It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about. Sure, you may be interested in buying fishing gear, but not while reading an article about Tour De France.
One of the reasons Google have been able to make a ton of money on ads on google.com is because they are able to deliver contextual ads based on you search. Google isn't using targeted ads on google.com. Think about that for a second. The worlds most visited site and largest ad company is NOT displaying ads based on tracking users on their own main site. They are showing you contextual ads.
Search for "cement" on Google, you're not getting ads for the washing machine you looked at on another site yesterday. Google most likely have the data to target you and show you washing machine ads, but they choose to show you an ad relevant to your search.
Are we really surprised that contextual ads might generate more revenue?
They have more context of what you're after and what's more effective + the ad keywords limit the audience. But in your situation if there's any crossover between washing machines and cement that will bring clicks, you can be sure they know about it and will serve it.
That's a fair point, the ads are almost always localized at least. Still they're also not random, they are related to your search.
You don't really need much more that a GeoIP database to figure out where in the world you user is coming from, and that should be enough to deal with the location targeting. I'm not sure you'd need much more information about the users than that.
But they're still incredibly targeted. They're not just using info from your search, although that information is highly relevant in choosing what ad to display.
Retargeting is one of the stupidest things on the Internet that actually works, there's statistics on that. The only thing that's stupider is email spam where one hit justifies a million misses.
Something similar happens here as I understand it: in one out of N cases you may have added the thing to the shopping cart but didn't pay. Another possibility is that you might actually want to buy another one. Though this leads to comical situations like [1] but advertisers have no time figuring out which items are less likely to be purchased repeatedly. But then you might think of purchasing another toilet seat for your other bathroom after all, so... :)
One of the reasons Google have been able to make a ton of money on ads on google.com is because they are able to deliver contextual ads based on you search. Google isn't using targeted ads on google.com. Think about that for a second. The worlds most visited site and largest ad company is NOT displaying ads based on tracking users on their own main site. They are showing you contextual ads.
Search for "cement" on Google, you're not getting ads for the washing machine you looked at on another site yesterday. Google most likely have the data to target you and show you washing machine ads, but they choose to show you an ad relevant to your search.
Are we really surprised that contextual ads might generate more revenue?