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Why Do Contextual Ads Fail?
minstrelmike writes If we give up all our privacy on-line for contextual ads, then how come so many of them are so far off the mark? Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you. And then the online world becomes customized, just for you. The real problem with this scenario is that is we're paying for contextual ads and content with our personal data, but we're not getting what we pay for. Facebook advertising is off target and almost completely irrelevant. The question is: Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.
Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web.
Facebook is banned here, precisely for trying that shit. Facebook domains don't resolve.
Because there's always going to be a disproportionate amount of ads delivered for those willing to spend the most money on them. If there's 30,000 users who actually like fast food, and McDonalds pays for 5 million impressions per day, people who don't like McDonalds are going to have some golden arches shoved in their face.
I don't think that there's any such thing as an advert that I actually want to see.
yeah. I know that when I look for something - like motorcycle boots, I see tons of ads for motorcycle boots. The problem - they are the SAME boots I already looked at. If I wanted THOSE I would have bought them. Give me other boots. Stupid.
Do people really still browse the web without an ad blocker plugin?
Sometimes they are downright hilarious.
One serious problem though: I see tons of advertisements for products I already purchased. Figure that one out and you've made a huge leap forward.
And allow all cookies, you'll soon see a plethora of carefully targeted ads for pretty much every site you ever visit. Like Eve Online? Visit the forums at all? You'll see adverts for Eve Online, regardless that you already subscribe. Want to buy a medical appliance for grandma, visit a couple of websites and you'll see relentless adverts for those incontinence pants no matter where you go.
And then the online world becomes customized, just for you.
Fuck that, just give me the information. I don't need no customization. There's a reason AdBlock exists.
It's bad enough we have to put up with shitty web sites 'designed' by people trying to show off how shiny, but unusable, things can be, we don't need ads trying to predict what we want adding to the damage.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If an ad exists in the same context as that which I'm attempting to read, it's like a gnat buzzing in front of my eyes. It's a distraction, and an annoyance. Annoying those you want to reach isn't the way to communicate your message,
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
I could not disagree with this more. There is nothing "beautiful" about harvesting personal data to serve contextual ads. I doesn't matter how well-targeted the ads are -- ads are not a benefit to me at all. The real problem with this scenario is that my personal data gets harvested in the first place.
Ads aren't always random. For example, Youtube advertises alcohol to me. And only alcohol. Ever.
I don't drink.
The ads for me are always late. Here are a couple recent examples. I wanted the 5th edition D&D Players handbook. I knew about it from word of mouth within my local D&D group. I went to amazon and ordered it and a big bag-o-dice. For the next day or three, I see advertisements for stuff I have already purchased.
.I don't need any more.
I frequent a blog HomeBrew Finds which is nothing more than a listing of sales around the internet. I saw a fermentor last month and ordered it. After I ordered it, I saw adds for fermentors..
Contextual ads need to be a little more prophetic and a little less "I sold you so."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
between selling, and exploiting someone's voluntary data. not all needs are voluntary - the young, the old, and the mentally ill also use fb.
Well that's news to me, and I work in (the IT department of) one of those agencies... Which shall remain nameless because work.
Are you going to tell us next that the NSA really is respecting the law and protecting us from dangerous terrorists?!?
I don't know what you are smoking, but I definitely want some of it...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Because the advertisers overreach and try to push stuff that their audience is unlikely to want. Advertising is full of wishful thinking about how powerful adverts are etc - many advertisers seem to believe that it is simply a matter of "targeting" their adverts and then people will invariably buy, no matter whether they like, need or can afford the product. The reality, meanwhile, is probably that by far the largest part of adverts are unwelcome, simply because people were not looking to buy and they feel affronted, when they are being slapped in the face with some irrelevant distraction. If you want to sell a product, you have to persuade your customer to like you, but nobody likes SPAM, whether it comes in emails, inserted into your favourite tv-program or through your letter box, and all that kind of advertising achieves is to alienate huge numbers of potential customers.
One of my common experiences is that when I buy something online, for weeks after I get lots of ads for the thing that I just bought. In most cases, my reaction is "Why are you trying to sell this to me? I just bought one, and I won't be buying another for years."
If the folks writing the ad software can't figure out why (for durable rather than consumable goods) this doesn't make sales, it should be no surprise that all the rest of their software's decisions are equally goofy.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I know and deal with a lot of marketing people every day. People get very confused about what marketing really is... to the point that most don't really know. Marketing primary product is: Marketing
They spend about 95% of their time proving they are worth keeping around. They do things like send free gifts to 100 targets considered to be "Leads" Then, later, when a salesman makes a sale to that person they claim "See? We made that happen!" But if you ask the salesman about the deal he says "I call everyone... every month. They launched a marketing campaign for winter coats in October. Of course they bought one. The free pen had nothing to do with it."
So what did the free pen really do? Allowed marketing to run a report showing a correlation between the pen and the sale, then suggest to management that is was a CAUSE not a correlation.
So now we're going down the same rabbit hole with the internet. Want to fix it? Disprove their nonsense data. Show that this garbage doesn't work. It shouldn't be that hard given the amount of data captured. Pop-up adds generate clicks... but do they generate sales? No... and it took a while for the industry to realize that, but they did.
> contextual ads, then how come so
> many of them are so far off the mark?
Simple.
They all are based on the assumption that I want to trade my life's work/income for shit crap junk trash that will end up landfilled.
Make something useful, long-lasting, and worth having.
Amaze me.
That's what I've noticed - I shop for a 16 bay rack mount drive enclosure and for a long time afterward I'll see ads for 16 bay rack mount drive enclosures. Silly, do you think of I bought a rack mount enclosure I might be interested in better cable management for my rack, maybe drives to put in that enclosure, an IP KVM, a good deal on rack screws ... the possibilities are endless. Amazon gets it right on their product pages - people who bought this also bought these things. If I buy this, show my ads for what other people who bought X also bought, not for the exact item I bought a month ago.
So, are you shilling for the ad industry, or do you really believe this is supposed to be a good thing?
Sorry, but I'm not interested in your ads of any form, I'm not interested in targeted ads at all, and I don't trust the entities gathering this information with any of it, or that they won't abuse it.
So, screw your contextual advertising. I will continue to block every ad tracking site I can identify, block your ads, your web bugs, and everything else I can.
If you think letting unknown third parties collect information about you, put cookies on your machine so they can know everywhere else you go, run scripts, run Flash ... or pretty much anything else ... is a good idea, then you're either clueless, or getting paid from this.
I think your entire premise is flawed, or dishonest.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Oh, look, this guy just bought a new fridge. Let's show him lots of fridge ads. Oh, look he clicked one of the fridge ads! Wow, this guy is really into fridges.
Meanwhile in guy's home...
Guy: "Hmm, this fridge looks about as good as the one I bought and the price is about the same. Yeah, I feel good about my purchase. Not going to return it. See you in 15 years, fridge sellers."
Aside from lack of privacy, the main problem i have with contextual ads is: Say i go to Halfords website to buy a few things.. Later that day, i will be inundated with ads for those particular products, from halfords. Why am i being targeted for things i have just bought a hour ago? When the analytics script should catch from the checkout page that i bought these. Contextual ads are always too late for me, I am constantly seeing advertisements for things i have already bought, or have already done.
portfolio
How many contextual ads are for things the user just bought? These people are probably the *least* likely future customers.
I recently reinstalled my OS and started Chrome without AdBlock for the first time in a while. God, the internet is like walking through Times Square on an acid trip without AdBlock. It would be sadly funny if it didn't bring my browser to a crawl.
Online advertising is a waste of money as it often irritates the very people it is intended to draw in as customers. Actually searching online for something is terrible as the results you get are invariably based on page rank, not on the suitability of the product for the customer.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Noone is getting tracking information from me. I don't care if the ads are not personalized then because I don't see them anyway.
Fuck off and get a real job, marketing scum.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
The problem is that I only see ads for something I'm interested in after I've bought the product and I'm not interested anymore. Last week I bought a pair of yoga socks online and now I'm being inundated for the product I just bought. I'll probably never need to buy another pair in my life so what's the point?
Lots and lots of NewEgg.
All of the time.
Forever.
You can never get away...
If you are selling cat toys, it's not that hard to select people that own/are interested in cats.
Same thing with baby food.
But those companies don't need to advertise on the internet that much, because there are much better ways and places to advertise them.
If however, you are selling a dating service, that is much harder to advertise for. Same for boner pills, etc.
Frankly, there simply are not enough people doing web searches for boner pills or dating websites for facebook to give the advertisers what they want.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Let's just get this out of the way: I, for one, am happy that I never get tampon ads online.
Ads are chosen by advertisers, not some personal shopping assistant. The ads I've seen on FB and Youtube (which is where I actually see most of the online ads) tend to be at least tangentially related to my life. Tech stuff that I might actually be interested in. Concerts for genres I like. I know that they're trying to sell me stuff that I don't have* so there will be misses. YT ads normally allow a bypass after 5 seconds. There have been two cases in the last month that I've watched the whole ad, because it happened to be something I was interested in or wanted more information about (but not badly enough to go look it up). That's an advertising win right there.
Except LG. I've seen more ads for the G3 that I already own on FB than for possibly any other single product. Note to LG marketing: I'm not going to buy a second one just for fun; you can stop.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've always maintained that a large part of advertising's influence extends way beyond the purchase of specific products. It creates a context and a culture of expectation, desire, and need, such that an advertisement for one product may in fact sub-consciously prompt you to buy another, entirely different kind of product. If advertisers are pissing off buyers with targeted ads for items already purchased, aren't they poisoning the entire advertising ecosystem, both for themselves and for other advertisers?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I crowdsourced some questions about contextual advertising and contextual content on Google+. It was an unscientific survey, of course. But several strong consensuses formed that perfectly matched my own observations.
How un-surprising.
The geek preens himself for his rigorous logic and mathematical literacy ---
but will swallow an utterly worthless blog spam post like this without a second thought,
Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you.
Leaving the "privately and securely" bit to other commenters who will roundly correct you, I'm sure.
I've done personalized targeting of ads, and it is not necessarily a beautiful thing. The problem is a mismatch in the objectives of the advertiser, the objectives of the consumer, and the GDP maximizing outcome.
The GDP maximizing outcome is the thing that maximizes the total satisfaction of wants for the entire society. In theory, that should match the objective of the consumer. In practice, it does not, because the consumer is rarely perfectly informed or perfectly rational. Flaws at this level result in reduced consumer satisfaction, which result in reduced economic activity, and lackluster GDP growth in the long run.
In advertising, these flaws can be either explicitly or implicitly induced. The explicit way is the world of Edward Bernays and the world of PR; a fascinating subject in its own right. The advertisement targeting mismatch is about how success is measured and iterated into the targeting algorithm.
The personalized advertiser's objective is generally either to maximize revenue or earnings during the run of the ad campaign. This results in short-run oriented behavior which can be significantly mismatched with maximal satisfaction -- not necessarily intentionally, but because the system has no regard for satisfaction. Consumer satisfaction doesn't go into the algorithm explicitly and since campaign success can be most easily measured in the relative short run (did this impression result in a sale during the 30 day window that the customer is considered "owned" by this ad campaign), long run satisfaction cannot even show up implicitly. Most notably, impulse purchasing is strongly favored by the most profitable ad personalization strategies.
Ad personalization is good for short term revenue or earnings (or whatever is being measured), but it is not very good for long run GDP. From a strict economic standpoint, algorithmic targeting optimizes for flashy, shoddy products.
I know, because I did it.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Mostly it shows me ads for things I've purchased recently. I recently bought a car. Now I see ads for that car everywhere online all the time.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
they're going to higher-priced since they're having to pay for snake oi-- er I mean-- ads.
So marketing is always a waste of money? Keep the day job, I doubt you'd fare well with a start-up.
I work in advertising
But you haven't thought through its position in a company's strategy, clearly.
I don't understand all the comments expressing bafflement as to why you get ads for something you already purchased. The contextual advertising company has no access to your purchase history... if they are going to serve an ad, guessing that you might have already not made a purchase is not a bad start. Is it usually wrong? Sure! Most ads are ineffective. But it's way better than showing the same ad to some random schmuck.
And why do you see Amazon ads after you've already purchased something from Amazon? Well, if you did ANY web browsing at all about it prior to the purchase, it likely got picked up by a contextual advertising company, which, again, has no access to your purchase history, and therefore has no idea they are serving an Amazon ad for something you already bought. The ad may not even be paid for by Amazon; it could just as easily be an affiliate marketer.
The problem is that the data collection is assuming the same user by trying to associate different things. However, we tend to share systems more, making it extremely difficult to validate that any given "user" is the same "user". It's the same as any authentication problem where more than one person uses the same credentials.
And that doesn't even get into the multi-faceted view of the human psyche - we where different hats at different times for different activities, and those don't always jive well together; in fact, they're often in conflict with each other - a conflict that even us non-computers have a hard time justifying, let alone trying to code it up into a way that computers could figure it out.
All-in-all, this completely screws up the "contextual" part. Whether because the account is being used by several literal people (Jane, Bob, Sue, and Alfonso), or several figurative people (Jane as Jane, Jane as Janie, Jane as Jan, etc) all using the same accounts.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Steam shows me ads for _games_ when I log in. Some look interesting so I'll add them to my wishlist for when they go on sale.
I'll tolerate the ads on Steam because they show ONE THING that I'm interested in: Games.
If they started showing ads for other shit there would be a huge uproar.
So fail? It depends on the
a) Audience
b) The *type* of ads -- HOW relevant are they?
This is because all slashdotters refuse cookies, have ad blockers and everything else possible to be anonymous. If they can't do any tracking, all you are going to get acai berry ads. If you come over to the dark side you can get the awesome deals from Thinkgeek.
Facebook is not trying to accurately place adverts only to the people who would want to buy the advertised good.
Facebook is trying to sell adverts.
If they can say 'targeted ads have a 30% higher click-rate' - then that may be enough to get people to buy them.
Even if it's off-topic for 95% of the people it's shown to.
yes i'm 46 and single but none of the dating sites marketed to me on facebook were credible organizations capable of helping me to find a mate. and no, my penis works fine so spam offering me pills for my dick is just bothersome noise which i tune out.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing.
Who writes this? Personalized ads are creep-tatstic they scream to their victim ... **WE'RE STALKING YOU**
They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you.
Except of course the next person who uses the computer.
"Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing."
You must be insane. Nobody thinks contextual ads are a good thing or a benefit except advertisers and those who sell advertising. Advertising sucks, contextual advertising sucks even more because they are gathering and harvesting my data.
Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.
"Facebook sees what we post about" - You have your answer right there.
Do you more often post:
"Hey, check out my new iPhone", after which you'll receive a deluge of ads for phones and carriers... Or...
"Gee I sure could use a new mouse - Should I go with a Logitech LS1, a Microsoft Natural 6000, or the el-cheapo HP X4000?".
In my experience, most people do the former, not the latter, while basing ads off products you mention would only work well for the latter.
Of course, all that assumes you even post about yourself. You might mention that your mother needs a new car (resulting in a flood of car ads that do you no good), or your cats, or just random news clips you saw.
Ads, by their very nature cannot be personalized. Unless they are being generated on the fly by some very clever AI, all you're getting is an ad that targets you as part of a group. And you can be lumped into that group pretty much willy-nilly, because of ONE data-point.
For example. I am on Facebook. My status is SINGLE. Yet, I have made very clear on my posts, and me NOT liking "match.com" and other dating sites ads, that dating sites are all scams. I've tried at least 75% of them and they all suck. In fact, they pretty much did the opposite, they convinced me it wasn't worth my time to even try anymore. And I've made that CLEAR via many Facebook posts.
However, Facebook doesn't read my posts; all they need is to see that my status is SINGLE, and I'm inundated with dating site ads. Because of that ONE data-point, I'm lumped into a group that gets served that ad for that product.
Nothing about it is "personalized" and I doubt it will ever be because no "product" exists for single guys who believe that dating sites are a scam and a waste of time. And therefore, I am served the ad that comes in as the closest match given Facebook's limited set of advertisers.
Other things facebook should know about me but doesn't, is my interest in vintage volkswagens. But no such advertisers exist for facebook, so it ignores this data-point entirely.
The point is that people are too diverse to ever have truly targeted advertising.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I've seen some really cool ads that were right on target - like the time I played a James May video on YouTube and the ad that popped up was for an electron microscope. I couldn't begin to afford the one the advertiser wanted me to buy, but I actually did poke around eBay to see if there were any old ones out there I might be able to afford. I've hit paydirt many times when Amazon and others pointed out "people who bought this also bought..."
That's the way it's supposed to work.
Then there are the way off base ads. I wonder if they are genuinely being blasted out to everybody, or if I fall off too many if-then-elses for anything more relevant to come up. These ads are invariably back-of-the-comics and/or cable tv infomercial quality, like the perennial "weird trick for belly fat" ads. I suppose I get those because Facebook et al know I'm a woman.
That's the deal we made, I suppose. A quasi-free internet supported by advertising. And, like all things, 99% of internet advertising is crap.
...laura
"And then the online world becomes customized, just for you."
That is not true. it becomes the internet YOU want. Here's a hint, the vast majority of people surfing the internet are not here to maker YOU rich. I/WE am under no obligations to click ads. I/WE are under no obligation to buy stuff you have for sale or advertise. That's is what you need to get through your thick skulls. Spying makes people pissed off claiming humans cant or wont look at the data is 100% an untruth and we know its for sale to the highest bidders. You are not doing this for us your doing it for you. We already know that, you don't.
Jack of all trades,master of none
People don't actually fit the marketing stereotypes (buckets) we try to shove them into.
Marketing stereotypes are useful in writing programs, but not in understanding people per se.
There's your problem.
I laugh at advertising that incorrectly thinks I'm gay or smoke MJ, when I do neither. I just like freedom.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They gather information about you, then they adapt their ads to that. I googled for a printer 12 months ago. I bought a printer 12 months ago. I still get printer ads for those printers today.
I have a 22 in wide screen monitor. My brain ignores the right one third of the screen. Ad and flash blockers and Noscript keep most annoying things at bay.
This is a well known practice in advertising companies. Targeting advertising that's too accurate is creepy, so they filter in junk content so you don't feel uncomfortable. Here's an interesting article about the practice: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
This article gives advertisers way too much credit. When we hear "advertiser," we think of the big corporations with big ad budgets, who might actually care about relefant ads. Lots of Internet advertisers are just a guy with a computer, mucking around trying to make a quick buck. They put together bots that generate ads for every imaginable keyword, spraying them all over the Internet indiscriminately. The framework for placing ads in a relevant way might be there, but these guys work really hard to find loopholes, to game the system. Much of the time, they don't even care if you buy something, they just want clicks, because that's what they get paid for.
People run businesses where the *only* source of new customers are those targeted ads that apparently "don't work". Clearly, they work well enough, for some people.
If you look at engagement rings, the internet will be filled with engagement ring ads for a week. Obviously, you'll ignore most of them (unless you buy a thousand rings?), but those companies would have gone broke if it wasn't working. They're spending a lot of cash. The thing is, those ads might cost something like $5 per thousand "impressions". If the average sale nets you $300, it's worth your while if the ad works at a rate better than once per 60,000 views. A lot of these companies carefully tweak their bid prices, and sometimes make no sales for long periods because they've been outbid in the areas they're targeting.
Would it be worth running those ads with no targeting? Probably not. People don't buy that many engagement rings in their life. Jewelry companies have always carefully placed ads so that they'd be seen by people who were likely to actually buy jewelry.
Facebook stalks you constantly. I have searched for items on Amazon and Googled items that promptly are advertised to me on Facebook - the exact item, from the exact vendor. They are tracking what goes on in other tabs.
Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you. And then the online world becomes customized, just for you.
This is not my definition of a "beautiful thing". "Privately and securely"? Only if you really trust what the right hand (PR) to tell us what the left hand (advertisers) are actually doing. And an online world that is "customized, just for you" is an online world where nobody shares the same experience. We are being increasingly isolated from each other based on our own poorly conceived personal preferences, more and more incapable of forming a powerful social consensus, and you call this a "beautiful thing"?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
If there are four people in your household then LG wants to sell all of them a G3.
If you don't want Peter Noone to track you, perhaps you should stop listening to Herman's Hermits.
Disable DOM storage and you won't be able to use web applications offline because they will have no way of storing the changes you made to sync once you are online again. And several web games save the campaign state to DOM storage, such as Cookie Clicker. Enjoy starting over every time. Disable Referer and you end up disabling images entirely on sites that use anti-hotlinking scripts. And hosting isn't the only expense; what business model should sites use to pay writers?
If "consumer" is a bad word, then what's a better term for someone who buys a good or service without the intent of using it to produce and sell another good or service?