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Everything you need to know about advertising technology

Understanding what behinds Facebook or Google ads

Nam Nguyen
9 min readMay 1, 2020

Have you ever been interrupted by an ad scrolling your Facebook newsfeed? Are you sick of waiting 5 seconds for an unskippable commercial before watching your favorite video on Youtube? That’s what advertising technology (ad tech) is doing. It forces people to view those ads, to interact with those promotions, and overall, to convert.

The number of views, clicks, displays, installs, and sales are vital metrics to ad tech, and they’ll pay any price to trigger those behaviors from end-users. If you like a fashion-related page, Facebook knows you might be interested in buying clothes, shoes, bags, etc. When you type “cheap Bluetooth headphones” on Google search, you will probably click on an announcement of a discount wireless headphone later on. This information is recorded in their gigantic database, and it is permanent even if you choose to opt-out.

Ad tech is not evil. Why should I bother if Facebook shows a relevant ad to me? Some say Google and Facebook know us better than we know ourselves, and that’s true. Once you set foot in the digital landscape, you’ll leave traces.

The traditional model

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Nam Nguyen
Nam Nguyen

Written by Nam Nguyen

Engineer by day, writer by night. Write a draft like no one is watching. Edit the draft as if the whole world is going to read it.

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