And then
> Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane.
Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?
Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret desires you don't even realize yourself".
And it probably even work by some small but statistically significant margin, compared to some arbitrarily picked baseline, so they can even back this up if necessary.
The king is naked, though.
Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can correlate.more sources inside FB.
I've done the math on this for a few small companies. I an thoroughly convinced that this is just not true for many companies. The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.
The opportunities are still there in local minima, places where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the trend is clear.
Costs go up because winners have been found. Like monopolies in capitalism.
It works for them.
They might need to make it work a tad more for their customers if they had to, but right now they apparently don't.
