOf course in some cases it ends up like that, but as someone who sees stats for a very big company in the IT world, re-targeting does work. I see a large number of metrics including ROAS (return on ad spend), and the false negatives are more than made up for by successful sale conversions.
- janesvilleseo 13y agoRetargeting works, but it requires optimizing. Often this is not set up well, because it works so well without optimizing it. It requires a high level of technical chops to see this and set up. Most traditional marketers just don't have the skills to set it up or the correct access to make the right changes.
- indspenceable 13y agoNo - it focuses advertising efforts on people who have visited your website. So, you look at a jacket, but then aren't sure you want to buy it, retargeting makes you see that jacket again and again until you change your mind. Then you keep seeing it anyway.
- derefr 13y agoYou know, I'd almost be willing to give ad companies access to my credit card statements, so they'd know when I bought something and stop telling me to buy it. And I bet ad companies realize this. This privacy-invasion paradigm is only getting started.
- TylerE 13y agoNetflix is a big offender here.
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- crazygringo 13y agoWow... so the publicly-advertised use of Incognito Mode of shopping for Christmas presents... ...turns out to be true. It's not just for porn after all.
- chasebank 13y agoIncognito mode doesn't escape retargeting, at least for adwords / doubleclick. I work in the space and it's truly a pain to see the 'natural' ads.
- stellar678 13y agoHow does retargeting work through Incognito mode?
- mynameishere 13y agoIncognito mode doesn't hide the IP address. Anyway, the solution to this problem is dead simple: Do your shopping at work, or at a library.
- fragsworth 13y agoI don't believe ads get retargeted by IP address very often. The miss rate is far too high when you have multiple people behind the same IP, and it only serves to subvert people who use incognito mode - which creates an angry user rather than a sale.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gaadd33 13y agoHow do those track you then? Do they only use ip address? Seems like that would really fail for any offices that use NAT.
- jdangu 13y ago
- mattmcknight 13y agoSeeing an ad for something doesn't make me assume someone else bought one for me.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoBut if you see lots of ads for that thing [on a shared internet connection] then it might now?
- mattmcknight 13y agoNo, probably not. Even then, do I remember or notice what ads I am seeing? I think this is more of a fear in the mind of the buyer that will almost never be realized.
- vinkelhake 13y agoAn easy solution is just to use different profiles. Chrome supports having different users on the same browser. I use this feature at work to keep corp and private profiles separate.
- brc 13y agoThe crazy thing for me is that i keep getting advertised with my own products. Just a bit of bug-finding on the company site, and voila! that's all I see, no matter where I go. The funny thing is when people with no clue about how internet advertising works, and they rage at a site for advertising something. Something like 'I cannot believe your site has ads for XYZ! That is outrageous and hypocritical!'. When there is a good chance they have been shopping for XYZ themselves, and that's why the ad popped up.
- andygates 13y agoThat's not how advertising works, it's how advertising is insane and broken.
- dschiptsov 13y ago"This holiday season is one more reason to cry")
- brandnewlow 13y agoI run a retargeting company and this annoys me too! The reason this stuff happens is because many players in the space soak up advertiser spend by not immediately opting users out of product retargeting campaigns after a purchase is made. The advertisers don't always know to ask for this and the retargeting companies make more money if they don't suggest it. These personalized campaigns are so profitable for the advertisers that they don't notice the extra spend being bled out on people who they shouldn't be retargeting. This tends to happen among the big "enterprise" retargeting companies that serve large online retailers like Macy's. There's so many people involved in the deals and operations of the campaigns that no one person is there to say, hey, let's make sure this doesn't happen. The takeaway: Only work with retargeting vendors that give you control and visibility into who you're targeting and why! We do this, but so do others. Not everyone is this lame.
- ben1040 13y agoI didn't know retargeting existed until a few years ago when a family member died. I had pulled up the website for a cremation service provider to look up their number, so I could pass it along to the person in the family who was making arrangements. For the following week, more than half of the Google ad banners I saw all over the web were for the cremation company. Even on things that were completely unrelated, like an Android developer blog. I could reload over and over again and I kept seeing ads for that company. I cleared cookies and it went away, and that's when I realized they were specifically sending me that ad because of an original visit to that website. To me it really seemed insensitive on the part of the cremation company for them to have bought retargeted ads. You'd have to think that more often than not, people visiting your site have just lost of a loved one. Is it really the best thing to remind them of it on every subsequent website they visit?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Groxx 13y agoSeriously, why would you click inside an ad to turn it off? That's the kind of behavior that gets you even more "one weird trick" and flashing "millionth visitor this second" ads that follow you around everywhere. I probably would've gone another year or more without knowing what that stupid triangle was for.
- gohrt 13y agoWhat do you mean "even more"? If you turn off targeted ads, then you get more untargeted ads. Is that what you were saying?
- Groxx 13y agoI mean that if you click on an ad, you tend to get more of that kind of ad. And since ads routinely have misleading UI, I wouldn't expect clicking on an ad to let me turn it off / make it less annoying.
- theandrewbailey 13y agoI recently bought some underwear. A day or so later, I noticed men's underwear ads on Youtube, and declared "damn you, Google!" I eventually had to search for and watch other topics, like Call of Duty, to make them go away faster.