How did advertisers know what I bought at the store yesterday?

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I don’t use any social media or shopping apps. I went to the store yesterday and bought a particular item. Today I see ads for that item when I’ve never seen ads for that item before. how exactly my phone is letting advertisers know what I bought?

In: Technology

11 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Did you pay with a card? Do you have one of the store’s sales cards (like what grocery stores have)? Either of these could be tracking your sales data, selling it, and correlating it with your online identity.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Did you google that item and then go somewhere that sells that item?

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you researched the item before buying it, it might have been linked to you through your phone being on the same network.

Anonymous 0 Comments

As others said – a google search for that item is enough for it to be registered.

It could also be the algorithm calculating though. If it know when you bought a bottle of shampoo for example it can roughly calculate when you need a new one and send you ads then.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’ve seen people do tests with brand new phones and/or computers where they show the ads on dozens of websites are not showing a particular item or genre of product. Then all they do is talk about a thing near the phone and within an hour nearly all of the same websites are showing ads for the thing they just talked about. One I recall was specifically talking about getting a new puppy, and then all of the ads were for puppy and pet supplies.

The point is that you are connected and your data is observed. In most cases the data is not directly linked to you by name, but instead to the electronic ID that your phone uses to connect with the networks. That ID can be tagged in advertising algorithms.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Location data puts you at the store. Existing data about you provides a pretty good guess as to what you might be interested in there. They might not know whether you bought anything, so they’ll present the ad in the hopes that you haven’t and could be persuaded to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t know you bought it.

No need to advertise for something you’ve already bought. 

You searchwd for the item or went to a place that sells those kind of items, and you then connected the sots afterwards to this being from your specific purchase instead. 

Anonymous 0 Comments

hi. digital marketer here.

You have a behavioral profile based around your demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics. You took your phone into a store yesterday, likely with location services enabled. Your presence in that store is cross-referenced with those profiles and typical purchasing behaviors of individuals matching your profile characteristics to select from a group of X number of products that would match that behavior, and then you got served an ad for that product.

AKA, we know that 30 year old men who drive an hour to someones house, connect to their wifi, and then drive to a convenience store are probably shopping for toothpaste or deodorant they forgot, because we’ve observed that behavior several hundred thousand times across the world.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your phone is listening to every conversation you have. If you said anything at all about the product around your electronics that’s why it knows what product. The where is simply a matter of your phone tracking everywhere you go. You consented to both of these surveillance methods when you agreed to the terms and conditions you probably didn’t read.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Advertising expert here. The ads were there before. You’re just noticing them now because it’s a product you’re in the market for. It’s a common phenomena that affects how many ad buys are managed, especially for so-called “low involvement” product or service categories.