Because the fault here doesn't lie with ML, but with errors of judgment made by humans when setting up the targeting demographics for their ads.
There's still a lot of anti-data sentiment in the paid ad industry, where media buyers will guide themselves by what they think their customer looks like, and not what data tells them it is.
And until this is a fixed behavior, you'll keep on seeing untargeted ads.
I've been following your blog for quite a while now, and I enjoy it a lot.
Are there any other link-blogs that you recommend? (besides the usual ones like kottke, etc..)
Oh thank you and yes, link blogs - the biggest one for me right now is at imperica.com. The weekly 'web curios' roundup. I link this one a lot, so apologies if you've seen it already. (And I'm sure you mean Waxy in the 'usual' ones, right?)
It's an interactive database of the top 100 Shopify stores, with 19+ e-commerce data points available for each one.
I'm really happy that the average time spent on the website is over 4 minutes and 30 seconds - I never expected people to be this interested, so now I'm thinking of ways to expand this idea.
+1 to this solution.
I've been using Carrd for small landing pages ever since this summer, as it is so easy to set up and use - in less than an hour you will probably have a highly-polished mockup.
And once you get the hang of it, it takes less than 15 minutes.
But consider that in Instagram's case, it's most likely just an attempt at discrediting "influencers" - which are a big parallel marketplace of ads occurring on Facebook's property without any return for the main company.
This is 100% correct, but this list is more about knowing if some ad platform can be a good place to launch ads to a cold audience (that are more targeted for the product) - because, after a while, every single one of the 6 ad platforms allow for lookalike audiences and those will be much more profitable.
Just having all the targeting options under one dashboard is already a very significant improvement in the strategy step that any PPC manager must think about.
All the stress and energy spent going back and forth between ad platforms really only favors the installed players.
