AdSense is completely broken | Hacker News Reader

AdSense is completely broken

poincare101.blogspot.com

What you're seeing is called retargeting. When you visit a site, they can cookie you. Then Google lets your serve up ads to those people you've cookied in the past. Sometimes companies do seem to be stalking you. I see ads for Storm on Demand (a hosting company) way too much.

Companies do this because they think someone who has been to their site and looked around is more likely to convert. It makes sense for them to spend some money getting you to return, than to get entirely new people. (Of course, this may or may not be true, but that's the feeling.)

I suspect Google especially uses retargeted ads on pages where there isn't a good inventory of ads related to the page. That is, they can't sell a good ad based on the content, so they'll sell based on who you are. I more often see retargeted ads (Hi Storm) on fairly lame pages.

Some companies seem to do this really well. Orvis will show you ads of specific things you were looking at in their catalog. It does tend to jog your memory, in a spooky sort of way.

It would be nice to have a "enough retargeting" button on the ad, so you could specify that you don't want to see more of these ads.

So their algorithm isn't broken, it is just annoying you in this case.

What you say is mostly correct but I want to fix a few of your statements and assumptions.

Regarding the skepticism on the end results of retargeting I can say that all the transparent retargeting companies offer you A/B testing of your retargeting campaigns. What we do is show PA ads to a control group and your retargeting ads to the experiment group. What we see is a lift of conversions between 40% and 200% and CTR doubles at worst compared to non retargeting display campaigns, these numbers vary by industry but are a good representation.

Google has moved its entire network inventory to the Google Ad Exchange. What this means is that for every impression there is an auction in real time where multiple buyers bid in real time for the right to show an impression to a specific user. While it's true that Google might filter out impressions that they deem particularly interesting for them it is not what we are seeing on the exchange.

AdRoll.com adheres to both Do Not Track and to the AdChoices initiative. Both of these allow the users to opt out of all retargeting campaigns either from their browsers or from the Ad itself (through the AdChoices icon). More information regarding this initiative is at http://www.evidon.com.

Disclaimer: I work for AdRoll.com and we are the biggest self-service retargeting platform.

"I had some poorly targeted ads, so a business that makes billions on actual CTR must be broken."

Just to be clear, you're calling a multi-billion-dollar business completely broken because it showed you a few ads you didn't care about for a few hours?

Here's a NYTimes article on retargeting: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html

Many people think this is creepy and privacy invasive. For example, in the past I've had a hard time explaining why an ad for silencers keeps following me around.

I do wonder at the tradeoff between retargeting people and getting that triple exposure for your product versus the creep factor that people have when they see you doing that.

I've never understood how AdSense produces any revenue at all and I suspect it's some sort of ponzi scheme. When I look at a web page, the AdSense adds are invisible to me and I bet to a large portion of the internet population.

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