Comment by porridgeraisin
4 days ago
Depending on the data you collect, targeting by user - unfortunately - works. If the granularity is not one user, it will be a hundred. If not, a thousand, and so on. I've seen apps run ads targeting a total of 5 cohorts(together holding a hundred million users), and I've seen companies run ads targeting 100s of cohorts with the same number of users. They all work better than no targeting at all.
However what you're saying isn't completely wrong. I've also seen user targeting become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens is that it's championed by a high level executive as the panacea for improving revenue, implemented, and seen to not work. Now, as we all now, the C*O is Always Correct, so everything else around it is modified until the user-level targeting A/B test shows positive results. Usually this ends up in the product being tortured into an unusable mess.
Before you target 5 different cohorts it's better to target the context of where the ad is shown. i.e. web content normally already has a category and people reading an article about cheap flats in a city might be very much interested in renting or buying a flat. By collecting signals on a user you might only get that interested after a longer time, if you even have a profile, and by the time you pick it up they might have a new flat and are no longer interested.
Yes definitely. User level targeting comes after targeting particular ad spaces in some ad platforms. But it still adds enough marginally to be useful.