[tinus_hn]

It’s proven to work in the area where it matters: convincing people to buy ads. Marketeers pay more for showing ads to targeted audiences than for showing them to random audiences. The Washington Post doesn’t care if you buy the toothpaste that is in the ad on their page.

[adrr]

Marketers care about performance. Targeting allows for higher performance. If I ran a baby product company, I want to target people with babies or who are expecting.

[darepublic]

I guess they should care in the sense that poor ad performance will cause marketers to question the effectiveness of ad buying with WP?

[mr_crankypants]

The open secret there is that it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance, and embarrassingly easy to come up with metrics that would make basically any ad campaign look like a success without looking suspect to anyone but a trained statistician.

Which will work out just fine, so long as your advertising client isn't someone like RStudio.

[TeMPOraL]

Yup. There's no reason to expect that an industry whose sole specialty is being manipulative and dishonest to behave virtuously when dealing within the industry. Adtech companies compete against each other too.

[riku_iki]

> it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance,

how come? You can measure your conversion rate, cost per conversion, etc.

[mr_crankypants]

That's about the only gimme, and it'll only cover a portion of the hypothetical payoff for the ad - some other, potentially larger, number of people never click, but do remember and come back later. Or if you're trying to sell things in meatspace, it's really hard to ever be able to say, "More people came to our store because we ran an ad."

If you do get enough profit from directly traceable conversions to cover the campaign, yeah, that's a gimme - you may not know your actual ROI, but you do know that its lowest possible value is still positive. That said, I don't work in adtech, so I don't really have any way of knowing how common that is.

[riku_iki]

> number of people never click, but do remember and come back later

For major brands they may remember. Otherwise I think it is reasonable to assume that clicking on ad is most established way for user to check product. Once user navigated to website, he can be reliably tracked by site owner.

[mr_crankypants]

Possibly. But, at the same time, "it is reasonable to assume" is the epitaph carved into the gravestone under which economics's credibility got buried alive.

I'd feel better assuming that question's answer is simply unknown until a few different people have performed a few different field experiments.

For my part, for example, I pretty much never click on ads, because they typically get shown to me at a time when I'm already busy doing something else. But, if I later perceive a need to buy a product of that kind, there's a decent chance I'll remember the name, and therefore be more likely to Google them or take a closer look when I see them mentioned on Wirecutter. I have no idea how typical I am on that front, but, tangentially, I do at least suspect that, if clicks were really the end-all-be-all of hawking product, then there wouldn't be quite so many billboards by the side of the highway.

[scarejunba]

> It's really hard to ever be able to say, "More people came to our store because we ran an ad."

Offline attribution and targeting based on offline intent is totally a thing that companies do today.

[_underfl0w_]

Correlation != causation. The parent wasn't discussing internal metrics, but rather establishing a cause-effect relationship between the targeted ad and your conversion.

[riku_iki]

Parent didn't provide much clarity about how he derived his opinion and what is the problem exactly with ads performance measurements.