"perfectly targeted ads"? Never had that experience.
Even if I summarize all the analytics solutions out there, like ads, Facebook stream, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix. What they usually do is they figure out what I did in recent history or in general and present me more of that. I don't know about other people, but that's absolutely not what I want. That's boring, or maybe even unnecessary.
Like, if I just bought a book about Linux system administration the only reason I would buy a second one would be because the first one sucked (and Amazon knows the ratings of the books). A reasonable suggestion after that would be something people do with Linux, like hosting a Wordpress blog. Honestly I might not even know what I would do with my newly acquired skill once I succeeded with that topic. Also it's quite tiresome to learn. Maybe after reading 30% of it I would like to insert a simple but interesting novel or comic book. Why not suggest something like that to me?
Or I just watched an action movie on Netflix. Then I don't need other action movie suggestions. After that maybe I want to watch a character focussed tv show.
What we need is not a "I know what you did and here is more of that" suggestion engine. What we need is a "oh that's getting boring, here is other awesome stuff that may surprise you" suggestion engine. Figure out the stuff I don't know I want and then suggest that.
And honestly, not a single of these billion-dollar-engines out there do that for me at the moment.
Amazon does this all the time with me. "You just buyed a headset, do you want another one?" ... really? How many people buy multiple headsets in rapid succession? Hopefully, their engine will learn with time to differentiate between categories where you often buy many in rapid succession and categories where you only buy every few years, so this gets better. At the moment, it is completely useless.
Well, I bought a headset for home, liked it, then bought an identical headset for the office. Someone else might like it and buy another for a friend. Probably their engine has found out that this is common enough for it to be worth recommending another headset rather than something else.
But why would I need a recommendation engine to show me ads for the thing I just bought, even in that scenario because I've got it in my hand and like it, so I'll just order another one like I did two days ago.
Buying something is the strongest marker of interest in a product. The fact that you bought it might be an invasion of privacy, but a strong indicator of interest in a product isn't, per se.
They serve both the one you have been looking at and other ones. If you like it then it's one click to buy more. If you hate it, it's one click for an alternative...
As an advertiser, I could see this happening if you started looking at headphones on mobile, but purchased on desktop. Unless they are using a cookie onboarding service (I'd be mildly surprised if they weren't), they wouldn't have a great way to fire another tag for adding you to ask exclusion list for that product.
Of course ecomm audience management at their scale is super hard, but these are challenges most etailers face.
> What we need is not a "I know what you did and here is more of that" suggestion engine
I really agree on this. The Youtube homepage exemplifies it for me. It recommends only content the same as or very similar to what I've watched before, and only the most popular of that. I've watched a ton of conference talks, programming tutorials, etc. yet those never show up. It's mostly junk with clickbait titles from big channels.
I do like Youtube's recommendation algorithm for the side bar suggestions on a video page, though I get more sponsored-looking content now than in the past. It's been useful at least for finding music. And YT does have a page for improving homepage recommendations, which granted I haven't tried yet.
Youtube's home page is especially terrible. It seems to have very broad categories, and there's no really good way of pruning terrible (but popular) stuff out of it. You can say "not interested", then get some almost identical channel instead.
Whereas the "related" sidebar while actually watching a video is great.
"I do like Youtube's recommendation algorithm for the side bar suggestions"
You do? It does ok if I'm watching something technical or some reviews. It's laughably bad at music and wider interest content such as a documentary. If you hit a music track, 50% of the recommendations are the same damn track in degrading levels of quality, 30% the same band. The 10% that's left for other artists are normally a really bad connection to the mood. The last 10% lately is taken by awfully bad match, clearly sponsored, junk though never identified as sponsored.
Most of the time I'd like suggestions in the same genre or mood of music. If I've just watched an upbeat rock track why not suggest other upbeat rock tracks? Last.fm radio was superb at this, for years, until CBS destroyed it. So it can't be that hard.
I think the only times I use the sidebar is if the vid I landed on is terrible quality or a bad hit.
I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but I only seek out full albums. I've found that YT does pretty well for classic rock, metal, and electronica, and ok for older Jazz and classical music.
I tried it out just now for an album I like. I get about 25% unrelated junk or stuff I've already watched, but the rest are also full albums that seem like fairly solid recommendations based on the album at hand (Jan Jelinek's "Loop Finding Jazz Records").
Interesting. I very rarely search whole albums on YT but often rock and metal.
Start with a random metal track in mind an I find I get a band mix suggestion, a nordic folk metal mix, 11 more tracks from the same band, 3 tracks I listened to very recently, 4 connected other artists and "5 CREEPIEST Old Found Footages - Recommended for you" as a perfect example of the crap being injected recently. They must notice I've never once clicked one.
I do clear cookies and history periodically, so perhaps not having a multiple year history counts against.
> I do clear cookies and history periodically, so perhaps not having a multiple year history counts against.
In that other link I posted YT suggests pruning your watched history to get better recommendations -- but that's a huge undertaking given the thousands of garbage videos that I've clicked out of in five seconds. Seems like it would be better if the algorithm only operated on data from videos a user manually "likes".
The worst ads are the ones that advertise the very thing I've recently browsed. Say I browse some shoes (not google them, browse the site selling the shoes), that's when I start seeing tons of ads for that very site. What's the point? I thought ads are supposed to tell me something I don't know?
Nah, the worst ads are the ones that advertise the very thing I've recently bought. Almost every time I buy something on-line from Amazon or some company's store, I then keep seeing ads for that very product. Not before I buy it, but after I've already bought.
I've even seen this for what the companies must know is a once-a-decade purchase, like a big lifetime-warranty espresso grinder. It's not like I need a second one! Offer me some accessories instead, dammit.
Hmm, could there be something in the analytics that could be used to claim, in aggregate as opposed to you personally, that the ads influenced your buying decision, hence demanding a higher price, perhaps for future ads? Coz it doesn't make sense why they'd do that.
The weirdest ones for me are ads for lumber. Like, I go to the local lumber yard website to check dimensions of what types of lumber is available when I'm planning a project. That lumber is typically costing $1-$2 per yard, so I frequently only buy lumber for ~$20, and they'll show me ads at least ten times. Their ROI has to be very low?
Adding insult to injury, I only buy lumber from their competitor, who, although having a sucky website where I can't look up dimensions, will let me use their compound mitre saw for free, saving me a $600-$1000 purchase.
That is retargeting and can be extremely effective. Often times it takes multiple touch points to get someone to purchase, so display ad reminders can aid that.
Experiencing this with Instagram now. I used Instagram to follow lots of different accounts but basically didn't like anything apart of places I want to go to based on pictures posted by NatGeo and the likes to have a list of that at one point.
Now Instagram only shows me this stuff and I'd have to scroll very far to find posts by friends. Now I'm not using Instagram anymore.
Wish there was an option to switch back to chronological view.
I'd argue that the new algorithmic feed makes things less democratic because naturally the most popular images and posters will trend to the top of my feed, leaving the friends who post once in a blue moon towards the bottom (even though I'd like to see their images just as much). The randomness of chronological was nice, now I just browse in my bubble of existing interests.
My favourite example of this madness was back in my Eve Online days, where, for years on end, I would be bombarded day-and-night with ads for Eve Online. SIGN UP NOW, JOIN THE ACTION, all the usual bullshit, despite me having an Eve account for years.
What the hell do they want out of me at that point? I already pay for an account, and if I want a second account then I already know where to get one, from the same place I got the first one: eveonline.com
Jesus, the whole thing was farcical, for all their tracking and profiling.
Just commenting about Facebook ads, the rest is pretty accurate in my experience -
On FB, that's the remarketing side, and it's a lot more manual. Generally the goals and data will be selected by the advertiser themselves. It works, but it's a bit blunt-weapon-y - let's say it'll catch 10% of people who are absolutely going to convert, and 90% of people who are absolutely uninterested for campaign X. All percentages here are pulled from nowhere, they're just to give you a general idea.
Remarketing is popular because conversions. Also, if you're well-off or otherwise a desirable target, you cost more to reach through Facebook - so you're likely to see more remarketing campaigns, because automatic campaigns will adjust to target less expensive individuals until they've gone through all of them.
Facebook's automatic targeting is a lot more sophisticated, and much more in line with the suggestion engine idea. Let's say it will catch 0.2% of people who are absolutely going to convert, 9.8% of people who might possibly convert, 45% of people who vaguely appreciate the ad being there without converting (including people who might Like/Share/comment on the post), and 45% of people for whom the ad doesn't really connect. It's not usually quite as powerful for conversion, but on average it's pretty accurate at guessing if you'll be interested.
Also, StumbleUpon was a decent suggestion engine once upon a time - if they could actually design a proper extension that did something similar, I'm sure it would be a success.
Just because the ad didn't work, doesn't mean it's a bad ad. If the average person has a .001% chance of buying the Linux book and you have a .1% chance of buying it, the targeting improved the efficiency of the ad spend by 100x.
The worst for me is getting back from holidays and having to suffer several additional months of ads for hotels in Japan everywhere on the web, reminding you that you're not there anymore.
That's actually what made me install adblock on my new system even though I was resolved to try to withstand ads this time.
Its worse if you click / visit stuff accidently. How many pages do we open just because we want to see what the issue is, but are finally not interested.
Totally agree with this. Even after collecting so much data, Google and Facebook fail at showing me ads which are useful for me.
However, even with their inferior targeting FB and Google are making billions. So it might be the case that there is no further incentive to improve in this area and they are focusing on making their core product better to get even more users.
the claimed relevance of the adds is the selling point of google and friends; maybe they do not quite anticipate what a 'power user' might want, however maybe they are more relevant to some people who are not connected day in and day out - sometimes you might do better if you have less data to extrapolate from .
Not a one of them appears to have thought of linking categories. If I just bought a mid or high price set of ear buds, sell me a nice case, some new music to listen to on them, or even a better music player, etc. Nope, more headphones usually.
If I just added some hiking boots, show me fluffy socks, gloves and coats. Maybe a compass and rucksack. Nope, more boots x4. Also bought: More boots x2, 1 pair of socks and a USB stick. Top Sellers in Athletic & Outdoor Shoes: Guess what? Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations... At which point it's getting tedious.
The only time the also-bought ad engines work is when buying music or books. I often buy those in 3s and 4s, and same artist/author or similar genre work pretty well there. For most everything else I buy they just don't work and are about as welcome as a party political tv slot.
I'm amazed none of them have tried to get a bit better at this.
What we need is an opt-in ad platform. For example I like reading sci-fi books and usually peruse Amazon’s catalogs to find new ones. But Amazon’s recommendation engine doesn’t seem to work that well, it’s just too broad. Other than that my options to find interesting reads are either niche sites/blogs which I rarely have the time to bother looking or friends’ recommendations. Wouldn’t it be nice if publishers could contact me with tailored to my needs recommendations based on genre, books I liked and what not. I wouldn’t mind been bombarded with ads if they’re related to my hobbies, not some random search I did on Google two weeks ago. It seems that the whole ad industry got so comfy with profiling that they never bothered moving forward trying new things.
I think a "oh that's getting boring, here is other awesome stuff that may surprise you" suggestion engine would get on my nerves (psychological) or just make me pee my pants (physiological).
The Holy Grail is Just In Time or Contextual purchases. The opportunity to buy something when your need is greatest. Calendar app which advertises to you based on your activities. Or the Amazon Dash.
The problem is pretty much all advertising is corruptible and becomes evil. I press your Dash button when you aren't looking.
Another targeting mistake is by language. On Facebbok, My profile includes Swedish, Italian and Dutch as languages I know. I've seen ads in those languages even though the products aren't even close to available for me (Though the ads are kinda memorable, especially the Postnord ad that I ran into for about 100 times, I wonder how much ad money they spent solely on me)
Even if I summarize all the analytics solutions out there, like ads, Facebook stream, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix. What they usually do is they figure out what I did in recent history or in general and present me more of that. I don't know about other people, but that's absolutely not what I want. That's boring, or maybe even unnecessary.
Like, if I just bought a book about Linux system administration the only reason I would buy a second one would be because the first one sucked (and Amazon knows the ratings of the books). A reasonable suggestion after that would be something people do with Linux, like hosting a Wordpress blog. Honestly I might not even know what I would do with my newly acquired skill once I succeeded with that topic. Also it's quite tiresome to learn. Maybe after reading 30% of it I would like to insert a simple but interesting novel or comic book. Why not suggest something like that to me?
Or I just watched an action movie on Netflix. Then I don't need other action movie suggestions. After that maybe I want to watch a character focussed tv show.
What we need is not a "I know what you did and here is more of that" suggestion engine. What we need is a "oh that's getting boring, here is other awesome stuff that may surprise you" suggestion engine. Figure out the stuff I don't know I want and then suggest that.
And honestly, not a single of these billion-dollar-engines out there do that for me at the moment.