You just bought a washing machine... could I interest you in a washing machine?
Utter nightmare (unnatural obsolescence, systemic perversity, pollution...) but. I have met R'n'D who admitted the goal was just to have something new to have people want to replace the old, on unsubstantial grounds.
You know your ROI, but your ad company doesn‘t.
I heard multiple stories from amazon, that hey still let the ad campaign or targeting running even if you bought the product for random times so external companies could not get insight in your businesses.
If you got the washing machine you will not click to buy another. If you pay per click, it makes no difference how long you let the campaign running if it is targeted.
I work in the ad industry.
The ad targeting knows you looked at washing machines, but doesn’t know you purchased.
However, they've been like this for over a decade so it's likely there intentionally. here's one way that could be possible:
There could be some popular third party service that's integrated on many e-commerce sites that sells this information and doesn't actually give a damn if you bought the refrigerator or not. They're selling you, not the refrigerator.
That's the problem with data brokers, it's mostly low quality data.
Yep, totally a 2hr task for an engineer who works on homedepot.com to “check” that you bought a fridge from lowes.com after you first price shopped the other site. Also a two hour task for a Google engineer to know you bought one in person at Best Buy after researching online first.
Yes, there are basic cases (buying from same merchant as who’s suggesting) that should be handled, but let’s not foolishly pretend that’s the average case, let alone majority / all.
The Amazon case could be the same problem I discussed before. Third party sellers can pay fees to promote/boost their listings on Amazon so ultimately the same incentive structure holds if there's fees for impressions and not just sales.
You can throw your hands up and yell impossible by looking for outliers with just about anything
Show me where I did that?
Both of these result in a higher fraction of conversions in this kind of targeting vs other targeting criteria.
Actually, there is one method they use to make suggestions that works very well.
If you have a wishlist, sometimes they'll recommend items from there.
It’s embarrassing, when associates glance at my screen.
2. We are discussing how ads are selected for presentation.
Another "If you buy a hammer you might also want to buy " -> "a nail". Ill forgive the singular.
Just to be clear those are not cherry picked - they were my first two attempts.
The most natural interpretation there is that Sarah bought a washing machine and a dryer simultaneously, not that, after buying a washing machine the month prior, she was finally ready to buy a dryer.