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?
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The short story is: the best and most-coordinated ad campaigns would likely try to avoid serving you ads as an existing customer, but doing so might not be possible, practical, or cost-efficient compared to simply serving you the ads!
The longer story is this:
When an advertiser targets an ad, they do so based on many different things about you – AKA demographics.
The available demographics to choose from differ based on the advertising platform, but they can include or exclude everything from your physical location, your hardware, interests you have shown via your browsing habits, and if you visited their site in particular.
On many ad platforms, those things are associated with you via a unique user ID. That user ID is often anonymous (sometimes by law). They don’t know who you are, exactly. They don’t necessarily know your email address, either. They know you as a collection of demographics to which they’ve assigned an ID. That may also correspond to the ID of your specific hardware device.
Many ad platforms can keep track of you as a unique user across multiple devices thanks to some shared logins to sites you use across those devices. Other ad platforms cannot do that, and are just getting lucky on other demographics you share in your browsing between work and home.
So: you may or may not be known as the same person at work and at home. Based on your example, let’s say they *do* know you as the same person.
To avoid showing you an ad for a service you already bought, the advertiser needs to identify you with NEGATIVE demographic – one that should be EXCLUDED.
Except… how can they achieve that? And, is it worth doing?
For many advertisers, they might have an email address associated with your login. That’s the best negative demographic! But, does the ad platform have an email address associated with your unique user ID? And, is that the same email you signed up with?
Also, depending on how many subscribers the advertiser has and how often they change, doing that might take *a lot* of manual effort and coordination with their ad platform. It might be cheaper to simply serve you some ads.
The advertiser COULD use visits to the logged in portion of their site to exclude you. But, that takes more work, including editing their site. And, they might be happy to sell upgraded services to existing subscribers or to capture recently-lapsed subscribers, making this impractical.
The best and most-coordinated ad campaigns would likely try to avoid serving you ads as an existing customer, but for many advertisers the 10x you saw the ad is merely a rounding error in their advertising metrics.
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