I had no idea retargeting even was a thing, until one particular ad kept repeatedly showing up.
When my grandmother died last year we looked up the website for a cremation service to find their phone number. Then for the next week or so I kept seeing banner ads for the same cremation service all over the web, on completely unrelated sites.
I would expect to see a cremation service ad on an obituary page, maybe a local newspaper, etc. I would not expect to see it on, say, a tech blog or an Android user forum. And I could consistently refresh threads on that forum and keep seeing that particular ad from that same company. Maybe it was the nature of the service advertised and my frame of mind at the time I was seeing it, but I was really creeped out.
I cleared cookies and it stopped. At that point I realized that the advertiser was doing something in particular to tell Google that I visited their site and to start throwing ads at me elsewhere. I checked out the AdWords docs to see how they were doing this and figure out how to opt out.
I don't know how long this has been a service offered by Google. Up until that one instance I likely had countless ads retargeted at me, and I may have even clicked such ads. And it works great until one instance where I'm creeped the heck out and I push back.
What makes this worse is that you'll get the same ad used across the entire page. If one wasn't enough, why not have another in the middle of a paragraph, and at the top of the page, and down the sidebar, and at the bottom, and above the comments?
Why not show me several retargeted ads? If I don't click one, I'm not going to click one of the other dozen copies on the page, so why not put something else relevant there?
As it stands, viewing a retargeted advert on an ad-heavy page is like being mithered by an annoying child. "Buy this buy this buy this buy this!"
(Curiously I appear to have opted out, but I still get this retargeting stuff.)
When it started happening to me I was more or less indifferent other than to think: "why are they showing me an endless stream of ads for things I'm already a customer of?". I have more disposable income, so show me something new ferchrissakes.
That's another case I saw it. A year and a half ago I bought a cruise ticket from Holland America, and next thing I know I'm seeing Holland America ads across the internet.
At the time I thought they were just doing an ad blitz, because it was the time of year when people plan vacations for the summer ahead and might consider going on cruises. In hindsight it seems silly for them to spend money displaying ads to me, when I've already paid (a substantial sum of money) for their product.
It wasn't until the funeral service ads that I realized I was being targeted for having visited specific websites.
Almost exactly the same thing happened to me. That's when I installed Adblock and Ghostery. (Hmm, I should install Ghostery in this browser, actually...)
When my grandmother died last year we looked up the website for a cremation service to find their phone number. Then for the next week or so I kept seeing banner ads for the same cremation service all over the web, on completely unrelated sites.
I would expect to see a cremation service ad on an obituary page, maybe a local newspaper, etc. I would not expect to see it on, say, a tech blog or an Android user forum. And I could consistently refresh threads on that forum and keep seeing that particular ad from that same company. Maybe it was the nature of the service advertised and my frame of mind at the time I was seeing it, but I was really creeped out.
I cleared cookies and it stopped. At that point I realized that the advertiser was doing something in particular to tell Google that I visited their site and to start throwing ads at me elsewhere. I checked out the AdWords docs to see how they were doing this and figure out how to opt out.
I don't know how long this has been a service offered by Google. Up until that one instance I likely had countless ads retargeted at me, and I may have even clicked such ads. And it works great until one instance where I'm creeped the heck out and I push back.