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Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

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Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#81

Post by HWR_14 »

sigil_my_ev wrote: post #18

I think what's hard to deduce with advertising, especially for small projects or people who don't have much experience is the activation energy needed to see any results from what seem like relatively large ad spends. To be clear, I suck at this. I've attempted to buy instagram / facebook ads and had little luck. For FaceBook ads you basically have to spend around $6k before the algorithm even starts to care about wh…

> However, targeted ads definitely work. I still get ads on instagram for the rapid-test clinic that just opened up across the street from my apartment. I can literally see the clinic from my window.

How is this working? I mean, I didn't think the claim was that targeted ads don't understand geography. The question was about if they drive behavior. And since you've seen the clinic every day, how does the advertising help?

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#82

Post by tomc1985 »

lordkrandel wrote: post #22
donohoe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the thing, you probably have. There are ads that want you to buy something, and there are ads that, when you are making a choice between products, you’ll go with the brand you’re most familiar with. Ads build that familiarity.

Or maybe I won't and go for the competitor... it often works this way. So many times I see something expensive being advertised and I go for a cheaper one I never heard of. So again, I might be a rare case, but ... I'm not saying that I never bought snacks that are also advertised, because everything is advertised. But I come from a "hard discount" family, and I'm a very hard target, I don't even like being given pre…

I don't think you realize just how insidious advertising is. Repetition builds awareness, which will infiltrate almost any thinking about the product or whatever. Every time you recall an earworm jingle, the ad is serving its purpose. The only way to not be influenced by them is to screen them out.

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#83

Post by mrweasel »

cm2012 wrote: post #3

As an advertiser, yes, modern algorithmic digital advertising is night and day better performance than dumb digital targeting.

Do you do a-b testing? I think one reason people keep asking, is because most answers are opinions and anecdotes.

Especially something like remarketing must be hard to do a-b testing on, as the control group is basically not tracked/targetet at all.

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#84

Post by lordnacho »

I gave drop shipping a try at one point, just to learn something about the internet.

It more or less paid for itself, without much profit, using just FB ads. So basically if some amateur can break even with barely any understanding of how it works, someone with proper marketing experience can probably do well enough to make a living.

The thing is the purchase rate was something like 1%. So it may well be that most people by far never buy anything via ads, but the minority is enough to make it worthwhile.

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#85

Post by beagle3 »

quanto wrote: post #13

Absolutely yes. I did both academic research (recommendation engine algorithms) and industry work (leading online advertising at a large e-commerce ). I can confidently say from my background that the targeted advertising works. In fact, it works so well that it is almost awe-inspiring to see it in real action. Any e-commerce or advertising firms, including my former team, have internal data to support this claim. Fo…

I was somewhat involved in (relatively early days of) real time bidding and targeted advertising, circa 2010 or so.

My data at the time led me to believe that there is a small-ish part of the population on which targeted advertising is effective, and all the effort (information-theoretic wise) is locating this group, when your only tool (in real time bidding, anyway) is bidding on random ad impressions.

I’m sure the world is different now, and this inight might not be relevant to today’s world. But it does explain why re-targeting is way more effective than most people assume.

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#86

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #73
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #69

Yes, yes they absolutely do, although not quite at the levels and extent you might think. I worked with an ad network DSP, who's entire business was figuring out what crap to put in front of what users. All I'll say is that they used pretty low down ways to get to people, one example that sticks out was the amount of targeting that went on late Friday, late Saturday night in APAC when folks would stumble home drunk a…

Two questions: - if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid? - how is that in any way ethical?

I don't think selling things to people while they are drunk/high/otherwise is invalid. Otherwise Walmart would have to breathalyze visitors.

However, it's massively, objectively, unequivocally unethical, and part of the reason I quit that place. And for the record, selling crap to drunk people in APAC was probably the least morally suspect tactic this company got up too.

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#87

Post by swiftcoder »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #73
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #69

Yes, yes they absolutely do, although not quite at the levels and extent you might think. I worked with an ad network DSP, who's entire business was figuring out what crap to put in front of what users. All I'll say is that they used pretty low down ways to get to people, one example that sticks out was the amount of targeting that went on late Friday, late Saturday night in APAC when folks would stumble home drunk a…

Two questions: - if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid? - how is that in any way ethical?

> if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid?

Sadly, we don't hold capitalism to consent standards

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#88

Post by boraoztunc »

Mostly no, it does not. Actually there is nothing wrong with targeted advertising, products and ads are meant to target specific people in its nature. But online advertising are a scheme for tech companies to make money.

Adtech was created to make the buying and selling of online advertising so much more efficient. Today, about $350 billion dollars is spent on online advertising. 70%+ of it is bought programmatically. And according to the ANA and PwC, 70% of advertising dollars spent on online programmatic advertising never touch a human being. Of $200 billion in annual programmatic ad spend, $140 billion disappears in "ad fees, fraud, non-viewable impressions, non-brand-safe placements, and unknown allocations".

See The Programmatic Poop Funnel: https://i2.createsend1.com/ei/d/DD/DB6/ACD/030147/csfinal/Sc...

I love reading Bob Hoffman about this subject.

"The lovely fantasy of online advertising -- in which the same person who was frantically clicking her remote to escape from TV advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with online advertising -- is going to go down as one of the great marketing delusions of all time. It has been undermined by an unfortunate fact of nature -- no one in his right mind volunteers for advertising.

By a factor of about a thousand to one, people who can interact with media do so to avoid advertising -- not engage with it."

https://www.bobhoffmanswebsite.com/newsletters

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#89

Post by HWR_14 »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #86
diffeomorphism wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two questions: - if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid? - how is that in any way ethical?

I don't think selling things to people while they are drunk/high/otherwise is invalid. Otherwise Walmart would have to breathalyze visitors. However, it's massively, objectively, unequivocally unethical, and part of the reason I quit that place. And for the record, selling crap to drunk people in APAC was probably the least morally suspect tactic this company got up too.

Walmart will let you return an item the next day. Meanwhile, I believe that a contract signed while drunk would be unenforceable.

What does the acronym APAC mean?

Re: Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

#90

Post by isomel »

mikewarot wrote: post #19
soared wrote: post #5

Yes. Brands, third parties, google, etc have all ran incremental sales lift tests, brand lift studies, customer lifetime value tests, etc and determined how successful tactics are and moved budget accordingly. There is a reason google/etc are worth billions. I’ve posted this comment before, but: 1. It’s hard to tell when someone has bought a product. You buy it at a reseller and the brand will never know. Or you buy…

It is entirely possible that large corporations measure the effectiveness of their advertising by comparing it to sales, and are confusing correlation with causation on a massive scale . They spend more on advertising, and point to sales in the same time frame, as a cause, even if reality disagrees. There are zero incentives for anyone to figure this out and fix it within corporate structures. I'd be thankful it make…

Reminds me of this urban legend:

The VP of marketing of ebay realized that the keyword for which they spent the most money was "eBay". He thought this was nonsense and that people who looked for eBay should know how to get to their website, so he decided to save some marketing money and stopped putting money on they keyword. Result: no changes in the amount of visit to the website. However, the click-through rate, which is the metric by which marketing department was measured, decreased significantly. So the VP was fired and they even increased the money spent on the keyword.

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