I don't know how this shit works. But earlier this month I was showing my girlfriend a Halloween costume I googled on my phone. I visited the website for maybe 10 seconds, I did not log in or create an account. A few days later I got an email from PayPal offering me a $5 coupon for that website. WTFFFF. It made me want to go full-nuclear on the privacy front.
For those who are referencing tracking pixels and say this isn't anything new, it's important to understand that this is the next evolution of that technology as a result of government regulations around privacy and browser/OS ecosystem changes from Google, Apple, and Mozilla. This data transfer won't occur at the browser layer for much longer - it won't be as technically feasible without cookies and it may not be legal given consent/opt-out requirements. Instead the data will pass directly from the advertiser's server to the ad platform's server. Of course this tech has existed for a long time - it's a basic API call - but it hasn't been widely adopted in the ad tech industry, while millions of websites are using tracking pixels.<p>It is not a 1:1 replacement for tracking pixels and lacks some of those creepy features (you're unlikely to get tagged if you simply browse a website without giving up any personal info), but it offers new ones as well (the ability to send arbitrary data to an ad platform).
Oh, I remember this, from like 2000 (in CGI/Perl). Did it this way for ages then there was this ground-breaking company for ads called "DoubleClick" (I think) that did it all with cookies and js. Wonder whatever happened to them.
How in the world does this satisfy the advertisers? They send the personal identifying details of each customer to Google/FB, and then Google/FB tells them "oh yeah, that guy totally saw an ad"? The ad giants would never lie about such a thing... they will just fix all of the bugs that under report and just not have the time to get to all of those pesky over-reporting bugs.
I have this setup for our clients on FB.<p>The reported ROAS is all over the place on FB right now. It goes from previously 1 = 100% return on investment. Now it sometimes says 10X numbers like 70, which I assume is of the data they could measure 70% roi.<p>It seems to 'automagically' combine the offline conversion data with standard FBQ but I have no idea the match rates for the server-server data I send in and also importantly if it de-dupes.<p>I've tried to experiment with voting data in the past, I want to try that more this election. Run get out the vote ads and optimize for actual early votes.
> “The server-side option was built as part of our ongoing work to give advertisers more control over their users’ data,” said a Google spokesperson<p>Wait. Whose data is it, Google?