Why Does the Internet Try to Sell You a Wedding Dress Right After You Buy a Wedding Dress?

When online ads don’t realize you’ve just bought the thing they’re advertising.

Right now, Facebook is showing me ads for a set of wineglasses I saw on Amazon this morning. Tumblr is giving me an ad for Ellevest because I just visited their site to unsubscribe from their emails. When I clicked on the Racked article we’re going to discuss today, I saw ads for Safeway grocery delivery, which I looked into last month and decided was too expensive, and WealthSimple, probably because of the article Megan wrote last week about WealthSimple interviewing a nun who took a vow of poverty.

But back to Racked. Chaia Milstein looks at why we see the ads we do, and why the ads sometimes seem laughably misguided:

Why You Constantly See Ads for Stuff You Already Bought

It all started with my wedding dress.

I bought it on Modcloth. Not even a minute post-purchase, I started seeing ads for it around the web. Especially on Facebook.

Who the fuck needs to buy a second, exact same wedding dress right away?

When I saw this headline, I assumed that it would be some kind of goof along the lines of “well, the best customer is a repeat customer, but online ads can’t distinguish between items you buy repeatedly and items you only buy once.” That’s not the case. Yes, every brand hopes to turn you into the type of superfan that will plaster their products all over social media. But that’s not why you get ads for the stuff you just bought.

“I saw ads for a good three months after I bought a couch,” says Racked senior editor Alanna Okun. She bought it from West Elm, in the store, after extensive research. “It was only after I bought it that I started seeing ads for it all the time,” she says. “Why didn’t they know I’d bought it already?” Okun was actively shopping online for couch accoutrements — throw pillows, an ottoman, a coffee table. Why wouldn’t West Elm market those to her instead?

Part of this has to do with a lack of communication between devices. If you browse for a particular item on both your phone and your laptop but only purchase it on your laptop, your phone thinks you might still want it. (I am astonished that we haven’t solved this problem yet.)

The other part—well, you’ll have to read the whole Racked story for that, but let’s just say it’s complicated. Everyone is trying to optimize their ads, as well as their shopping carts and their sales funnels and everything else, and because all of those pages are constantly shifting and changing and getting A/B tested, sometimes the sites and/or ads forget that you just bought something.

These ads are very good at regurgitating stuff we’ve looked at online, but they don’t yet know how to contextualize this information. They don’t know that you’ve already bought a wedding dress, or that I’m not interested in paying $12.95 for Safeway grocery delivery. In fact, because I went to the grocery delivery site to confirm the delivery fee, they now assume I want it more.

And yes, to assume is to make an ad out of you and me.

Also, I just clicked on Slate and it showed me an ad for the Crocs Isabella sandals I bought in April.

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