[pretzel]

There are ads and then there are ads. One of the things that the company I work for, Qubit, does is to validate that the tracking tags that vendors put on people's websites drive an uplift. We talk about one of our clients doing it here [1]

While blindly targeting people using search engine "promoted searches" may not work for every impression, this does not take into account the ads that you see on other 3rd party sites - which is probably what people think of when they talk about "ads". Google's version of this is AdSense (as opposed to AdWords).

This is something that is quite easy to test, and we have seen that some really do work and some not so much.

But driving someone back to a website with an offer on something that they have added to their basket but not purchased, is one way to be sure that you are getting people buying after seeing your content. The problem then is to make sure you aren't cutting into your margins too much...

[1] http://www.qubitproducts.com/content/video/arcadia-video-cas...

[frik]

> But driving someone back to a website with an offer on something that they have added to their basket but not purchased, [...]

People like useful recommender engines (e.g. Amazon.com).

But not so personalized smart ads that follow them on every website the visit. What's wrong with the static ads that fit the targeted website category?

[cbsmith]

As per the article, there is more than a bit of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" reasoning in the above. Just because you seeing "people buying after seeing your content" doesn't mean the ads are working.