[vbsteven]

My comment was an expansion on GPs second bullet point. It’s not Google that knows about the purchase, but Google that “somehow” picked up contextual info from OPs environment linking OPs online identity to Voltaren as a product.

Edit: the purchase could have been involved somewhere in the chain but it’s not necessary.

[whimsicalism]

> Your purchase landed some key about you in a bucket that was mixed and repackaged with many other keys that the advertiser knows as "keys recently interested in Voltaren."

There's not really that much ambiguity in this sentence from the second bullet point.

Unless my mental model of online advertising is wrong, your physical in-store purchase should not be landing you in some Google advertising bucket.

[vbsteven]

I completely agree that they should not show up. It looks like I went lightly over that sentence and focussed more on the one after:

> Some of those keys are related to people who bought it, or who searched for it, or more indirectly who lingered while reading a page with an ad for it...and in most cases are very short lived.