This kind of page-content-based ad targeting did exist way before fine tuned retargeting (say, search or audience/segment retargeting). There are whole bunch of companies that serve this exact market. The reason a more complicated retargeting was created is proof that there is value in it, for advertisers. I am not claiming this is good for people - I am talking only about the business side of things.
> don’t need to keep seeing hotel offers for Florida
This is not for the lack of smartness in code - it is that the conversion funnel is so narrow that "saving that $30 per month, by not showing you the ad, on a $1m campaign" is not worth tracking and excluding. Although I do believe companies should take the extra effort to avoid the annoyance and be a good citizen - particularly once they have identified "the one real person who actually bought something" among 99 other bots/crawlers/untraceable entities. Not all ad companies appropriately value the real person and the annoyance caused to them. Some do.
> The reason a more complicated retargeting was created is proof that there is value in it, for advertisers
I'd argue the value was in it for media buyers. A lot of retargeted inventory is spent targeting people who are going to come back anyway. The agency then spins the numbers and presents it as if they were the only step in the process.
Some even take it a step further and conflate their retargeting with their prospecting numbers - there's a lot more uneducated advertisers out there for agencies to rip-off than educated ones.
Other than your standard ecommerce flows, online advertising is still an area of very murky attribution.
Which is why tools and reporting for incremental lift analysis need to be more widely used. It doesn't help that there are walled data gardens complicating things either.
Especially when your dashboards are prepared by the buying agency - always request the raw data behind the scenes. If it takes them a while to find it, there's perhaps a reason...
For sure. Although never attribute to malice what can be attributed to messy spreadsheet exports and databases cobbled together with shoestrings, gum, and vendor swag.
Oh definitely, but often you're paying them a pretty penny to have it all together, they might not be deliberately BSing you on the data, but they've probably BS'ed you before that they would have the data.
Ad companies being able to figure out that I just reserved a hotel room, so they can stop advertising hotels to me, might reduce the annoyance level. But I'm also pretty sure that, if I found out that they had done this, I would never patronize that hotel again.
I am talking about cases where the ad results in a click or view through and finally tracked to a purchase from the same provider. You shouldn’t see the same ad again or another ad to rent a hotel room from same hotel chain. I thought that was the case GP was taking about.
I am excluding the likes of companies like BlueKai (now Oracle) who facilitate trading the cookie to other companies for further targeting or completely different chain of ads based on a search click to another hotel chain
That said, all of this is getting killed by recent Safari and Chrome change of getting rid of all 3rd party cookies
> don’t need to keep seeing hotel offers for Florida
This is not for the lack of smartness in code - it is that the conversion funnel is so narrow that "saving that $30 per month, by not showing you the ad, on a $1m campaign" is not worth tracking and excluding. Although I do believe companies should take the extra effort to avoid the annoyance and be a good citizen - particularly once they have identified "the one real person who actually bought something" among 99 other bots/crawlers/untraceable entities. Not all ad companies appropriately value the real person and the annoyance caused to them. Some do.