So many Sense ads!

Has anyone else had their online advertising experience completely taken over by Sense? Since installing I’ve seen a Sense ad on almost every ad-containing website I visit. This morning a news website set a record with six ads for Sense scattered throughout the content.

This is starting to get annoying, not to mention bad business strategy since Sense only sells one product and I already own it!

I remember seeing a few more sense ads after I purchased but I had done a lot of research over a long period of time so it didn’t seem unusual. I know in general, I find it funny that the algorithms always seem to go nuts on an item after i purchase it - it seems like they’d be smart enough to show you ads for what you’re shopping for, not what you’ve already purchased.

Same here… …Used AdWords for business many times over the years before I’ve seen this activity on many personal purchases. Dunno how much is lost in ad impressions towards existing customers. Nature of the beast?
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Sorry about this, @luterra. I know you’d sent in a support ticket about this a while ago too!

We do try very hard to ensure our existing customers don’t get advertisements or sales emails from us, but occasionally someone slips through the cracks because they purchased on Amazon or through an installer or something like that. I think we’ve gotten your particular case straightened out @luterra, but as always, there may be a few days of advertising mayhem before it actual kicks in.

Sorry again, and if anyone else is experiencing this, please DM me with your email address!

Best,
Brad

Thanks for bringing this up, @luterra. For some time, I have wanted to get the message to Sense that they are wasting $ doing this.

It is common for some SEO or marketing company to sell a retargeting ad campaign to a company professing to increase sales. What they don’t measure or capture is the loss opportunity or sales because it pisses off so many who may be interested.

When I was researching electrical monitoring solutions and started doing research on Sense, I got so inundated with Ads -in stupid places that I wondered just how smart the Sense people actually were. I almost didn’t buy the system because of it.

BTW, since I purchased the system four months ago and am still getting these ads, I’m now convinced somebody at Sense does not know what they are doing. It now pisses me off more than ever. I get so angry that I’m often tempted to click on the ad in hopes I can blow their budget. They may think they are using AI to do better marketing, but in reality, it is DI (Dumb Intelligence) to pay for impressions to people who already purchased what you are trying to sell. You might as well buy an ad for the halftime in the super bowl.

Sorry @BradAtSense, don’t take this personally, but somebody needed to point this out and I’m pleased @luterra did.

I will DM Brad with my email address if that can get me off their list.

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This business with the ads popping up everywhere when you start shopping online for something has happened to me many times on my purchases. This is always annoying after I’ve made the purchase or decided not to. It is certainly not Sense’s fault, but the ad algorithms (Google). I haven’t tried it, but deleting your browser cookies could eliminate this problem. Ignoring the ads also works, but takes a good long time!

Ever since I read Tim Wu’s excellent history of advertising, The Attention Merchants, last year, I’ve been waging a bit of a war on ads. So far, this includes:

  1. Using Pi-Hole as a DNS sinkhole to block ads across our entire LAN, including on mobile devices and even within apps.
  2. Using the Brave browser on my phone, which blocks ads even when I’m on the cellular network.
  3. Using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, which doesn’t track users.
  4. Using the Privacy Badger extension from the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which blocks tracking in my desktop browser.

This combination works extremely well, to the point that I’m surprised when an ad sneaks through. It also breaks surprisingly few things; most apps and sites seem to be resilient to ads not loading.

I know it’s not great for those trying to sell things, but it makes my life a lot more sane.

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My Sense ad load has not actually decreased after whatever was changed, still constitutes ~50% of my total online ads, for some reason especially on news websites.

Sorry to hear that. Let me rope @BradAtSense back in on this.

Hi all, very sorry for the frustration here.

We’re still working with our ad vendors to try and come up with a full-proof way of ensuring that our customers aren’t targeted by our own advertisements. In the meantime, if they’re driving you nuts, I’d recommend clicking on the “Ad Choices” button in the top right hand corner of the ad when you see it. You should be able to opt-out of ads using that tool.

This article describes the process in a bit more depth:

Sorry again for the frustration. Hope that’s helpful!

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