this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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I dabble in marketing for my company. Let me just say advertisers don't need a damn cookie to know who you are to serve you ads. Even across multiple devices. There are so many methods.. literally over a dozen when cross referenced tells companies exactly who you are, even on vpn, even incognito.
If you know who I am and what I like, gimme some damn relevant ads. No, me clicking the "Not interested" button doesn't mean the next ad is the same damn thing. Worst are those when I search for something for several weeks, and when I finally find it and buy it a week later, I get peppered by the VERY THING for another week.
No offense, of course. The ad industry is just insanity for me.
For those "Just use an ad blocker" - I do, I just occasionally unblock sites to show support.
Some advertisers know their market and pinpoint, others just drag net to see what sticks. You're getting the equivalent of cold calling for ads. If you show interest in something even once, you're a target.
Edit: All advertisers are not geniuses. If they're serving you the same ad for a thing that is not consumable, then one of two things happened. First, their tracking pixel at checkout was not able to associate you with your purchase. Maybe they set it up correctly or there was an error. Maybe you saw the ad on your phone and bought on your computer without enough common data points to connect them both to you. Second, the advertiser may not have set their campaign to stop serving after you converted, which is a total waste of their money. Laugh at them.
Google regularly thinks I'm a robot and the ads are not even remotely relevant. There's no way they know who I am.
Google is not the ads industry. Google is a small part of it. I know ad sellers that partner with Google and 60 other data brokers to know when you're taking a shit.
Which is why cookies, server-dependent adaptive design and many other things in the Web were big mistakes.
Gemini. Closing FF now.
Cookies don't even matter for advertising anymore. They don't need them. You leave breadcrumbs everywhere. Literally where you are, your wifi connection, browser used, browser build, device used, screen size, Google account logged into a browser, just to name a few. They string all this stuff together over days, weeks, years.. you'll slip up at some point no matter how diligent you are with something big, like that Google account login, a share from social media.. there's so much more lol
Well, if you clean all cookies, there'll be much fewer things targeted in ads. But - yes, still connected.
then why do they still use cookies? i'm genuinely curious.
It's easy and it started with that.
Edit: The services I'm talking about have fees. Barrier to entry prevents knowledge and usage. There are hundreds of services that provide this, all to different degrees of quality. But you could just Google "UTM Generator" and, assuming you set up a free GA4 account and set it up on your site, congrats, you're now using cookies to track purchases based on link clicks to your website. Very easy and literally free.