I suspect the entire "show users ads based on their browsing history" simply doesn't work. I don't recall ever being interested in any of the ads targeted at me.
What works for me is, I buy "Mopar Action" magazine for the ads. Back in the day I bought computer mags for the ads. And so on. Those ads were targeted at what I was actually interested in at the moment.
For another example, recently I've become interested in Film Noir movies. I go looking for them, and I get ads based on my interests last month. No sale. I look at Film Noir websites, and I want to see Film Noir movie ads, not movies I was interested in months ago. If I look at a woodworking web page, I want to see ads for woodworking tools.
On my own web pages on programming, I wish Google and Amazon would run ads based on the page content. Amazon has a way to suggest that, and I tried it out. All it would serve for weeks was Batman movie ads. Why would anyone looking at a programming page want to see Batman movie ads? I finally just disabled the Amazon ads. It's similar with Google ads.
Note that serving relevant ads in this manner has absolutely no requirement to know my browsing history.
P.S. I actually still run Amazon ads on my programming pages. However, I don't let Amazon pick the product anymore. I pick it myself, and my page generation program picks one of those products for each page. The products I pick are from a self-curated list of the best programming books available.
What works for me is, I buy "Mopar Action" magazine for the ads. Back in the day I bought computer mags for the ads. And so on. Those ads were targeted at what I was actually interested in at the moment.
For another example, recently I've become interested in Film Noir movies. I go looking for them, and I get ads based on my interests last month. No sale. I look at Film Noir websites, and I want to see Film Noir movie ads, not movies I was interested in months ago. If I look at a woodworking web page, I want to see ads for woodworking tools.
On my own web pages on programming, I wish Google and Amazon would run ads based on the page content. Amazon has a way to suggest that, and I tried it out. All it would serve for weeks was Batman movie ads. Why would anyone looking at a programming page want to see Batman movie ads? I finally just disabled the Amazon ads. It's similar with Google ads.
Note that serving relevant ads in this manner has absolutely no requirement to know my browsing history.
P.S. I actually still run Amazon ads on my programming pages. However, I don't let Amazon pick the product anymore. I pick it myself, and my page generation program picks one of those products for each page. The products I pick are from a self-curated list of the best programming books available.