this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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[–] snooggums@piefed.world 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It is like encouragement for the thing you were already likely to do, which is the goal of targeted advertising.

Now if you purchased something, then got the ads afterwards and they counted it retroactively then they would be abusing it. I'm 99% sure they do that.

[–] theparadox@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago

It is like encouragement for the thing you were already likely to do, which is the goal of targeted advertising.

It's the claim of targeted advertising. The person I saw talking about this actually ran the numbers, comparing two very similar geographic markets. In market A they paid for advertising, but in B they did not.

When comparing market A to market B, market A had a marginal increase in sales for the advertised product vs. market B. However, they were charged for orders of magnitude more conversions than the actual increase in sales.

The idea is that when compared to something like actual click-through purchases, where a user literally clicks on an ad and then buys a product, it's extremely deceptive.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 7 points 23 hours ago

Now if you purchased something, then got the ads afterwards and they counted it retroactively then they would be abusing it. I'm 99% sure they do that.

That explains everything!

No doubt their ads are monthly/quarterly purchases. So Google reports the end of month "conversions" when in reality it's ads shown during the month but happened after the sale.