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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

  However, if Google gets a query "Where to buy a Rolex" or "best deals on Rolex watches", well you know that person is perhaps already considering buying a watch, so you want first crack at the deal.

I've found that my "buying questions" are never properly answered by those ads. The more commercial intent I display, the scummier the ads get.

I blame misaligned interests: I want to know if the product is good and to find good deals, they want me to give them money, now! And since advertising is a numbers game, they don't pull their punches when manipulating me.

No, thank you. Talk to my adblocker.

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I get where you're coming from. As someone who has had ads be "basically" what I want, I've never really believed that someone wanting to take my money for a thing I might want is _that_ misaligned in terms of interest (kind of like recruiters or real estate agents wanting you to take basically anything: they might not have your best interests at heart but they do want to close a deal). This is, of course, a naive view of the world

A sort of value-neutral narrative I've come up with recently: the ad -> sale pipeline is basically super flexible (you put in X money to get Y clicks for Z sales, but don't really need much staff on it). So if you're super good at this kind of optimization you can confidently put in the maximum about of X money to get even just some profit. And of course outbid people who are less confident.

So in the auction-based ad market, the people who will "win" the ad space will be people _who are good at auction-based ads_! Everyone who really cares about sales funnels etc will be able to get better results!

Of course there's like.... misleading copy etc, but I'm more and more convinced that the reason for the awfulness is that the people who get the slot are getting it for a mostly unrelated skill.

> I've found that my "buying questions" are never properly answered by those ads. The more commercial intent I display, the scummier the ads get.

It’s a lot like walking into a car dealership. They aren’t aiming to match you with the best car for you, they’re aiming to sell you the car that makes them the most money.

I've never actually bought straight from a dealership so excuse my naivety here, but wouldn't they be better off trying to sell me the car that is best for me? Otherwise if it doesn't meet my needs, I won't be buying anything.

You probably can't tell which car is best for you, and salespeople aren't gonna help.

They just have to convince you it's good enough.

Even if they do pick a car largely based on your needs, they're never going to say it's anything but a perfect or near-perfect fit.

Car dealers may not be a frequent repeat customer like stores Word of mouth is diluted by type model needs, it’s not my friend was recommended dealer bar for their experience buying a Honda foo I’ll go and buy one

What is 'best' is highly subjective and emotive.

At almost any price point there is going to be some model or feature that is a bit more expensive that you may not strictly need but that may be better in one way or other.

They will sell you the car currently in their lot that most closely matches what you need. Not what you actually need. Just the closest they have.

Doubt. Yes, the one in their lot; no, on best match. They'll try and sell to you according to their need - highest commission, dump a lemon, etc. If you do choose a vehicle they'll try to give you a terrible finance deal, wiggle out of a warranty they were offering, and such.

I recommend talking to some people who know about car dealer sales strategies. For many people buying a car is highly emotional and car dealers are trying to manipulate those. Some examples, if you come in with a budget of say $5000 they will always try to sell you something which is above your budget ("this is what you really want/need"), so never give them your true budget. If it comes to closing a sales deal they will often work on you with 2 people, which is much harder to resist psychologically. So best is to go buy a car with at least 2 people as well (and make a strategy before so they don't play you against each other). They also use strategies, like installing a mirror at the place where you drop the car back after a test drive so you see yourself in the car, which causes an emotional response.

...and this is part of the success of Tesla.

Car dealers are literally driving traffic away from them. They are about as popular as taxi drivers before Uber.

Psychological tricks are a predatory social behavior, not only to the buyer, but also because people (especially introverts) detect them quickly and grow tired very fast. That leads people online (for Tesla) or online shopping (who enjoys being harassed by vendors in every clothes shop?), or online because at least the price negotiation doesn’t depend on your face or your mastery of social games. When your psychological tricks lead to entire industries sidestepping you and letting you die with popular support, you know something is wrong.

And yet Saturn failed even though that was how their cars were sold also.

All true. And thankfully avoidable in 2021. I just bought a new car, from a large chain dealer, 95% by SMS.

No thanks, delivery would eat all my data allowance.

Bought my last car this way - once I knew what make/model I want (which did require physically seeing a few), it was 100% email until it was ready on the parking lot to drive off and the papers were ready to sign. The dealers that asked to "come and talk", or "call and we'll discuss the options" just got "thanks but no thanks". Fortunately, in 21th century there are people that are willing to sell cars without bullshit, and they got the deal. And that was pre-lockdowns, now I imagine more people would be willing to work this way.

OTT but in line with your question In my part of Australia we have an established dealership who has been here since the 70's and I bought my 1st car from him in the mid 90's. each couple of years I would go back and ask what he could do for me as a trade and on what. every time, walking out with a good deal (he actually moved figures around to get the best price) larger part of my wifes family started going there and same outcome, come home with a car they like, met their expectations and got good trade-ins for their cars. recently I took mine and my wifes cars in to change over, we picked our cars, got fair to good trade ins on them, paid and then waited on them to be detailed so we could drive home. I asked the dealer principle which car would he have sold me if he wanted to make money. he said, plainly "they all make money, in differing amounts, no point trying for a high margin car that won't suit either of your needs" I asked what he could of pointed us at if he wanted more money out of us. his reply "I'd push you to a cheaper 2nd hand car or one of the LDV/MG/Import cars where I would make 3x as much as what I am getting from this sale" guy is in his 80's and doesn't mince words but is as honest as they come

It seems that it's common understanding in US that car dealer is BS. Is it cultural? because I don't see such common understanding outside US.

Modern life is like being in a car dealership 24/7.

That is a sadly apt metaphor

My experiences exactly, my ad experiences fit in to two categories “things i just purchased” and “terrifically bad suggestions”. A third category might be “creepy connections” where a random search leads to ads on vastly different platforms usually quite inappropriately.

Amazon are terrifically bad at the “things I have already purchased” advertising. They _know_ with 100% certainty that I bought a webcam 6 months back - because I bought it on Amazon. Yet they’re still sending me email and putting ads on webpages for webcams, including the exact model I bought from them...

(I totally expect some shitty AdTech startup to start buying remarketing ads for NFTs any minute now. )

Have you considered that Amazon is very good at what they do, and that perhaps people who buy a webcam are much more likely than then general public to buy another one?

Considering that the same thing happened to me when I last bought a movie on DVD from them and then got ads for that very same movie for weeks, no.

You'd be surprised how often the people who are supposed to be good at ads aren't. Organizational inefficiency explains a lot of it: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

That may happen in many companies, but I'd be very surprised if it happens with remarketing ads and Amazon? Performance-based advertising with solid experiments that appropriately consider both counterfactuals and long-term user value is one of their core strengths.

> Have you considered that Amazon is very good at what they do

Cynical-me considers Amazon to be the least-worst of all the companies trying to do what they do.

I'm sure their "re-advertise stuff people bought before" thing works great for some of what they sell - toilet paper or laundry detergent or cat food. So just like every "data driven" VC backed startup, they've "validated the business model" and are now pumping advertising dollars into "scaling" their proven toilet paper sales pipeline to webcams. They're probably busy running multivariate testing to find if the optimal repurchase advertising repeat rate for webcams is down near 4.3 weeks like laundry detergent, or way up at 9.1 weeks like toilet paper. 'cause the data doesn't lie, right? :sigh:

Maybe the victim in this case is not you, but the company paying for the ads.

Think about it this way: You buy a webcam from some company X. The company X wants to sell more webcams, so they buy ads. Amazon shows those ads to you. At the end of the year, company X gets a report saying "we displayed your ads to bigiain, and bigiain bought your webcam" (the little detail that you bought the webcam before seeing the ads is not mentioned). Would this seem to the company X as money well spent?

Are the "things I just purchased" suggestions actually bad though? I see people complain about them a lot, but I haven't seen anyone chime in with what the conversion rate is on them compared to other targeting strategies. Like I'd suspect that having already purchased an item is highly, highly correlated with purchasing it again. And that probably even applies to things that don't initially seem like you'd need more than one of.

When I have my ad-blocker off I see a lot of ads for Linode, AWS and DO. I already have a relationship with each of them.

Amazon still keeps showing me faucet valves and a kitchen-sinks. (I did a replacement two years ago).

And, every last ad for any/all PostgreSQL commercial add-on.

Some (many) items don't fit the repeat pattern and I'm confounded how, with all the Ai/ML crap this isn't known yet.

They (ad-sellers) would rather hustle the BS of "retargeting"

Or it fits better than you think, and/or the margins for certain types of products are high enough to justify bidding for ads even when they fit only a tiny proportion of the time.

E.g. you may have a relationship with Linode, AWS and DO, but presumably all three would prefer you ditched one or two of the others for more spend with them.

And you may have done a kitchen replacement two years ago, but how many percent need to do repairs or changes subsequently, or are unhappy about choices they've made, and end up spending enough on high margin additional products for years to come? That you've proven yourself to be willing to invest in improvements recently might well make you more profitable to advertise to even though you've already made the biggest investment.

I'm sure many advertisers are bad at targeting, and so I'm sure some of these ads are metaphorically burning money. But I'm also sure - because I've seen that too - that sometimes seemingly totally counter-intuitive ads makes sense after all with access to the actual underlying numbers.

My impressions about ads is they are usually not interested in selling you what you actually need, but they try more to get you to feel like you should buy things you don't really need. I suspect it is because it's easier and much more profitable (we would spend less money if you only bought things we want need).

Having already purchased an item is indeed highly correlated with purchasing it again, however, you are ignoring the temporal element. Yes, I will need to buy a new gaming monitor for my son, but hopefully not for another three years, and by then most of these ads will have disappeared.

But for all they know perhaps you want to purchase one for your daughter now or a second one for a dual-monitor setup. Ads in general have a very low success rate, so it can be worth doing even if the guess is wrong a very large percent of the time

Well, the most common ad of this type are for the exact item I purchased from the retailer I purchased it from. Usually for things which a person wouldn't need two of. I tend not to see these ads until after I have made the purchase.

Right? If anything that tells me what vendors spend more on ads than on their product; every dollar they spent on this annoyingly pervasive ad campaign was a dollar they took from buyers but didn't put into the products they're selling.

Yeah, it is annoying when I am searching for a specific product and the top ad results are places that don’t actually sell it. It is one thing to advertise to me the thing I want, but don’t distract me from what I am trying to do.

See, I have the opposite problem in that I'm too impulsive. I search for a mattress for 20 mins, then buy one.

The problem is that I then get mattress ads everywhere I click for the next 3 months. It's like I need a button to mark my query as solved.

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