Your Targeting Sucks

I work in Display Advertising, with RTB and Performance Marketing. I decided to start blogging about the bad ads I see. Partly for my own amusement and hopefully help some brands see the error of their ways. Ruby GIF because that's how I feel when I see your terrible targeting. If you are like me and frustrating by bad ads submit your experience, let's vent together.

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I did some shopping on New Look today, in store they didn't have a jacket I wanted so I went online to get it when home and also browsed to get a new hoodie because who doesn't need another colour.

Before this screengrab they retargeted me the exact hoodie I had bought.

Really guys? Can we do some negative matching on recent purchasers - or at least give me some cross-sell. I bought a hoodie, i don't need to see all the different hoodies I looked at earlier.

Also like to note, a quick URL check on analytics parameters -  and they're running through Criteo.

So Criteo - your targeting sucks.

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This is an interesting view of two ads that popped up in the right bar of my Facebook today in the lead up to Valentines.

#1 has missed the fact that I'm not listed as 'Single' on Facebook (unless this is inferred some other way) and also missed the fact that I am 'Interested In' Women. So, sorry not interested.

#2 have this Facebook targeting Spot On. This is a generic party, I've checked out the event page, it's an open event to a general party but they have selected an image that directly relates to my interests. It's also a 'Traffic Light' party so being single isn't a requirement.

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Seek doing a great job in responding to my queries and twitter appear to have missed the point.

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Currently sitting in Hong Kong airport looking at this after 10 days in Australia. I had been to New Zealand so I’m wondering is this twitters geotargeting fault? Or seek nz doing something wrong. Update: got some responses. See the next post for screenshots as I can't add them to this post on mobile.

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Thanks to my friend for this one, she works in SEO and London based but is getting lots of farming ads. Someone might want to look at some geo-targeting.

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Wow this is really bad Facebook targeting from Match,com

I presume they are using the Facebook ad-exchange, which is one of the reasons I think Facebook inventory on open exchanges is a BAD IDEA - seriously use the direct advertising and use my damn gender preference to give me ads, because right now I'm just thinking 'Gross, straight dating site' and I don't want to click on your ad at all.

With the targeting capabilities available on Facebook this kind of targeting is just unacceptable and I hope someone notices this shit targeting.

Seriously, this is crap. Pity Facebook changed their TOS - I miss the days they used to say you had to be explicitly listed as single to even be targeted for dating ads.

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More poor twitter ads.

Because 'Hosting Blues' are not a thing.

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A friend pointed this one out, A promoted tweet for Impulse (which is essentially the girl version of Lynx/Axe) targeting someone not interested in their product at all.

Now to be fair, ages aren't available in Twitter so it might be a bit tough for Impulse to reach those 13 year old girls. However you'd think they would select some more relevant interest targets.

At least they're not just broad-targeting females as I haven't seen them in my own timeline.

Also, does anyone think this is a really strange ad, why on earth would I care about a body spray for a girls night in of movies? Did I miss out on something in my teens?

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Facebook Again ...

Despite all the targeting options available with both FBX and Facebook itself Levi's looks like it has failed at one very basic concept - Geotargeting.

Producing relevant ad copy for a user should be Advertising 101 and targeting an ad that talks about spending Euro's to a UK user is just stupid.

This is Facebook, it's a text ad, how hard is it to update the copy and set up a second campaign with relevant ad-copy.

UPDATE:

I spotted that they fixed it:

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Yes I know I like it ....

For my first post I'd like to talk about Facebook.

Facebook has amazing amounts of data about users, it also has amazing amounts of impressions available both direct and via FBX.

Amazon.co.uk should also have loads of information about me, I shop with them fairly regularly.

So why does this ad suck? It's great, I love Hyperbole and a Half. It was fantastic because I didn't realise the book was coming out so soon!

So I clicked, actually I think I went to the website for Hyperbole and a Half the first time. Then I bought the book. Actually I bought two.

Now this ad is still sitting there, taunting me. Yes I know there is a book coming, I pre-ordered it. Why won't you go away now?

This could be direct marketing from Allie Brosh herself, or maybe the book publisher. In which case they probably don't have access to a conversion page to know I bought the book already.  It would be nice if Amazon had an option for people promoting their products for Amazon could have an option to collect this data though. (Can they, does anyone know?)

But if this is marketing from Amazon? This is really bad, it's basic e-commerce for something like this, negative target your conversions! Or is it on Pay Per Click so you're just going to keep bugging me?

Then on top of that with Facebook, I'm just thinking, why are you still serving me this ad? I don't click on it, Why don't you put something else there, something new and exciting I might actually like. 

So that's today's bad targeting, an ad that won't go away.

I'll probably complain about Facebook a lot. It's done so poorly for an environment that should be so rich for data to provide targeted ads.