Location targeting isn’t effective.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
Even if you write Brooklyn USA, there are 22 places called Brooklyn in the USA.
So now your search term is "Pizza in Brooklyn, NY, USA".
And now you want to search for the cost of a taxi... "Taxi prices in Brooklyn, NY, USA".
And now you want to know who won the baseball... "Who won the baseball, in USA". (Baseball means other things in other countries)
It's a staggering number of queries where the location changes the interpretation of what you're looking for, which changes the results.
Heck, I even get ads in the wrong language.
Hint: Instead of noticing that I’ve been doing manual labor recently, and inferring that I’m not a native English speaker, just use contextual targeting: show me ads in the same language as the content I’m watching.
Ad blockers are making the problems tracking-based much, much worse. Whatever signal is left after people block aggressively block trackers is actually just noise. Hopefully the market will see this and self-correct.
Why are your anecdotes relevant?