How Ad Retargeting Ruined Christmas
marketingland.com
marketingland.com
The reason this stuff happens is because many players in the space soak up advertiser spend by not immediately opting users out of product retargeting campaigns after a purchase is made. The advertisers don't always know to ask for this and the retargeting companies make more money if they don't suggest it.
These personalized campaigns are so profitable for the advertisers that they don't notice the extra spend being bled out on people who they shouldn't be retargeting.
This tends to happen among the big "enterprise" retargeting companies that serve large online retailers like Macy's. There's so many people involved in the deals and operations of the campaigns that no one person is there to say, hey, let's make sure this doesn't happen.
The takeaway: Only work with retargeting vendors that give you control and visibility into who you're targeting and why! We do this, but so do others. Not everyone is this lame.
...turns out to be true. It's not just for porn after all.
After the Facebook Beacon[1] and Google Safari cookie control bypass[2] settlements I would have thought legitimate companies would be a little reluctant to push the envelope so far as to explicitly bypass privacy controls.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
[2] http://www.informationweek.com/security/compliance/google-se...
> legitimate companies
Google is both an advertising company and a product company (and big and famous), and also uses Don't Evil as part of its brand; this why it has a user-friendly privacy policy to keep it honest.
B2B advertising companies, which is, like, all of them, have no need for privacy policies, unless their customers (website owners) demand them. And what website needs to have a privacy policy that impresses users? Googe, Facebook, sure, but cheapdiamondsonline.com?
I use NoScript (most sites disabled) with Firefox. I also clear everything whenever Firefox closes. I exit Firefox quite often. So the best way to track me would be using IP address. And if they don't use those very often, then ... no problem!
I'm not sure why more people don't do this. On any newer computer and decent broadband connection, Firefox startup is almost instant, even if cache cleared, etc. There's very little penalty for restarts, even between individual websites. Certainly easy to do in the scenario in the article, i.e. between visits to online retailers.
About my only reason to trust Chrome for browsing is for the built-in Flash, which St. Steven wisely eschewed. So I only switch to Chrome when I absolutely want to view some silly video in Flash. Which isn't very often.
Maybe another way to deal with this is to set up some sort of Squid-like proxy on a firewall computer?
Each user gets their own profile: cache, cookies, history, saved data, extensions, etc. The only thing shared should be IP address and user agent. (Unless the user infects the profile with a url that identifies them.)
I use this for testing, isolating my facebook profile, and isolating all of my banking sessions from my main browsing window. (Just in case they have a CSRF issue.)
It's just been hidden (and there's no need to set up email).
Anyway, the solution to this problem is dead simple: Do your shopping at work, or at a library.
If you really wanted to you could do cookie syncing based on IP, but does anyone actually do that?
Marketing people are like aliens.
It requires a high level of technical chops to see this and set up. Most traditional marketers just don't have the skills to set it up or the correct access to make the right changes.
And I bet ad companies realize this. This privacy-invasion paradigm is only getting started.
I think you've given my wife a name to my problem :D
For the following week, more than half of the Google ad banners I saw all over the web were for the cremation company. Even on things that were completely unrelated, like an Android developer blog. I could reload over and over again and I kept seeing ads for that company. I cleared cookies and it went away, and that's when I realized they were specifically sending me that ad because of an original visit to that website.
To me it really seemed insensitive on the part of the cremation company for them to have bought retargeted ads. You'd have to think that more often than not, people visiting your site have just lost of a loved one. Is it really the best thing to remind them of it on every subsequent website they visit?
"Honey, why is your browser on incognito mode?" "Uh, yeah I was shopping for gifts. That's it. "
If you turn off targeted ads, then you get more untargeted ads. Is that what you were saying?
The funny thing is when people with no clue about how internet advertising works, and they rage at a site for advertising something. Something like 'I cannot believe your site has ads for XYZ! That is outrageous and hypocritical!'. When there is a good chance they have been shopping for XYZ themselves, and that's why the ad popped up.