Why can targeted advertising be smart enough to show me ads at home for something I searched on my PC at work, but not smart enough to not show me the same ad 10x in a row or for services for which I’ve already subscribed?
In: 128
It’s important to know that quite often, ads are managed by agencies or people external to the business that the ads are for. There are a lot of ways to advertise so it’s a pretty big job, and there are also a lot of ways to either optimise or overspend your ad budget based on whether the person who set them up knows what they’re doing or not. Being done externally means it’s usually up to that person’s personal opinion about who sees the ads.
There are definitely ways to stop you from seeing an ad for something you’ve subscribed to, such as through your email address you’re signed up with to the subscription service, or a cookie stored on your devices if you’ve logged into that site from there. Depends on the network doing the advertising but it could be the case that your Google login email address is different to the one for your subscription so there’s nothing to match it up with and take you off the targeting list. In the case that it knows what you searched at work and shows you ads at home, you’re likely logged into a service or browser on both devices and it knows your info through that (commonly either Google or Facebook networks or both).
I obv don’t know the ads you’re seeing for the subscription service but ads aren’t always made with the goal of getting you to sign up. Often it can be used to be a subtle reminder to people to keep using it, or showcase new features or things to try out etc. Or deals etc.
Also, unfortunately I’d say a lot of ad revenue comes from people who don’t know what they’re doing and it’s not I’m the advertisers interest short term to tell them they’re overspending most of the time.
Source: work in advertising (sorry)
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