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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

I like when they show me ads for the expensive thing I already bought, as if I'm going to buy it again. Had they predicted I wanted to buy that thing, and shown me ads for things like it first, that might have been useful.

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That happens all across the 'net though, not just on Facebook. Happens to me with Amazon all the time - they have records of me eyeing something up, I buy it a day later, and 2 days later they're still pestering me around the 'net with ads about that thing.

This is intentional. They're shaping your perception of the purchase by mitigating remorse.

Are you sure? I often see ads for the same type of thing but from multiple competing brands.

is this your personal guess? it sounds plausable, but... reference?

I, like novaleaf, would like some sources for your otherwise plausible sounding claim.

FWIW, this is a co-ordination problem. There are many ad-networks that know your cookie was interested in this, however there is no singular (or multiple) way to let all of the ad-networks know that you have purchased this product, hence you get loads of ads for the same product even though you have already purchased it.

"People who have done things that suggest they're interested in buying this" is a highly valuable segment. Even if half of those people have bought the thing, it's worth advertising to them if it means you get the other half's eyeballs. They don't know that you bought it - they just know that you do things like those who want to buy.

Like, I went to a coding bootcamp. Making that decision means browsing the web like someone who is interested in that bootcamp. I ended up seeing a ton of advertisements for the bootcamp I was currently enrolled in. If you do things that are similar to what a company's target market is, people will notice that and turn that into cash.

Oh, but quite often they do know. Amazon knows perfectly well what I bought on their site. Vendor X should know perfectly well what I bought on their own site, using their own store instead of showing me the ad for that product for the next two months.

Even if Amazon knows and organizes the fact that you've bought the thing, that isn't what the ad space is selling. They're selling space that targets a particular kind of person, and whether or not you've bought the thing doesn't matter. Like, the company buying the advertisement slot wants to target a particular sort of person, and this is measured in various ways. So the network selling the advertisement slot wants to group visitors into different buckets based on these measurements, and sell to whoever happens to pay the most for a bucket that view happens to land on.

Basically, it's the end result of a process that confuses a measure with what it's measuring. You want to optimize for "interested in buying X". What you can actually look at is "things that people interested in buying X do more often than people who aren't interested". People buying advertising optimize for that, since it's actually possible to do so. And then since buyers actually care about the measurable proxies, that's what ad-space sellers give.

It's poorly done retargeting, but a common mistake.

Advertisers create a cookie list based on people who visited a particular product page. They fail to subtract from that the users who visited the checkout page.

If you're paying on a CPC, the cost to you (the advertiser) is negligible. Most people who have already purchased aren't going to click your ad again.

If you're paying on a CPM or CPV basis, then you're liking wasting money. It probably gets lost in the noise of the waste in all advertising. I have no idea if it's negligible or not, but it would help the user experience if the larger players helped more.

It's not hard at all to exclude buyers of the advertised product from the ad and I can't imagine that Amazon doesn't know that. We're doing it for clients all the time.

Probably they just don't care enough about their ads being a few percent more efficient as long as they are profitable.

Have you actually managed ecomm campaigns where you've done this? If so, how were your tags set up to facilitate this, particularly solving for the obvious cross device challenge?

I'm genuinely curious because those of us that are experienced in the hands on management of this stuff know how hard of a problem that can be in some circumstances.

Fwiw exclusion lists can be very effective if you can properly cookie someone at the appropriate time or leverage a data broker to pipe in CRM data. But it is by no means an easy thing to solve for.

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