Well it's a big question.
if all you show me are things that I've already searched, do I ever learn of new things?
In this example, Canadian Tire already potentially had me as a customer. Wouldn't they be better spending time on trying to get people that didn't know they sold product X?
The only reason i see Canadian tire ads is that I went there online. If I didn't go there and instead went to Lowe's, I'd be seeing Lowe's ads. Canadian tire wouldn't have an opportunity to market to me in this scenario since Lowe's has my cookies.
They are spending a lot of energy essentially pestering me with ad after ad when I am already most likely a customer. I'm not sure that's good value for them.
Maybe the metric looks good in that I will eventually buy that leaf blower but to be honest, they are the exclusive dealer for that brand and I'm just waiting for it to go on sale. I would buy anyways. So I would question the integrity of the numbers.
I don't know, it's like if you only get your news from a single outlet, you miss out on other views.
One of the best ways to get my attention isn't to chase me around the internet but come up with something funny. Folks don't mind the Super Bowl advertising even if they aren't interested in the product.
Alot of the new algorithms for ads will work on predictive methodologies, like "if user looked at boat websites, target user for boat trailer ads" - its going to get much much more complex than that, but that sort of logic to hit users before they are shopping for the item.
There's also smaller area geotargeting coming, so like "if user's device is in Leaside neighbourhood, target for Leaside real estate ads" - there's a natural issue in targeting people who were incidentally in that area rather than interested in the area, but there's some neat things that can be done as those areas get smaller especially if they can be combined with other demographical information
I agree on the funny route - I run the advertising dept for my family company which is Canada's biggest mover, last summer shot a commercial using my two nephews to highlight the dangers of using super cheap kijiji movers that poked fun, it got really good reception
So now we'll just get ads from people who can afford to out spend the other guys on advertisements..
well sort of, most of the social media platforms and all of the search engines work on an auction basis for selling their advertising, so the market does set itself in terms of pricing, but not every impression goes to the absolute highest bidder. There are forces on both sides of the supply and demand though: There's an ever-expanding pool of impressions to sell as we spend more time on our devices, so the supply is rising and social media commands a lot of it so Google doesn't have a monopoly at all.
Demand is largely driven by each advertisers budget, which is almost unilaterally determined as a percentage of their revenue, so its not like Walmart/Home Depot/McDonalds can buy up an endless supply of impressions to squeeze out the little guys.
My company has about 25 locations across Canada, and we're really big in an industry that doesn't have any really big companies but we're nowhere near the economic giants that exist in retail, banking, communications, etc. We've never had an issue in competing for impressions, and much of the competition is within your own industry because not every company is relevant to every user all the time, you target to try to get the right person at the right time
It's also in the best interests of the search engine/social media platform to present the most useful ads to you - you as a user are more likely to feel good about using their platform which makes you more likely to use again/use more heavily which gives them more inventory to sell, and the companies paying to advertise are more likely to continue spending money if they're getting customers