And then, they throw away all that information and give you targeted ads that are so bad that you couldn't make a worse job if your life depended on it.
They use all of that info to target you, limit the number of times you’ve seen an ad, and stop sending you ads after you buy the product. Obviously it’s a really hard problem though, because the above list doesn’t always work as intended.
This is because of the vastly different amounts of work involved on either end.
Knowing you browsed a product is as simple as firing a tracking image on the product page from the adtech platform. Knowing you actually bought it means having a connection from the ecommerce system back to your email then back to the id that used used in the adtech and then setup as an exclusion filter in all of the campaigns.
It's also usually not worth it since conversions are low and ads are cheap so better to keep advertising and get net new sales then worry about the people who already bought seeing the same ad.
it would be good for them to work that out because showing me the same ads for lawn mowers for months straight is a waste of their advertising space and their clients' dollars.
I also do things like look up something on Google for someone else, then see ads about it for months. While I understand the simple way of this technology works, they might want to rethink the idea that I need to see ads endlessly for everything I did one search for.
I explained it's not worth it in the last sentence. It's year of work and millions in cost, and now regulation prevents tying PII from your purchase to the anonymous IDs used in adtech. You're going to get new ads anyway, retargeting campaigns rarely last beyond a few weeks from the last product page visit.
Yeah that happens often. I ran these campaigns for two years - you effectively get 200 dials, knobs, and levers to pull all making minor changes to an incredibly complicated adtech ecosystem. My first year I ran 80 of these campaigns, and could spend <20 minutes a week on each.
Missing something like “exclude recent purchasers” was easy to forget, but easier to not even have time to set up. (It might take 10-30 minutes to set that up)
I've noticed a lot of Instagram ads where the advertisers seemed to ignore a regional target, or Instagram does. I get ads for restaurants all over the country, which makes no sense for the advertiser. I'm not about to go eat at some Mexican restaurant 2000 miles away from me in a suburb.
I guess it is a mixed blessing.