It makes sense to show ads for potato chips but with washing machines you should stop after purchase.

I much preferred the time when kiteboarding sites had static kiteboarding ads instead of the current situation where ads are totally out of context.

Half of Google's income is derived from businesses pissing their marketing budget up a wall with incorrectly targeted ads. But it's still more effective than newspapers.

Ah yes I was waiting for a response like this. Adsense campaign or do you mean Adwords campaign? There's a pretty big difference between the two.

Also, what's the difference between pissing away money on "poor targeting" and "testing" targeting which helps you to determine what the best options are?

Alot of bro-vado in your comment - what's your avg CTR? Churn rate? Spend? Out of curiosity.

Or out of nowhere. I get ads for real estate in Chicago - except that I live across the Atlantic. Or ladies products every time after my fiancee used my phone.

Not to mention how most ads are just plain bad. I don't mind actually watching good ads - I was hooked onto buying the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo for a while because of its ad (although later I learnt that the product was shit). The Honda Day/Night ad is another one that comes to mind.

Not only will they stop showing ads of washing machines after the purchase, knowing the make and model will help them gauge when to start targeting repair ads as well as start targeting replacement machine ads. They will also know whether you will stick to the current manufacturer or which you will switch to, and which model you will buy. You will be able to live with the comfort of knowing that your entire future of washing machine purchases is planned out and concentrate your energy on more important things in life (such as lobbying for better privacy protections).

Even if they have the sales data, it is not connected to the ad data (bought a laptop from a big chain here this week: will get ads for that laptop from the same chain for months) so common sense should work fine for now. If the ads appear around the days I am looking for the article, I even might click on them. Now that my brain knows all ads are irrelevant because they are outdated things I already have, I just do not see them anymore.

In any case, I put up a network wide Pi-hole blocker shortly after it because the washing machine adds didn’t just show up on my single device, but pretty much every device i own, including my wife’s phone.

I’ve since spent a long time since trying to convince my wife that Apple doesn’t listen for keywords and sell it (though I have no doubt Facebook, Google and Amazon would - if allowed), and that the fact she was seeing washing machine adds as well was either that she had searched for one (at the same time) or they were basing it on our public ip.

I also switched my search engine to DDG at the same time, and it’s quite funny watching the profiling algorithms struggle to find something they think I like. There are still washing machines in there, but the rest of the adds are pretty much all over the place.

New platform, new opportunities. I have thrown money into ad's on various content suggestion platforms, Reddit, Quora, BuySellAds, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and a hell of a lot more.

TikTok is apparently incredible right now with conversions and pricing. It's all over the forums and the guru's are pumping it too. Give me some solid targeting options and viable metrics and you could probably wrangle some money out of me and many other marketers out there. I would say it's easy money if you can spin the ad network in a new way.

So inevitably you try it, then you get some 'tips', then you read a marketing guru's success story, then you start getting ads for ebooks all of which have the best strategy and you really feel that you have no choice but to go for it. It's the FOMO/what if complex magnified by professional requirements to grow at all costs.

From now on I consider online advertising like gambling. You think you can win but the house always win's because you spend more money on A/B testing, copy edits and new keywords all of which create very few leads or deals. You always think you can win too, 8 years later I still go back to online ad's because I feel that there's just that juicy copy, design, content combo round the corner.

We buy ads for political clients. On FB I could get a positive immediate roi for donations. Scaling huge is hard (i got one client to over $1 million last cycle for context). Admittedly but you could go a lot bigger if you look at ROI down the line with email donations.

And we're not alone. I don't think the many many direct to consumer brands would spend so much money on FB if they didn't get a positive ROI.

Maybe some PE or other funded brands are trying to grow over profit spending more than they make. But there are a ton that are profit seeking and get good value. FB is definitely an exception though unless you are an app install ad on mobile.

For us we make a donation page. The only links that go there are from FB ads. We also use different refcodes for different ad groups AND the FB pixel passing in purchase value which is really good at optimizing FB's delivery to highest ROAS

FB is very very very good at this

I feel like people who question it or like don't understand basic attribution should do some more research before denigrating

There are other non-direct measurement, FB for instance allows you to upload offline purchases. Definitely not as clean especially if you're hitting across different channels. But a basic A/B holdout test is pretty good in that case too.

For us personally we cannot get anywhere close to similar ROI from other platforms like Snap that attempt to be FB let alone contextual targeting.

It probably works better for app instal ads but otherwise it's.

The cookie based ecosystem also doesn't add a ton of value, some studies say between 5-15%.

It's Facebook and Amazon and Google's 1P data that don't rely on cookies.

If you don't think it's right for them to exist, I'm not challenging that viewpoint at all. But coming in and assuming, with minimal to no research, that thousand of people and billions of dollars are pouring into complicated products which don't actually do anything, is a bit of an anti-vaxxer approach to the world.