Targeted advertising and you

June 20, 2017 2:48 AM

When people are talking about advertising on the web, and more specifically about targeted advertising, they always say they are seeing or getting ads. Where, specifically, are these ads?

My browsing habits on my laptop, which is my computer for daily use, are generally closer to the cautious/paranoid end of the spectrum: no Facebook, nothing Google except for YouTube. My browsers are pretty hardened and I never surf without ad blockers.
I have a smartphone, but it's a Blackphone, which means no Google anything (I could use their search engine but I don't), and very few apps. Brave is my mobile browser. It has an inbuilt ad blocker.

So I basically never see targeted ads. And it makes me wonder. When you are seeing ads that are related to things you've been doing online, where are you seeing them? Are they in an app (which one)? On a webpage (which one)?

posted by Too-Ticky to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Oh dear, I am super lazy about this. Mostly the ads appear in sidebars and reflect whatever I just Googled - dresses or bike lights or whatever. For example, this crochet pattern is showing two copies of the same Bendigo Bank on either side of the first picture of the hat. Ads don't really appear in-app, though I don't have many free game apps and the like. I have occasionally downloaded free games with ads but they're not targeted at all.

Which webpages? Certain blogs, metafilter, facebook for the most part.
posted by jrobin276 at 3:37 AM on June 20, 2017

I've been trialling a Microsoft Surface in work this day and was served an Amazon ad for a rival brand of keyboard-with-tablet in a blog I read this morning. Generally if I browse but don't buy on Amazon (or sometimes when I browse and then do buy, it's not very smart), I get a ton of Amazon ads for that product or similar products in that category.

They all tend to be on blogs I follow which use paid ads to support the blog (Ask a Manager is the main offender; I used to get the same thing on Captain Awkward until she switched off ads recently).

I'm using an ad blocker but not being anywhere near as cautious as you in terms of overall online hygiene; I haven't found a good ad blocking solution on mobile yet, which tends to be a) where I'm more likely to browse sites like the ones I mentioned above and b) where I see the majority of this type of ad.
posted by terretu at 3:49 AM on June 20, 2017

Best answer: Hi, I sort of do this for a living. When you ask "what site" or "what app", the answer is "pretty much any of them". Online ads break down into basically three categories: direct sales, ad exchanges and house ads. Direct sales are ads where a site or an app sold ad space/impressions/clicks to an advertiser directly. Some sites will support retargeting, where you show ads to people who have visited your site (Facebook does, I would bet somewhere like the NYT does not, but I don't know), or you can target with something like "show ads to people who've read an article about baseball in the last week" (and the site uses their data to figure that out). Smaller sites aren't going to be able to support any sort of targeting beyond something like "show this ad on this page and not that page".

House ads are what you show when you're thinking (well, your ad-serving platform is thinking) "Oh, crap, I don't have ad inventory to show here, got to show something" (this is called 'remnant') and you show an ad for your own site/product--maybe something like "sign up for our awesome newsletter!" (Of course, you might show a house ad in other situations--those annoying overlays trying to get your email address, for instance, or because you need to actually promote your thing.) The targeting possibilities are whatever you could support for direct sales.

Obviously, you don't directly make money from showing house ads. And if you're a small site you don't have the resources to have a sales person selling ad space, which is where ad exchanges come in. There are/were exchanges like the Deck (aggregating ad space across sites and then (I think) doing direct sales), but I'm really talking about real-time bidding. You can have Google (or Bing or Yahoo or several others you probably haven't heard of, there are some specialised to in-app advertising) sell your ad space at auction in real time to whoever wants to buy it (buyers get put into categories, so you could ban, say, clothing ads if you wanted). What's on the exchanges is usually remnant or the low-quality ad placements (bottom of the page) that aren't really worth the effort to sell directly. When an offer (a thing you can bid on) comes in, you get information about the page and some sort of user id (coming from a cookie belonging to the exchange). As an advertiser you're sitting on a pile of data that's all identified by some id (that you then have to map to the id in the offer, but that's a technical detail) and you can use that data to decide whether to bid (and with which ad to bid). So you're back to all the targeting possibilities we had in the first paragraph--people who've visited your site (and are now visiting example.com), people who read certain things on your site, people who've visited some partner site that has your cookie, whatever.
posted by hoyland at 4:54 AM on June 20, 2017 [6 favorites]

You're going to get many answers. Night before last, I searched "English hat" because of an upcoming trip to England. The next morning I got a spate of emails offering English clothing.

In another case I joked on Facebook about a US patent related to toiletting. Immediately a couple of ads on bathroom topics popped up in the right-hand column.
posted by JimN2TAW at 5:35 AM on June 20, 2017

I let targeted ads come at me because I work in the field and they don't bother me. I see them on Facebook, any site using Google ads, media sites, blog sites, etc. Particularly egregious are sites of "cool links to share" like distractify or good, food blogs, etc. Because Google ads are so common I often assume that's where they come from.

I was looking at shoes lately and I find the inundation of retargeting ads both amusing and in fact helpful because I haven't found any. I particularly like that small business can "get in the game" on places like Facebook for a low entry cost and not much technical knowledge, and I don't miss ads targeted to older men, etc.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:36 AM on June 20, 2017

Another freaky thing I just noticed, Google-related this time - I just did a bunch of Google/Amazon searches about curly hair care. I then did a Google search to find out when the new Lana Del Rey album is coming out. Typing "lana del rey", the first autocomplete was "lana del rey curly hair" - autocomplete laser-targeted to my recent browsing, rather than most common searches etc. (I assume more people are googling for her music than for her hairdo?).
posted by terretu at 5:45 AM on June 20, 2017

The most obvious ones for me are in the Facebook app. I don't think you can get rid of them but to be honest I find them quite amusing and don't want to. 90% of what I get is relevant to my interests but recently I have had adverts for assisted suicide, sex addiction counselling and plus size underwear and cannot fathom why it thought any of these might apply!
posted by intensitymultiply at 6:29 AM on June 20, 2017

When you are seeing ads that are related to things you've been doing online, where are you seeing them?

I see them when I turn Ad Blockers off. For example, I was looking at a roller bag on eBags. Decided not to buy it but did click around a little bit looking at it and may have put it in my shopping cart. When I went to other websites like the NY Times and other journalist-type sites, I would occasionally see an ad for THAT EXACT SAME BAG (and it was an off brand weird bag not one that was on trend and would otherwise be advertised) which was fascinating to me. Otherwise I use Ad Block Plus, Privacy Badger and a whole bunch of other things to make sure I'm not tracked around the web and don't see ads, targeted or not.

This is not the case for in-app stuff on social media so I'll regularly see ads on Instagram in my feed, usually for local Vermont-y stuff since Instagram knows where I live. This is especially true on Facebook (if I was browsing without using FB Purity, which I do not) which can slice a lot of my demographic information they have via a combination of what I like and who I am friends with and what groups I am in, so theoretically they can niche target ads pretty effectively. It's really interesting to read how this all works, if you're an ad buyer, for example, you have pretty granular control of where your ads go.

A lot of the targeting (i.e. whether it uses information it knows about you) is turnoffable it just requires a little work to get there.
posted by jessamyn at 6:40 AM on June 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

In addition to the stuff others are mentioning (although I use an ad blocker so I avoid a lot of them) one place I notice targeted apps is my Instagram feed. Like, I changed my relationship status to "Engaged" on Facebook, and the next day there was an ad in my Instagram feed targeting brides (for some kind of invisalign-like tooth-straightening system, so that my teeth would look their best on my big day, GROSS!).

I also notice a thing where you shop for (and maybe even buy) a thing, for instance rain boots, and then you see ads for rain boots for DAYS afterwards. I just bought rain boots! Why would I want to see more ads for rain boots!
posted by mskyle at 6:41 AM on June 20, 2017

Twitter asked me if I'd like to "follow" a food product I'd bought recently. I laughed and declined.
posted by Carol Anne at 6:48 AM on June 20, 2017

Here's an interesting one:

We use google suite at work, I use Chrome. When I log into my personal stuff, I do it only through an incognito browser. I regularly see ads for things I've searched on my work google show up in my personal facebook.

Yesterday I bought some office supplies for work on my company Amazon account, opened in my work Chrome profile. Batteries, post its, hand sanitizer, a few other things.

This morning, on facebook, on my phone where I don't have work stuff, I had a sponsored Staples ad showing me deals on batteries, post its, hand sanitizer, and a few other things.


The one I don't get is that facebook apparently thinks I'm pregnant??? I've been getting a lot of ads for breast pumps and peri wash bottles the last few days. I don't talk about babies or search baby things or click on baby ads. Babies creep me out and I don't like them. When someone on my facebook has a new baby, I generally unfollow them so I don't have to look at babies. But facebook's doing the hard sell for paraphernalia in my sidebar and keeps showing me sponsored posts from parenthood meme pages. Who knows.
posted by phunniemee at 7:01 AM on June 20, 2017

Best answer: Broadly speaking, internet advertising is bigger than the web. There are advertising "channels" that aren't web pages (e-mail, mobile apps). Pretty much all "targeted" advertising is programmatic (either real time bidding via ad exchanges, or custom in house solutions like gmail ads), because that's the only way to send different ads to different users, which is kind of the definition of "targeting". And all of the major advertising channels can now deliver programmatic, targeting advertising.

In the industry there is a distinction between "prospecting" and "retargeting" audiences. Retargeting audiences consist of known users who have previously demonstrated some kind of interest in your product/brand, which is usually determined by the presence of a specific cookie on a users browser. When people talk about "targeted" advertising what they usually are responding to is being "retargeted", i.e. they visited a web site and looked at a product, and all of a sudden advertisements for that product are following them around the web. So to answer your question directly, the most common place to see "highly targeted" advertisements (i.e. where you are part of a retargeted audience) is via web pages accessed thru your desktop browser, because that's the channel with the richest user data landscape.

But you don't need to be explicitly interested in a product to receive targeted advertisement. A large portion of the dollars spent in online advertising is against the "prospecting" audience. These users may have never explicitly showed interest in your specific product, but companies responsible for delivering your ads may have extensive user profiles on those users nonetheless, and sophisticated statistical models which suggest certain users may be interested in certain products without explicitly showing interest. Prospecting is not nearly as successful as retargeting for generating "conversions" (i.e. purchases or other desired actions on the part of the user), but there are still economics that make prospecting worthwhile (i.e. it's less expensive to place less effective advertisements, so you can place more of those advertisements, and increase your total conversions that way). So even if you are not being explicitly "retargeted", you may still be receiving advertisements that are specifically targeted at you based on the data advertisers have about you.

The industry is highly dependent on cookies, but the rise of mobile devices, and specifically mobile app "traffic", is challenging the dominance of the cookie as the premiere (re)targeting apparatus. It is harder (today) to build good user profiles when those users are engaging via mobile devices (for a variety of reasons), but the industry is working hard to overcome those barriers, and parties on both sides of the table are willing to make it happen (more money for everyone). But at this point, the state of the art doesn't allow for nearly as much retargeted inventory to be sold on, for example, mobile in app channels, as it does on desktop PCs and laptops using standard web browsers.
posted by grog at 1:28 PM on June 20, 2017

Response by poster: Thank you all! It's become a lot clearer; also your answers helped me realise how many people use and experience the internet in a way that differs from the way I do.
I feel enlightened by your responses. Also I want to hug my ad blocker and my limited, finicky, cumbersome Googlefree phone.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:15 AM on June 26, 2017

lots of sex and foreign wives (and i'm a woman, no idea what men get) plus any shopping search you did until you wish you'd never looked for a shed. If female, expect fifteen-minute video ads on youtube if you ever, ever dare search for a makeup video. To evade, use foreign languages: google seems to be working on asian ones, but in general is too confused. Once used a dating site to search for women, and it showed me porn ads aimed at men alongside the profiles, so you'd get 30yo teacher nearby town, and half-dressed upside-down 'russian student seeking older man' right next to it ('call me now' etc)(no ads when searching men)
posted by maiamaia at 2:00 PM on August 28, 2017