Once you buy the car, then you'll find that various ad agencies will start recommending you a car.

Yeaahhhhh... people need to work on their algorithms for sure.

> people need to work on their algorithms for sure.

Do they?

Most adspace buyers are utterly clueless about how Google algorithms work.

The flaws the OP describe are real, but my bet is 80 to 90% of adspace buyers have no idea of the shortcomings.

Nor do they care BTW: the ROI on their ad dollar when spent on GOOG is so much higher than traditional channels ever were that they just set the drip in place and never look back.

Clearly these ads are simply bidding the most. Why show you "better" ads that generate less revenue?

You also need to take into account user annoyance, would you rather show a 10$ ad today, but lose the user and never show another ad or show a 2$ ad every month until eoy. There's a lot more than just revenue that factors into these algorithms. And you also need to take into account advertiser's ROI, they want people who will convert.

Source: used to work on prediction modelling in ads.

Sure I get it, but clearly it's not working. It seems like it's just showing an ad that pays more. The OP seems annoyed, so that part isn't happening.

If they showed the perfect ad, advertisers would be willing to spend much per view. As an advertiser I might pay some low CPM to blast my ad with poor targeting, but if instead they only showed my ad to exactly the correct people who will click and buy it, I would pay up to my marginal revenue per sale

I have a similar approach to Amazon's stock, as long as my package isn't delivered within an hour, there's still lots of growth left (ignoring aws and all).

> I'm a Google shareholder partly because their ads are so poorly targeted at me.

What?

Also, I'm fine with ads not being targeted at me. It's really annoying to look up information on a toaster and then get bombarded with ads for toasters.

He's saying they're leading the field, manage to stay ahead of competition, keep making bank, yet still have a gigantic amount of growth potential.

I find it more annoying when you get bombarded after buying the toaster. Surely they know I made that purchase and don't have a need for multiple toasters.

(disclaimer-I work at Google but have no hidden insights here)

If you randomly show ads, what are the odds someone just happens to be in the market for a new one toaster? 1 in 1000?

On the other hand, what are the odds that someone who just bought a new toaster ends up returning it and being in the market for a new one? Probably much higher.

This! All these comments about how bad ads are at targeting a proper audience really miss the point, you have to make comparisons to conclude anything. If an ad is relevant for x% of users and x is very small, that's still better than 0.5*x%.

I don't think it's a mistake if after you bought product P, you get ads for P, it probably does work in practice.

It really doesn't, it's just the lack of a common interchange format for purchases that would allow the advertisers to remove you from the audience.

Information you don't have is by definition not relevant to compare targeting strategies, which are based on information they do have.

Either you have this information, then Rebelgecko's comment explains why it would make sense to still have such ads.

Or you don't have this information, then other information (such as "you searched for P") probably leads to this result as well.

In both cases this strategy makes sense intuitively, and I'm pretty sure that ad-tech knows what it's doing to maximize returns, if only by looking at the metrics.