

AdSense is completely broken - dhaivatpandya
http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2012/04/adsense-is-broken.html

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cschmidt
What you're seeing is called retargeting. When you visit a site, they can
cookie you. Then Google lets your serve up ads to those people you've cookied
in the past. Sometimes companies do seem to be stalking you. I see ads for
Storm on Demand (a hosting company) way too much.

Companies do this because they think someone who has been to their site and
looked around is more likely to convert. It makes sense for them to spend some
money getting you to return, than to get entirely new people. (Of course, this
may or may not be true, but that's the feeling.)

I suspect Google especially uses retargeted ads on pages where there isn't a
good inventory of ads related to the page. That is, they can't sell a good ad
based on the content, so they'll sell based on who _you_ are. I more often see
retargeted ads (Hi Storm) on fairly lame pages.

Some companies seem to do this really well. Orvis will show you ads of
specific things you were looking at in their catalog. It does tend to jog your
memory, in a spooky sort of way.

It would be nice to have a "enough retargeting" button on the ad, so you could
specify that you don't want to see more of these ads.

So their algorithm isn't broken, it is just annoying you in this case.

~~~
dialtone
What you say is mostly correct but I want to fix a few of your statements and
assumptions.

Regarding the skepticism on the end results of retargeting I can say that all
the transparent retargeting companies offer you A/B testing of your
retargeting campaigns. What we do is show PA ads to a control group and your
retargeting ads to the experiment group. What we see is a lift of conversions
between 40% and 200% and CTR doubles at worst compared to non retargeting
display campaigns, these numbers vary by industry but are a good
representation.

Google has moved its entire network inventory to the Google Ad Exchange. What
this means is that for every impression there is an auction in real time where
multiple buyers bid in real time for the right to show an impression to a
specific user. While it's true that Google might filter out impressions that
they deem particularly interesting for them it is not what we are seeing on
the exchange.

AdRoll.com adheres to both Do Not Track and to the AdChoices initiative. Both
of these allow the users to opt out of all retargeting campaigns either from
their browsers or from the Ad itself (through the AdChoices icon). More
information regarding this initiative is at <http://www.evidon.com>.

Disclaimer: I work for AdRoll.com and we are the biggest self-service
retargeting platform.

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akanet
"I had some poorly targeted ads, so a business that makes billions on actual
CTR must be broken."

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psylence519
Just to be clear, you're calling a multi-billion-dollar business completely
broken because it showed you a few ads you didn't care about for a few hours?

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jerrya
Here's a NYTimes article on retargeting:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html>

Many people think this is creepy and privacy invasive. For example, in the
past I've had a hard time explaining why an ad for silencers keeps following
me around.

I do wonder at the tradeoff between retargeting people and getting that triple
exposure for your product versus the creep factor that people have when they
see you doing that.

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talleyrand
I've never understood how AdSense produces any revenue at all and I suspect
it's some sort of ponzi scheme. When I look at a web page, the AdSense adds
are invisible to me and I bet to a large portion of the internet population.

