Comment by lelandbatey

The term for this that I heard is:

> Advertising as inference not influence.

People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".

You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.