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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

You're right that these retargeting shops have a stupid thesis and can only exist because marketers' metrics haven't evolved enough yet (and that's changing). Highest purchase % doesn't mean you changed intent or created business, you just won the bidding war to show an ad to someone who was already going to buy, or maybe already bought.

But users will never manually enable 3rd party cookies, even if they agreed with you that the ads were adding value (which odds are they never will either).

Content has to be monetized in some way -- if not ads, then how?

All that blocking 3rd party cookies will accomplish is put most of the less technically-mature shops out of business while the smart ones figure out a way to route around using the exact same data science for targeting.

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>But users will never manually enable 3rd party cookies, even if they agreed with you that the ads were adding value

It depends. Maybe not the ads per se would be added value, will see anyway.

And by the way, ads may be the content on its own, don't you think? Ask anyone of 30+ mln people who had viewed last Pepsi&Jeff Gordon commercial on YouTube for example.

Is your criticism of retargeting based in experience? I'd love to hear more about it.

I work at a "retargeting shop" and our customers test the crap out of our tools to make sure we're actually driving results. Others may use more smoke and mirrors, but when done right, retargeting does in fact change user behavior and generate ROI.

Well, there are situations where retargeting makes a bit of sense, like selling business services on a low-traffic website.

But most e-commerce retargeting, IMHO, is trading on the fact that a naive marketing manager will put too much stock in a high conversion percentage. All of those people were, by definition, aware of the product and actively shopping. Did you create a customer? Probably not, maybe by virtue of them clicking the ad instead of going somewhere else, but that's still pretty zero-sum.

Prospecting for people who haven't previously clicked the item on your site, but would be interested, is a lot harder and potentially more valuable.

All IMHO of course.

sophisticated marketers have done hold-out tests with retargeting shown that it can drive incremental sales at a profitable roi. this includes big ecommerce brands.

granted not every viewthrough and clickhtrough conversion is driven by the advertising, but some definitely are and it is often profitable if a campaign is optimized and run well.

> Content has to be monetized in some way -- if not ads, then how?

Charge for it perhaps?

I guess. The NYT/WSJ are trying that already because they don't get enough from ads to do original reporting; ads can barely fund recycled opinion pieces from bloggers as a full-time job. Results are decidedly mixed.

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