This is like how you get a million ads about dishwashers the day after you Google around and buy one. At least wait for a short duration of time to let the target run out of medicine before adversiting new stuff.
Consider: one of the hardest parts about advertising is figuring out when someone is ready to buy the product. That is why car companies bombard ads everywhere, just to catch you in the rare moment when you may be buying a car. Lets guess that maybe the odds of a random person wanting to buy a dishwasher is 1 in a million.
Now consider someone who has just bought a dishwasher. What are the odds they need a new one or a second one? Maybe the one they bought is a few cm too tall/wide/deep. Maybe it came broken on arrival. What are the odds here? I have no data, but I would guess like 1 in ten thousand.
The odds of you buying a dishwasher and then needing to buy another are much better than the odds of someone wanting to buy a dishwasher in the first place, because the hard part is finding people who want to buy a dishwasher.
I think once your dishwasher breaks, the time you are “live” to buy is closer to a week :). Also it is (maybe?) harder to identify a person with a broken dishwasher than one who just bought one and may need another.
Something like 30% of purchased products (including appliances) are DOA or returned.
The follow-on advertising is hoping to capture your replacement activity.
People really do return major appliances though. Perhaps dishwashers less frequently than refrigerators, though people never fail to surprise me.
"A standard dishwasher is about 24 inches wide, 24 inches deep and 35 inches high. Most cabinet openings are made to fit a standard dishwasher size. Note that certain handles may affect the overall dishwasher depth. Oversized dishwashers are built wider than the standard opening."
they come in three sizes compact standard and custom.
Also, completely unrelatedly, if you saw some armchair internet rando claim they'd debunked a major and long-standing business strategy of market sector leader, how seriously would you take them?
They’ve conflated “most purchases of a toilet seat are made by someone who buys another” and “most people who buy one toilet seat buy a second”.
There’s a small, but high volume group of toilet seat purchases — eg, office buildings or apartment maintenance.
And it kind of makes sense if you think about it... really, what are the consequences of seeing these silly over-recommendations? Did you stop buying from Amazon? I bet the vast majority of people shrug or laugh, but don’t change habits.
Also, big one-time purchases tend to be rare, so optimizing a recommendation system around those is probably suboptimal compared to optimizing it around frequent consumable purchases.
Or you tell all your friends about it and end up having a conversation about guitars/dishwashers or whatever.
It may not be intentional on their part, but spin off conversations can be a nice by-product for them. Feels like it helps it stick in the mind, a bit like writing a witty TV ad.
At a certain point in my life, one where I sought fewer material comforts (and had less media exposure), I used to claim that advertising won't convince me to buy anything but it may convince me not to. There is a very fine line between persuasion and overstepping ethical boundaries.
Business is subject to fads and stupidies, we have proof that open officez are a net negative, yet businesses continue. We have proof that getting people to change passwords every month is bad for security, but its still policy in many places. We have proof that using basalt or stainless rebar in RCC is more cost effective in the long run, but bs still continues.
For urban life multiple doesn't make sense. For professional/rural it really does.
P(buying crap) < P(buying crap | has bought crap before)
Advertising is applied statistics and works on large cohorts. Nobody cares about you personally or your psychology.
Thus far, the clearest signal for answering the question "will I buy a mechanical keyboard in the next few days?" is "did I just buy mechanical keyboard?"
https://www.shopify.com/retail/examples-of-great-post-purcha...
Also in general I've noticed there are a lot of people that return online purchases a lot, even the non broken ones, since you can't determine if the clothing fits, if the colors really look good, if it has a good texture, from pictures and descriptions online.
They may not be good customers, but Google probably gets money per purchase, not for customer quality.
That clicks all adds for you. Maybe it can be modified somehow to click already bought item?
* Big businesses are unaffected as they use click fraud prevention services.
* Businesses that don’t use that have to pay more money to Google because people clicked on their ad, and they think their marketing is effective (at least from a click through perspective).
* Google makes even more money because you are clicking on all the ads and it makes them look better. They can demonstrate how well their marketing platform works even better!
... or not. Maybe their recommender systems have simply decided that buying product X is highly correlated with buying product Y where Y = X. Who knows? Probably not even google itself knows.
Also, remember that google is not trying to sell you anything, they're only trying to maximise adoption of their ad platform by advertisers. Who cares what you actually buy? Not Google.
Other comment explains it though: Many people return the dishwasher or screwdrivers (they might have ordered several) - Amazon wants to make sure you buy with them (though my account history should show that I practically never return things because I hate getting returned things as new).
Personal anecdote: Recently I cancelled an order because a better product was shown in ads post-purchase.
For medicinal products I’d be keen to see research on whether a treatment group being re-targeted would report better efficiency of a treatment than a non-retargeted control.
Also, this person is now in a certain class of shopper (I think some this may be Experian Mosaic classes), so the advertiser knows what quality level of dishwasher this person is buying. The cheapest kitchen applicances, or premium kitchen applicances? Premium kitchen applicances on credit or premium kitchen applicances full price?
This will have a massive effect of choice of other items to advertize, the difference between ads for loans (credit purcahse) or ads for international holidays (full price purchase).
It throws dust into eyes of advertising efficiency measurement.
Company pays for ads, and Google just sizes the ad impressions to what it can find.