Having said that, I'm constantly surprised by how bad Google is at targeted advertising. For example, today when I visit nytimes.com I see an ad from Google with the ad text in French. Hey Google, despite my recent visit to Paris I don't speak French - maybe your AI experts could analyse my 13 years of Gmail and search history to figure that out!
PS: I'm a Google shareholder, so my confirmation bias is in the other direction :)
It's possible that some combination of efficient markets, semi-inaccurate/incomplete tracking data and chaos theory combines to make it mostly irrelevant.
So Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series, but advertising to him is useless because he has already decided to buy a BMW 3 series. Whereas Larry has had the same job for ten years, and the same Ford for ten years, but if you put a luxury car ad in front of him it may get him to take a test drive and actually create a new customer.
The data says Mary is single and goes to the gym every day, but it only thinks she's "single" because she's in a committed long-distance relationship and isn't interested in dating anyone else. And she's a fitness expert who is willing to spend her time researching fitness products, so she already knows everything there is to know about those products, already buys the ones she wants, and advertising them to her isn't going to create any new exposure. Whereas Jane never goes to the gym, so you might actually sell her a gym membership or a piece of fitness equipment because she doesn't already have one or know anything about it yet.
John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up, but he has also known exactly what he's going to do for years. Whereas he has a third cousin whose wedding is coming up and has no idea what to get, so you should be showing him ads for toasters and flatware rather than jewelry and chocolate.
In general, you may do better to advertise your stuff to the people who aren't already interested in and knowledgeable about it. Which actually looks kind of a lot like random scattershot rather than targeting.
I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics.
Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.
The only thing Google can provide is slight refinements on which political book to suggest — which isn’t far enough above the noise floor to matter. Anything else is just them giving the NYT statistical fuzz to pretend carrying their ads on beef jerky isn’t an all-around negative so they can fleece advertisers.
Targeted advertising isn’t about efficiency, it’s about raising the number of places they can (uselessly) place beef jerky ads so as to increase their cash flow.
> Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself.
I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no intrest in. I think targeted ads is the biggest con no of our age.
I have been running my online business for 5 years now. I learn (and keep learning) all I need to know from the same, high quality source.
I get targeted all the time by adds on landing pages, email funnels, Facebook ads, etc. Some of these are legit, but thanks to my experience I can see that most of them are of poor quality.
They will never sell me anything, while they might sell something to someone that hates his job and is looking for another way to make money.
I think a message's context matters - and this is almost self evident from examples like ads for airline tickets being shown on plane crash articles. I think targeting is great, I really do, but I think the value of trusted brands is likely just as, if not more, strong.
If context matters, and I think that argument was the entrenched idea pre-internet and has not been disproven, then where is the positioning of targeting? My hypothesis would be that targeting is likely best utilised when people stray from self selecting brands, e.g. NYTimes needs no targeting, but a smaller publication likely does, as people aren't there for the brand's known positioning, but because of their targetable interests, e.g. they ended up on a site about coding, or computer games, or knitting or whatever.
If true, that would be easy for an ad network to detect. If the click through rate for ads on a topic not matching the users interests (as determined be browsing history) are higher, then your theory is correct.
It's basic stuff, and I'm sure they already do that.
But the ads I see are way off target.
Hell Google's news ... AI or whatever they're doing has been absolutely convinced I'm a Nebraska Cornhuskers fan, probabbly because my team plays them and I google something about them once in a while.... but in the past even when I told Google directly "I don't want to see stories about Nebraska Cornhuskers" ... after a while it again becomes convinced I'm a huge Cornhuskers fan.
I'm just not sure these systems are ... that effective.
Not to say it is easy, the systems have to be really complex / interesting.
The two sides see "off target" quite differently. If the baseline is 0.1% accuracy, and an ad platform offers 1% accuracy, then you see relevant ads showing up at 1 in a 100 rates rather than 1 in a 1,000 rates. You still feel like you're being spammed by useless nonsense. As an advertiser, my cost to reach my audience just dropped by 90%.
But probably the truth is that these systems aren’t that good :)
I bought a Dyson last summer. Amazon is still suggesting that I buy more vacuum cleaners.
I browsed retailers to copy the specs into my ad.
We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion.
Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it!
Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.
But I agree that targeted ads (as primitive as they are) are more efficient then I untargeted ads
If Google's ability to discern my interests for ads is as bad as is their ability to discern my interests for news, then I would not be surprised.
I have never been aware of listening to any music by the band "Foo Fighters". I've almost certainly heard their songs in passing, but never in a context that gave me the name of the band.
A friend on Facebook posted a link to a YouTube video called "Dave Grohl brings kid on stage in Kansas City to rock out", in which Grohl, who is apparently the lead of the Foo Fighters, invited a kid from the audience at a Foo Fighters concert up to play a song, and I watched this video. (The kid asked to play a Metallica song, which Grohl and the Foo Fighters knew and played, so I still have not knowingly listened to any Foo Fighters music!)
Google has latched onto this and decided that I am interested in Dave Grohl news. Every time I go to Google News, for the last several weeks, the top of the "recommended by your interests" section is a story about Grohl or the Foo Fighters. Even though I hit the "show fewer stories like this" link for most of them, still they come.
Furthermore, they are almost all negative stories. The one thing they have of me showing any interest in Grohl and/or Foo Fighters, that video of the kid on stage, was a positive thing. But what they are giving me is a parade of stories about Grohl screwing over current or former bandmates, Grohl misbehaving while drunk, etc., from what appear to be trashy gossip publications. Yet a bit of research shows that Grohl is apparently actually a nice guy, well regarded. If I click the link to tell Google to not show me anything else from one of these trash publications...it obeys and just turns to other one to find Grohl gossip for me.
What the heck, Gooogle!?
When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.
It's clearly confused, and so my wonder is how do they correct that over time? How do you un-scramble a scrambled machine learned profile? Can you even detect that it's gone awry?
They are very efficient in telling people that are intending to buy your product that they are going to buy your product. Or even buy your advertised product on the website that you're advertising.
They are not efficient in acquiring new customers, as most(90%+++) of the ad impressions go to the people that are already aware about your product.
The only truly efficient ad targeting is restricted by geography, culture, age and timezone.
It may be that targeted ads are more effective, but some counters to your points:
> John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up.
A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it.
> Mary is single and goes to the gym every day.
Frankly, the former of those two data-points could mean anything. Much of what advertisers believe about consumer habits of single people could easily be correlation.
As for the latter, anyone with a daily gym routine is less likely to want to change it. Selling gym membership to someone speculatively hoping to start going to the gym is a better bet, but much harder to track.
> Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series.
Going back to the anniversary gift—I seriously doubt many people are much swayed by one-off ads in buying something as significant as a car (unless Steve has 10+ cars, in which case the promotion is less relevant). This is case where untargeted ads definitely have a much bigger role (Steve sees many BMW ads passively over a number of years).
It may be there's some cases were targeted ads are extremely effective, and some where they're not. And—as you've pointed out—it may be that Google et al. aren't really incentivised to actually be good at targeting as long as their advertisers believe they're good at targeting (which goes hand in hand with market dominance).
Combine this with marketers wanting to be more data-driven - and needing to report numbers to their own bosses - and you've got a situation ripe for exploitation. I expect the adtech companies could sell pretty much anything, as long as it smells like numbers.
> A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it.
No idea what you mean here by cheating or novel thought. We're talking about whether knowing that info allows you to have more successful advertising compared to random chance. Serving John ads for roses, chocolates, and vacations will be more effective than serving those ads to a random person.
>Frankly, the former of those two data-points could mean anything. Much of what advertisers believe about consumer habits of single people could easily be correlation.
Correlation is the whole point. If someone who is single and goes to the gym is correlated to certain purchases or behavior, you can advertise those. And being single, a woman, and a gym-goer isn't super valuable by itself but combined together you can advertiser women's athletic clothing that is functional but also attractive.
> As for the latter, anyone with a daily gym routine is less likely to want to change it. Selling gym membership to someone speculatively hoping to start going to the gym is a better bet, but much harder to track.
Again, you don't understand advertising. If I know someone goes to the gym every day I'm not going to advertise gyms to them. I'm going to advertise water bottles, protein, healthy meal kits, athletic clothing, etc.
> Going back to the anniversary gift—I seriously doubt many people are much swayed by one-off ads in buying something as significant as a car
We're not selling Steve a car with targeted ads. We're taking his promotion and propensity towards bmw to assume hes wealthy and likes luxury goods. You advertise more expensive goods to him, rather than cheap ones.
I don't have any data on my own actually behavior, only my feelings. If I search for "React" on Google and ads for react based services or other software services appear it doesn't bother me. If I'm on stackoverflow or jsfiddle and there are ads for software dev related products and services great! If I'm on Polygon and see ads for games, perfect!
It's when I see targeted ads unrelated to the activity that I feel angry, annoyed, upset. For example I viewed some apartments on an apartment site. Then I went and checked movie reviews on yahoo (japan) and every ad was for that exact apartment I looked at. It's not just creepy it's anger inducing. I'm not interesting in looking at apartments. I'm looking at movies. It's like the sales person from the last store I visited followed me into the movie theater and is badgering me to buy the clothing I looked at
So, I'd basically like to believe there's 3 tiers
1. 100% un-targeted, random ads
2. Content targeted. Video game ads on a video game site. Or BMW ads on an article about BMWs
3. User targeted. Being tracked all over the net to try to divine what I want and showing me ads for that.
It's easy to believe 2 and 3 are better than 1. I want to believe 2 is as good as 3, maybe better since it's not creepy.
No, they literally could not, because the data flow between Gmail and Ads has ben severed a while ago:
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
These kind of things are treated pretty seriously. There are teams whose job is literally making sure that your data does not leak from one Google product to another in a way that would violate your privacy. Source: I'm an engineer in Google, but in none of the mentioned teams.
Virtually all google products are governed by a shared google privacy policy, which allows Google to combine data across products and services. This change was made years ago, despite some end user protest.
Most apps and products are also optimized to maximize data harvesting - ex. Android OS and Maps will nag if users don't give up data. So I don't really believe what you're saying.
It allows you to sell more ads to the marketing people since it sounds very compelling. So there is your model.
The fact that I am still shown ads for items of the complete opposite (football) team that I am clearly (online visible, on FB, in my gmails, from my google search history, from my chrome browsing habits) fan of; show the targeting is still... moderate to say the least.
The thing is if there is something I want to buy, or own at some point in my life, I don't tend to forget about it or need some reminder from a targeted ad. If it's something I really want I'll usually think about it daily.
On the other hand, there could be something that I need, and have never searched for, that I have forgotten about such as going out and buying more toilet roll.
They would be the ones making the ad, targeting someone X miles from them, who is interested in BMW's.
Car just won an award, which would direct him to look up more info about the car and why it's considered good.
Maybe they just made an update to the car model he likes, but is not aware of this change.
We tend to think that these companies know us very well, but (anecdotally) that's not my experience on Facebook.
There is a page where you can see a list of things Facebook thinks you like. In my case, it's full of things I don't care about and I would never buy. They are there because, according to that page, I clicked on some ad at some point.
Which I don't remember, so it might well be five years ago. So I get targeted by ads I am not interested in at all. A random ad has more chances to capture my attention than something targeted on a non-interest.
I think there are a few factors:
1. Targeted ads are more likely to show people things they're already familiar with. The ads are more "expected" so there's less novelty. Untargeted ads can inadvertently hit wants and needs that aren't part of the user's tracking profile.
Closely related to that: targeted ads can induce their own special kind of fatigue. If all you see are diet ads because your profile says you want to lose weight, you're going to get really sick of seeing diet ads. The targeting actually works against effectiveness.
2. Targeted ads are much more exploitable by scammers. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s.... This leads to a greater erosion of trust. The expense of traditional and untargeted advertising weeds out such scams.
3. Building a good user profile is hard. If you get it right, you have the problems I described in #1. If you get it wrong, you're blasting someone with ads that are completely off the mark (like weight loss ads for a very healthy and fit person).
4. If a user sees one targeted ad a week, that ad is likely to punch above its weight. If they see 50 targeted ads every day, the effect is much different. They're more likely to develop negative emotional reactions to the ads, as they gain awareness and get creeped out by the tracking and attempted manipulation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
- I already bought that recently, why would I need another one?
- I already decided which variety of thing you're showing me I will buy, this ad isn't helpful to me.
- Why are you spying on me? That's creepy, I'm not going to click that ad even if it was exactly the thing I wanted to buy right now.
I expect that this experience isn't extraordinarily unique. Having less targeted ads is actually somewhat helpful because it maintains the pretense that ad companies aren't spying on you constantly.
I contend it is due to untargeted ads.
If you could actually create ads for things that I would want, personalized ads are probably worth more. I just don't think it is possible with current technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
People know when they're being manipulated and we usually don't like it. All the data in the world won't help you if using it creates antipathy.
John has a 10y anniversary - will make John focused in buying stuff, he'll need exposure to new products... Not ads for stuff that he already looked at. John is probably not an amnesiac.
Mary is single and likes gym - doesn't make her more interested in gym clothes, she's already well aware of the gym clothes...
Steve getting a promo bundled with him liking BMW will be a total waste of a ad target. He already knows the cars and will buy a BMW with or without an ad from any car manufacturer.
Going on a diet implies that you know what diet you're going on.
In short retargeting is great at reminding people of what they like. It's really not great at acquiring new customers.
I worked on this stuff and it's flashy, but ultimately just a great way to siphon off marketing budgets out of corporations.
Don't sell your stock just yet. The product is useless, but it's a scam that is as prevalent as organized religion
It would be really nice to see those people buying to understand it more.
Amazon for example still shows me washing machines after i purchased one through amazon. But that feature is still here on a high traffic user landing page!
Perhaps it matters for products which are clearly build for a very specific target (like a startup selling a shopping service to 30 year olds which work all the time) but there might also be a lot of standard products which everyone would buy?
Dog food, dog toys etc.
Also i often enough see companies paying (at least those are ads) for there own name. When you enter 'Miele' (well known german company for washing machines and other stuff). You get an ad for miele.de but miele.de is already the first hit. The same when googling 'Samsung S9'.
I would be astounded if revenue dropped at all if Google stopped providing targeted ads, at least in the short term, because there is no serious competition. Longer term it may well be an advantage as you think, but I don't think it is a sure thing. Unless targeting gets an awful lot smarter, I think companies may choose to spend their dollars on cheaper, dumber services that provide the same conversion rates. Especially if privacy concerns and law changes enable a lot more people to drop out of the targeting.
If the unknowns have a greater influence. So, a little knowledge makes google overconfident.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
>>> User1 has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. User2 is single and goes to the gym every day. User3 just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. User4 is overweight but has just gone on a diet.
There, no identities and you can still advertise. Is it hard?
Perhaps the question is whether that turns to sales and engagement, or if people who don't click ads don't click ads regardless of content, and those that do, do.
The vast majority of ads I see are of no relevance to me. It makes me assume that the companies that would have relevant products just aren't spending as much as broader interest stuff, bringing us right back to square one.
If only one could 'scan' the product they just bought to no longer see any ads about it...
Often I see targeted ads for products I looked up and did some research on. I either bought the product or decided not to buy the product. Unless the ads convince me to buy another one or change my mind about whether or not I need a first one, they're not going to do any good.
Targeted ads can also be creepy and offputting. It's weird to look something up and then see ads for that specific version of that specific product everywhere.
Our team's recommender algorithms were marginally effective. Despite having significant data on our customers.
The new new thing is "personalization". We'll see if that helps.
If I had to guess, broadcast and individual targeting both (can) work, but the middle ground is fool's gold.
IMHO, I'd like to see renewed emphasis on improving search, browse, foraging. I generally know what I want, but still struggle to find it.
But they'll also still be expensive because everyone else also thinks the data is super-targeted so they throw a lot of money at it, increasing bids.
Really valuable - but is it best to be done when they're reading something completely irrelevant? If they're reading a piece on the latest political issue of the day, are they really in the mindset to explore that purchase?
I have used Twitter for a decade. They know where I live, and that I’ve never once indicated that I know Spanish or Japanese or whatever, yet somewhow their targeting setup seems to be “you are in Japan therefore here are Japanese adverts” which is fucking baffling for a company with that amount of engineering resource.
They've been wrong 100% of the time.
Maybe I'm just weird.
Besides if you advertise in the NYT you ARE technically targeting people: namely NYT readers. Thats a demographic right there. And a lucrative one.
- Calendar: You can buy an ad for one day, a whole week, the weekend, just Sunday, etc.
- Section: You can run your ad in the Travel section instead of Sports.
- Region: For national papers, you can have your ad printed in only one region--for example buying a full-page NY Times ad that is only printed in the papers printed in DC.
- Edition: Papers use to run a morning edition and an updated afternoon and evening edition. Some papers now produce a free thin version that is handed out free to commuters.
Big papers have also long offered ad campaign management services, where you work with their staff to optimize a campaign (including creative sometimes) to target the audience you want.
Broad content-based targeting kind of targeting we or the GDPR is talking about. The issue here are individually targeted ads that are only possible with computerized ad delivery.
At that point wouldn't all ads be targeted, to some extend? The only sites that would be in "trouble" is massive news aggregations sites.
- Intent targeting via search remains by far the most effective form of targeting. Type life insurance into Google, very high value ads. Mortgage, a car model, etc. This is why Google is so valuable.
- For display, the biggest lift from targeting is via retargeting (showing you the shirt you considered on a commerce site)
New York Times was definitely using ad exchanges only for their remnant inventory, so there is nothing surprising or interesting about this article.
I wonder how effective it is actually.
The narrative we are lead to believe is that the user will be thankful to get the information it needs surfaced right in front of them. Or the difference between the paid ad and the organic results will be blurry enough to not have an impact.
Yet I think it works only if:
- the ad effectively matches what the user is looking for (that's not a given, even amazon throws a lot of random things supposed to be in relation to search results), and if the product pushed by the ad is seen as legit.
- the ad is from a brand the user somewhat trust in the first place. For instance most people won't choose an ad from an unknown phone maker if they were searching for an iPhone (or they're getting scammed, and that's another issue). I see very few things average people would just search on Google and buy from a random supplier, especially for mortgage or anything high value.
What I am getting at is, there's a significant amount of effort needed on the vendor part to make an ad work, and I wouldn't be surprised if the brands going these length are not already appearing pretty high in the search results in the first place. Having the top stop could still make a difference, but that's just a nudge, and not something critical or that valuable compared to the rest.
This is not the point of advertising at all. You’re operating on incorrect assumptions.
There are many different objectives of advertising. Imagine you’re in market for a vacuum. You might only be aware of a few brands, so other brands need to advertise so you become aware of their product. You may have forgotten about a brand that you previously liked, so they advertise. You might be considering one vacuum, but are potentially open to spending more on a premium model. You might be doubting the trustworthiness of a brand, until you seen them advertising on NYT. You might also need a new broom if you’re buying a new vacuum. What about this new product I invented, scented bags. How am I supposed to inform you about those?
Take something like Alex Jones' male virility supplements. There are numerous 'brands' selling this type of snake oil to vulnerable, ideologically zealous people. Brands like these are fly by night, they wouldn't invest in an ad on say, The Economist.
But you would definitely want that ad showing on someone's feed when they've already indicated they follow pages and personalities that make it obvious you're the target customer, i.e. an easy mark.
Retargeting is considered to be a pretty efficient ad spend. Though sometimes I do wonder if the numbers are inflated by people like me: I'll tend to look at an item, throw it in the back of my mind, and purchase weeks/months later after some consideration. It's a longstanding habit, and I block the very vast majority of ads -- so retargeting doesn't factor in as far as I'm aware.
I would be surprised if there is no difference, but advertising worked for decades without hyper-targeted ads, I'm sure it will keep working.
It's a big paradox that I personally loathe Facebook but would be dead in the water without them as an ad platform: he are the only place that gives us material ability to target people. We don't go that specific or that deep, but it's far more than most others provide.
This is again an issue of the EU killing business with 'well intentioned' but possibly maligned legislation. The NYT as mentioned in the article is a major brand, and they are effectively selling that. Buyers know roughly what they are getting, and transactions back and forth are not small.
Small companies do not have even the budget to access NYT, even then it would be a bad idea in most circumstances.
Smaller companies depend generally on very actionable ads, whereas only at a certain scale does the marginal value of ads matter for brand campaigns etc..
So kudos to the NYT, but this is not good for many as we now have one (major) less place to advertise.
I've seen some compelling case studies that it does work, and even at low conversion % for big-ticket items (like hotels etc) it's insanely cost effective.
It's why TV ads are so expensive and wasteful, but lucrative for networks.
Like, fashion and clothing can be pretty individualistic so it might actually help to micro-target. Not even just for styles, but if you're a swim suit maker who specializes in plus-sized clothes you can target ads at them. You could even not bother sending ads for a sale on jeans to people with, say, size 30 inseams if you're sold out of jeans in that size. I never see them used this way though.
But almost every use case I can think of that is mutually beneficial (like the sizing), seems to be demographic information rather than behavioral analytics. I'm having trouble coming up with a way to leverage behavioral analytics in a way that doesn't seem invasive or impertinent. I guess it might work for content curation/recommendation engines (movies, books, music, etc.) But even then, you just need to know people's backlogs and basic demographics, you don't need to start snooping on their web browsing behavior.
The devil in the detail is how well the targeting is done.
Is there a big difference between poor targeting & untargeted? Not really.
Is there a big difference between good targeting & untargeted? Massive amounts of data to say yes.
I was able to find this study after banging my head against a bunch of paywalled sites trying to charge money for public domain research:
https://beesystrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Chris-S...
Working on reading through. Seems like it would be difficult to control an experiment like this, since the subjects know they will be seeing advertisements as part of a study and won't really be purchasing these items. I don't know, I'm looking forward to learning more about the experimental procedure. Also they seem to be measuring somewhat vague self-reported impressions about the ad in context of being targeted / untargeted, not the actual sales they produce. Drawing a line between these impressions and real ad performance seems to be mostly a matter of opinion. As I said it seems like a tough thing to quantify, and I'm hoping that people smarter than myself have found credible methods to truly measure it.
Do you have anything you'd like to recommend?
Note that ads can still be targeted, except that the article's context (or whatever the user is looking at) can be used instead of the user's profile and you're not violating anybody's privacy. And on the web this works great due to the long tail, available articles, movies, searches, etc. telling you a lot about what the user wants, without having to profile that user. It's not like on TV where the content has to appeal to a wide demographic, quite the contrary.
The problem with ad exchanges is that they are designed to violate the user's privacy by leaking user data on purpose, like the user's IP address and now with GDPR they rely on good actors, because the ad exchanges can't control who gets that data based on consent, with the threshold for vendors signing up being really low.
They were able to do this by analyzing purchasing patterns and according to the book were fairly successful.
I'd imagine that online tracking when combined with other sources of data provide a lot of insight into what customers are looking for and in some cases can provide a big payoff.
Even just a few hours of NYT ad traffic ought to be statistically significant enough to say that the difference is within a few percent.
The problem is that the data might not be _representative_. NYT traffic might behave differently enough from yours that their results don't apply to you.
Yeah, tracking probably throws the ads into a local minima. But ad algos don't care about conversion, they care about charging the ad buyer more.
Bingo. The users clicking the ads aren't the ones funding the advertising networks - it's the people buying the ads. If you can convince them that targeted ads are more effective (and it would certainly be a safe assumption based on most peoples' understanding) then you can charge them more.
I'm not sure why you're being so heavily downvoted for this, but the presence of so many people "in the industry" in this thread might be some indication.
But I've yet to see some actual controlled evidence showing clear data in terms of sales that we can be reasonably sure were generated by targeted advertising. I think such evidence probably does exist, I'm not saying I don't believe it just yet. But all the arguments here seem to confuse science with scientism--what we have is a lot of reasoning and academic explanations of how people think it works, which is just not the same as evidence. It doesn't matter if something sounds like the way it might work in real life, we have to make observations to call something data. I haven't seen much data here.
So why do ads follow you even after you bought the product? Well the ads are still less than 1% effective (products sold / by ads shown), so for the average company (not Amazon) it is just not worth the engineering effort for a < 1% savings on your remarketing budget. Secondly, this is more speculation, but for many products the chance of buying a product given you have already bought one (e.x. a spare or a gift) is still higher than chance for a random person. As such the ads are still effective.
So what is the deal with the NYTimes? They a huge popular publisher (especially amount rich people) already command high ad prices through traditional adverstising. The value of a remarking ad (to the advertiser) is largely independent of the site that it is shown on. So The New York Times would naturally have fewer of these ads because the adverstiser gets more ads/$ on other sites. A diffrent site like a local paper might have a diffrent story. However remarketing ads have never been a large percentage of ads shown so from a revenue stand point publishers care a lot less about them.
Its a not very well kept secret of internet advertising that it's so much more "measurable" than other types of advertising, but it's not actually measuring anything useful most of the time. There is the traditional quote that "I am wasting half my advertising budget, but I can't tell which half" With internet remarketing ads the answer might very well be both ;)
Also, when I just bought some appliance online, maybe it's time to stop showing me ads for it on every page that I visit.
If your browser is sending “Accept-Language: nl-BE, <other stuff>” I wouldn’t be surprised if they showed French ads. It’s one of the official languages of Belgium after all.
They may not have any relevant Dutch inventory to show, or they’re getting more money for the French-language ads which also target Belgium.
I honestly don't care why they show French ads, but you cannot call such things "targeted", if you cannot even get the language correct, out of a choice of either Dutch or English.
1) different television
2) another television
3) alternate listing of the same television and 4x the
price because it's controlled by some idiot algorithm
4) more television
5) yet another television
Yeah, I was, you're right, I spent a couple of hours looking at car insurance stuff and now it's done for the year, so you're spending your advertising budget chasing people who are the absolute least likely to be interested...
If you are a smaller publisher, unless you get particularly active in courting advertisers (i.e. spend time going into sales), the niche advertisers will never even look at your content. The 20-something digital ad manager has no motivation to risk his job doing speculative ad spend. As a result your ads are less relevant and your inventory’s CPM drops as a result.
If you are a large property, then tracking affects you less (in fact tracking might be worse for you). Large publishers already have sales and marketing teams and ad managers will just choose you because you are “safe”. If brands are moving to a world where tracking data is less and less reliable, then by default they will move to spending more money on a smaller amount of “safe” inventory
Few pubs can afford a direct sales team facing the EU, but I think most publishers would jump at the chance to have direct revenue and pull ad exchanges in a heartbeat. Policing exchanges for malware and junk creative is a full time job publishers shouldn't have to do, but ultimately they are held accountable for whatever the exchanges pushes their way.
I'd be interested in knowing if there are other effects: if you remove targeting, does that also mean you're turning off the extreme bloat on sites? If so, I can totally believe that costing you enough users to kill the value added by the ad precision (contra the conventional wisdom of "lol I'm only marketing to people with the latest hardware anyway").
Take up knitting?
What would you rather have people do?
By itself? No, not at all. At least not more valuable than giving the same people the same money for doing nothing.
>What would you rather have people do?
Literally anything not actively harmful.
There is a very interesting generational rift between the pre-web companies like Microsoft and Apple and the Google/Facebook generation.
That’s just rumour, but it would help explain Google’s ephemeral approach to new products.
The NYT doesn't need returns on ad space to appease the purchasers of that space. They have the audience and some companies are more than happy to just have their name out there for one reason or another.
This isn't just a media thing. It happens at sporting events, conferences, fashion shows, etc.
I wonder if smaller sites could do the same thing or this is only working so well because they're the NYT?
Smaller sites have zero chance to strike a deal with large agencies who are serving large brands. So their only chance to increase ad revenue is to offer targeting, to improve viewability (aka put banners on top), and to hope that they will get enough of retargeting dollars.
EDIT: and once you think of it, people from Europe who are reading NYT is targeting option in itself. Most probably they are affluent, english-speaking, etc. If you are large luxury brand, this is all you need.
Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together. Smaller sites now also don't do targeted advertising; they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targeted ads.
About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual. Same for newspapers (on paper), TV, magazines, books, billboards in certain area's...
6 year experience working in ad-tech on different projects.
>Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together.
Well, try to get a slice of Procter&Gamble or Volkswagen ad budget being a small guy and not having any targeting.
> they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targeted ads.
This is not how it works.
If you are a small site, you set a google or any other ad network tag on your site -- right.
After that, when someone visits your site, you initiate a call to these ad networks with user cookie.
If this user is identified as known (say, male, 25-35 y.o., NY, was interested in Hi-Fi equipment) some advertiser may pay a lot to show an ad to this guy. 5$ CPM is not uncommon, and you may even get $10-20 from time to time.
If this user is totally anonymous and there are no advertisers interested in him, good luck getting even $0.5 CPM. Most probably impression will go unmonetized.
>About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual.
nope. in case of retargeting or even modern prospecting you do target individual, just as in example above.
If good portion of your audience is known to DMP's (Data Management Platform, basically tracking silos, google "Salesforce DMP" for example) and other ad-tech players, you will easily get x5 return on showing ads to them, as compared to anonymous users, all other things equal.
And this is how you make money being a small publisher on the internet these days.
It says so right in the part of the article that was quoted:
“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities...
(the "he" is the NYT's SVP for global advertising)
Say like, combining their inventory into one source (say a supply side platform) and then offer that inventory to buy (say via an exchange).
Meanwhile, companies still have their advertising budgets; they'll just have to spend money on untargeted ads. It takes time to measure the relative effectiveness of different types of ad campaigns, so it will take a while for the market to adjust.
No, it doesn't. All it means is that Europe will become even less relevant in tech than we already are. Just because European companies can't do behavioral targeting doesn't mean companies outside of the EU can't do that and the EU has no jurisdiction over them, if they can even find out that this is going on in the first place. All it will mean that European tech companies get out-competed.
Another thing you're not considering is that the EU has 30+ languages in it. I'm sure it will be great to see advertising in languages you can't even read. That will drive home the point that only France and Germany matter even more.
>Meanwhile, companies still have their advertising budgets; they'll just have to spend money on untargeted ads.
Advertising budgets don't exist in a vacuum. Their size depends on how much money they can make based on those ads. If it costs more to advertise than it brings in as sales then you just don't advertise. If targeted ads aren't a necessity then neither are online advertisements.
I'm no web dev, but couldn't sites use the HTTP header `Accept-Language` to pick appropriate ads?
Besides, as other commenters have pointed out, there is no concrete evidence that targeting individual users is any better (in terms of bringing in more sales) than targeting the combination of region, language, website topic, and on-page keywords.
If you're so worried about the sustainability of European ad agencies, maybe you should stop fearmongering and start trying to improve contextual targeting technology to such an extent that it provides even more value to your customers than behaviorally targeted alternatives. If and when GDPR-like regulations arrive in other parts of the world -- I'm pretty sure the noose is getting tighter in the U.S. as well -- your European agency will be in a perfect position to grab market share there.
Perhaps it doesn't make sense for the LA Times, but I'm wondering how large the investment really is and whether or not it would start getting worth it if you look at (say) 3 or 5 year periods.
It's a market targeting and opportunity cost question. Yes, many of Apple's consumers are probably high-priced wine consumers. And yes, winemaking is a profitable business. That doesn't mean, however, that Apple serves its interests by expanding into wine.
It's promising, though, that we now have data showing psychotic targeting practices are unnecessary. Perhaps, even inefficient.
NYT is a premium venue for people who want to advertise, because its regular readers (especially the ones who don't live in New York) tend to have above-average disposable income. Because of that, the NYT should be able to charge a premium for advertising with them.
But if they opt into the ad exchanges, then they've given ad exchanges a signal they can use to more easily track who is a regular NYT reader. Advertisers could use that to target NYT readers without ever actually advertising on the NYT's website - they can follow them somewhere cheaper, and advertise there instead.
tl;dr: My understanding is that an advertiser can use ads on the NYT to profile its audience, then use that profile to target the same audience on cheaper sites.
I can't find the link now, but I've read that this practice is killing the economics that drive the production of quality content. Quality content is expensive but it attracts a higher-value audience, and sites make it with the expectation they can pay for it by charging more for ads shown to that audience. However, that audience also consumes low-quality content, and smart advertisers realized they can get more bang for their buck by running "research ads" to profile the high-quality site's audience, but then target that same audience on low-quality sites.
So ad targeting discourages the production of quality content, and encourages clickbait and memes in its place.
Annoy persistent customers with ads? It means it is driving retention and not that they had to get milk and knew you were an immediate better option than the alternatives.
Not receive as many sales during a recession when people cut back and you are forced to cut back on ads? Cutting ads brought this and not!
Clearly it has some impact given the derth of businesses without any but it is so entangled that it stinks of being driven by self-serving superstition more than concrete impacts. I would guess abstractly modeling awareness and desirability as separate concepts for one. No matter how much you advertise people will not want an air freshener that dispenses Ebola in their living room.
I know my own biases towards an annoying outgroup, that I am not equipped to derive a more logically rigorous and complete proof (let alone actionable and doing adequate in the field never mind better) but it feels as if the whole field should use way more mathematical rigor and self reflection.
This has happened to me at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years: I go to a supermarket or a store that I have never been to, I do shopping and come back home. After a few hours, I pick up my phone to check Email/Facebook, only to find myself staring at an advert for a product that's sitting in my fridge.
I mean, come on... The first time this happened I thought it was a funny coincidence, but it has happened with products that I did not bring home either. I can't be the only one?
And this is my point precisely as to why behavioral ads suck. They make you realize just how much companies are spying on you and using your data to feed you crap. Would I really want to have any part in this kind of an endeavor? Let's be real here.
Unless "listens to X podcast" counts as targeting, but that's no different from "reads X magazine" in offline media. No creepy tracking required.
It doesn't, except to the adtech targeters who want to muddy the water.
Ad targeting in this context means individualized targeting based on individualize tracking and data collection, full stop.
Disclosure: I am replying to my own comment.
The "manipulate" argument is silly.
> I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none
> What if I told you the NYT has been doing "untargeted" advertising for 150 years? Besides if you advertise in the NYT you ARE technically targeting people
> advertising is the art of fooling oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others
> Why would any premium website even agree to ads that track users?
Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!").
That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the people who lack that bias also have less knowledge.
What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the self interest, and educate the rest of us.
It seems worth commenting that you could make the same argument about not listening to doctors for medical advice. In this context, it just seems like you're making an appeal against authority.
You could, but mainly against things like billing practices and perhaps the necessity of certain procedures where there might be a conflict of interest.
Below is an example of someone trying to write about ad tech, but just making incorrect claims throughout the entire blog post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18732538
It also doesn't really make sense that every single person who works in adtech is biased, and unable to get around that. If a single person could "fix advertising" then they'd make billions of dollars by changing the entire industry.
So you're saying we should just take whatever Wall Street says as the truth, since only insiders can really understand?
I think sometimes insiders confuse "not taking an insider perspective" with being wrong or being unable to understand.
If you think they're missing something, find an good reporter (who can understand you, find alternative viewpoints and call you on any BS), then volunteer your testimony and experience to them.
Willfully choosing not to believe is on you. If you discount everyone talking about their profession because they get paid for it then you'll quickly end up with no experts on anything. People are still professionals regardless of industry. Treat them that way and you'll get clear answers.
I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.
Tons of comments here confidently say that the very idea of targeting clearly doesn't work based on their own experience or that it's a house of mirrors that doesn't work because of some obscure math.
I've managed over $10 million of ROI focused ad spend on Facebook and Adwords. You can test if targeting works trivially:
1) Use the platforms to target one audience that's a generic "All US Population" audience.
2) Test this against (for example) an algorithmically generated Lookalike that FB creates based on your seed audience.
The Lookalike will generally perform 3-20x better than the general population, depending on how specific the audience is your trying to target.
As far as public data goes, 90% of new ad spend goes to FB and Google for a reason - they're the best ways of targeting specific audiences online. And this is easily provable if you've ever worked on even mid-size ad campaign.
Buying ads on the NYT Health section is a form of targeting. It's also a much lower noise targeting compared to programmatic.
EDIT: and the downvotes begin, at this point it's just comical.
The Dunning–Kruger effect at work.
> Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.
That's like when you see a news report about something you're a domain expert on. You notice the mistakes and are left to wonder how often that happens with all the areas you're not an expert on...
You can trial this pretty easily by just creating multiple accounts and consciously changing the tone of the comments you make. It's pretty amusing! Online comment voting systems are extremely easy to game because of basic recurring phenomena like this, that you'll find many people come to exploit whether consciously or not. And thanks to those little arrows by our names, those comments that game the system end up near the top.
And finally you also have to keep in mind the You and I that actually chat instead of lurk are outliers, a surprisingly small percent of all people on the site. So you get twisted and likely counter-productive conversational cues driving conversations between a likely biased sample of (not necessarily positive) outliers. And finally now add in the countless biased interests (corporate and political in particular) with presences working to steer perception to their benefit. Nonetheless, I still find it entertaining watching how all the parts play together.
Advertising in the New York Times in general is already targeted in some fashion (you know the basic demographic of New York Times readers), and if you want to advertise laundry detergent there's not a lot to gain from knowing a person's exact age and the gender of all his siblings siblings and the top keyword searches he made on Pornhub. Logically speaking, it seems for targeted advertising to be worth it, you'd need an unusually high response to advertising among a very narrow selection of people who can be identified as such, and that these people don't have an obvious place where they can be found.
In the case of the New York Times, that means you have a product whose message is going to be wasted on the majority of the population; who can only be communicated with through a general interest publisher like the New York Times, but not a website or conference dedicated to that thing; but who can none the less be easily identified through invasive and secretive tracking data, but not through what news stories they're viewing; who will be very responsive to advertising (so not people who are domain experts in a particular hobby or career and will choose a product by intentionally seeking information on that product and rationally weigh their alternatives); and who are a large enough group that it's even worth putting together an advertising campaign.
And how responsive are people to ads even on a base level anyway? Award-winning campaigns like "You Got Milk" had massive impact on culture and awareness, but didn't drive sales.
With so many hurdles, targeted advertising seems like something that provides only marginal and diminishing returns. Newspapers seem like just about the worst place to benefit from violating user privacy. It's like trying to sell Linux dev ops software by asking a top 40 radio station to play ads for it after specific songs.
- There are a lot of players in the market
- Most of them oversell their ability to actually target effectively; I actually know some sales people in this space. Bla bla, machine learning, bla bla bla algorithms, bla bla bla smoke and mirrors.
- Especially the smaller players tend to not have usable profiles on the vast majority of users for reasons of not having existed long enough or not having enough customers to have actually captured enough relevant data.
- Any new ad company has to fake it for quite some time until they actually have enough data. And with GDPR, that data is now a lot harder to come by legally.
- Some of ad companies are fraudulent in the sense that they overcharge their customers for clicks that never happened. E.g. bot traffic is a big revenue driver for ad providers and most of them conveniently can't tell the difference between a bot and a user they supposedly profiled.
So, what just happened is that the NYT cut off most of the worst offenders in this space and ended up with better quality ad providers with better conversions (even without profiling).
Profiling is actually only needed if you have lots of ads competing for the same space. If you reduce the number of ads, the need for profiling goes away. Also, you compensate for bad profiling this way since more (random) people will see your ad. So previously under-performing ads might actually benefit from being shown to random people as opposed to some silly algorithm that uses bad/incomplete profile data to take the wrong decisions.
So what the NYT figured out is that they are better served by a small number of high value ads shown to random people than a great many low quality ads from low quality providers targeted to a handful of their users.
Targeting still has a place in this market but it needs to be consensual; which is going to be a tough sell to end users.
I mean, if most news sites are getting their biggest revenue via online targeting, who am I expecting to report abusive behavior among ad networks?
Perhaps they made a choice that looks the same from the outside, but could perhaps be very different from the inside? GDPR implementation is rarely as cheap, straightforward, or easy as some of its adherents might have you think. It can be a large, difficult, expensive undertaking. It may be worth bearing in mind that not every journalistic outlet has a sizable, disciplined, competent technical organization or the financial wherewithal to acquire one rapidly. These days, running a newspaper is famously a poor business.
Might it be possible that organizations, faced with a choice between an easy way to cut some costs and a potentially non-trivial investment for marginal return, might in some circumstances opt for the former?
Again, you're absolutely right that this looks like a crass choice between naked greed and basic human rights. It's just possible that it might be more.
Before GDPR, a company would have likely contacted an ad agency to target the population that reads the NYT. Ads would then be sold to a pool of websites that included the NYT. After GDPR, this is no longer possible as the individual websites have stopped sharing targeting information with the ad agency. The only solution available to the same company is then to buy directly from the NYT (and maybe a few other big websites) rather than “syndicate” the ads through the agency.
It would be interesting to know how ad placements changed pre/post GDPR and how the ad revenue distribution shifted across different websites.
Most ad loaders actually run async these days, cutting out middlemen/trackers doesn't help you for time-to-first-readable-content. Biggest culprit there are expensive assets like dozens of different fonts/variation combos, pre-roll video ads and uncompressed images.
After all, it takes CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to run scripts and load images in the background. The difference is especially noticeable on mobile, and it's even worse when the scripts trigger redraws or mess with the scrolling.
A lot of people are already doing direct sales via mail and then work out a way to get paid somehow, which can be cumbersome. Hoping to make that easier, while also improving the bad, intrusive behaviour around ads.
However, I have concerns about the economic efficiency (broadly speaking), as well as the dynamic optimality of advertising (though, admittedly, this is a second order concern to me!).
I switched off most of the stuff I could after GDPR went into force, so at first glance it seemed that I started getting trash.
That was until I saw a banner with a unappealing gray background with a fragment of a poem.
It was an ad. For a poem. This one specifically: https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2009/7/12/age-of-asininity.html?...
No way in hell I would discover such a thing had my ads been targeted and personalised, since those usually are reactive, so they show e.g. stuff you recently bought(meaning: been searching for recently).
They are pretty much all high value visitors (from an economic perspective).
There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less money in the overall market.
This is another case of regulation benefiting the bigger players (advertisers and publishers). EDIT: curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here.
My reasoning on why this is is that networks like DoubleClick don't care or know any of the qualities that raise the value of a particular publication in the advertiser's mind. All you are to them is a blank square above or below the fold on a domain with X monthly uniques.
Do you have a source for your claim that there's "less money in the overall market"?
My sources are the CEOs of major ad exchanges and the internal discussions with their BD and revenue teams, although there are some posts about it [1]. Europe has seen a big drop in liquidity on open-exchanges and while a lot of spend has shifted to private deals, it's still more labor to setup and and manage those deals so spend is now further focused on Goog/FB and large sites.
1. https://digiday.com/media/google-data-protection-regulation-...
> curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here
not downvoting but I suppose it might be that your post comes across as saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
if you need to be a big publisher to mamage doing well-behaved (not ad-net served ads) and you aren't a big player - then my opinion is you should shut down rather than use ad-nets. I don't care whether 80% of content and jobs just disappear in the process. Integrity and privacy are more importanmt than both.
You can easily avoid sites you do not like but I don't see what that has to do with integrity (of what exactly?), or why you think that everyone else would also be ok with losing 80% of content and jobs? Billions of people over decades have shown they prefer free and plentiful content and it's unlikely that is changing anytime soon unless you can somehow change human behavior first.
Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels that get them.
So the time in researching what small websites exist for my market (say dog owners), the ad cost per buy of making many small buys, the administrative overhead related to maintaining many small accounts (accounting, dealing with many sales people, many platforms to administer, etc) vs. buying ads in greater bulk with a few content providers like the NYT or others alongside pet related stories (or other compatible content) where I'm likely to get most of the niche site users and others that are also in my market that don't use those sites.... seems kinda no-brainer.
I also expect data aggregation to continue, even without a focus on "personalized" or "one-to-one" behavioral data. For example the NYT times would likely want to be able to show advertisers that those that read dog articles also disproportionately read articles about outdoors activities... they can produce those metrics within the course of normal operations, I would think, possible even without employing things like cookies for the purpose... naturally the metrics being captured today do have a market value beyond just allowing the collector what ads to show and my suggestion doesn't replace that path, but I expect for just the purpose of targeting ads that's probably more useful anyway.
Negotiating deals, verifying them and all that stuff costs time and money.
I don't get why so many US based websites are concerned about an EU law.
Given that they likely have paying EU customers for subscription, they operate in the EU area. Which means they can be subjected to GDPR. Enforcement would be difficult, of course, but not impossible (think of seizing credit-card payments or bank transfers for sales proceedings of printed NYT in Europe).
And GDPR violation fines can be massive.
“A scramble to implement GDPR, last-minute scramble to inplement GDPR when it arrived in May” vs “it won’t be a scramble in the US, as companies will have until 2020 to prepare”.
These companies similarly had two years to prepare. And I’m glad they took the hit for not doing so. I’m also glad they’re discovering that selling private info left and right isn’t the only way to earn money with ads.
https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-y...
NYT is deeply hypocritical when it comes to digital advertising.
