Mods, please move if not the appropriate venue.
Browsing on my iPad and iPhone, it seems like almost half the ads are “How Older Men Tighten Their Skin.” I’m 62, so I’m the correct demographic, but I never searched for anything remotely related to skin tightening. How is this happening?
But you have searched for other things, and looked at other sites. It’s almost impossible to figure out what cues the advertisers used without harvesting as much data about you as they have, but somewhere in your history, there are clues that you’re an old man. And they’ve gotten very good at putting those clues together.
I was going to rail at you for the “old man” jibe, but I have to paint the rumpus room.
Seriously, I must be naive, but I don’t post a lot of personal details online. I do Facebook, is that the likely culprit?
You don’t have to post stuff actually. It’s where you visit.
Did you visit a site that gives retirement money management advice? IRAs? 401(k)?
In fact did you visit any money management site? People generally don’t get interested until middle age or older.
Did you visit a certain ignorance-fighting message board where the median age of visitors is probably around 70?
If you want to fight it, start visiting video-game boards and women’s wear retailers.
If you use Facebook, then that alone could account for it completely. Remember: Facebook knows everything that you’ve told them.
I see ads focusing on a town 30 miles away, across the water, and others that think I live on the island near that town. Occasionally, though, they do get within a couple miles of here.
And remember when you signed up, and they asked you what year you were born?
I am getting ads for the July 1st election here.
On the SDMB.
I am sure it has do with my location.
When you say “browsing” I assume you mean visiting websites and that means cookies. Cookies can track and report every website you visit. It doesn’t take much of a surfing history to tell if you are male or female and if you’re a “senior” or not.
If you’ve ever clicked on an ad for a “seniors” type product, then that “impression” has been tracked, even if you leave the page without buying anything.
It’s hard to comprehend the amount of data that marketers have available to them.
Don’t forget that Google (a company that arguably has the most computing power in the world) is an advertising company and the amount of stuff they track is friggin scary. Add all that data to the fact that they have the best minds in AI creating software to analyze it and it’s mind boggling what they can know about you.
My gf wanted me to buy a portapotty for our pontoon boat. I found three possibilities and sent Amazon links to her personal email account for her to review.
Hours later she was leading a meeting at her ad agency. She projected her laptop view of several clients’ webpages and all the ads being served were about portapotties.
What I find especially amusing is that, for a month or so, about half of the ads I was seeing were for… me. As in, for products that I, myself, was selling. Yes, I do know about those, thank you, but I don’t think I would be going through my shop to get one. Though it was a bit of an ego boost the first time, before I realized what was happening.
I still get a lot of ads from that same site, but at least they’re not for my own products.