(no subject)

[simrob]

So you know that thing where your friend posts a hilarious review of a Frobbles Bar Deluxe on Amazon, you click on it to look, and for the next week, all across the web, you're getting ads for Frobble Pro, Frobbles Foo Bazzes, and Frobbles Unlimited everywhere on the web?

I always assumed this was because I'd tripped some Mysterious Neural Network thing somewhere Deep In The Algorithm, but it's actually a lot simpler: "remarketing" is an option that a lot of web-advertising companies support, and it basically just means that rather than targeting by location or demographic, you say you want to try to show your ads to people who have been to your website or viewed your product lately.

That's both creepier AND less creepy than I assumed. Creepier because of the tracking it implies, but less creepy because - an advertiser wanting to remind me of a thing I did actually did before makes a lot of sense and is kind of something I almost want, being-advertised-to-person-wise.

Comments

[infryq]

I would like it better if they also tracked whether I bought the thing, and if so, added an appropriate time delay. I just *bought* shoes, I don’t need any more until next season at least...

[lindseykuper]

This is one of the standard complaints about targeted ads, yeah. In fact, sometimes I even get ads for the exact dress I just bought. Like, come on, ModCloth, at least show me a different-but-similar dress.

Even if they know not to show me ads for a thing I've bought, though, I think it's complicated by the fact that if I make, say, three distinct visits to the site to look at X, but only actually buy X on one of those visits, then they have "looked at X and didn't buy it" logged a couple times, and so I get ads for X, notwithstanding the fact that I did in fact already buy X on a separate visit.