One of the hot topics of 2020 was how these “evil” companies like Facebook and Google are “stealing” everyones data. If you watched any of the congress hearings about User Privacy you also likely noticed one common theme; older people who work for the government having not the slightest clue what they are talking about. So here’s why “data mining” is helpful TO YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS...

Any company who has reached the level of running ads understands “Targeting”. Let me explain it like this; Here at BigBrandWholesale.com we primarily sell our merchandise to small online sellers; PoshMark, eBay, Amazon, etc. When we pay to run ads we do not want to pay to have our advertisements shown to 14 year olds interested in Fortnight skins or 65 year olds who are looking for tutorials on knitting scarves. What we want is to “Target” potential buyers… and the 14 year old as well as the 65 year old are not within our demographics. Equally, if our advertisement is about “2 Hour Local Pickup in Michigan” we don’t want to spend money on showing this ad to citizens of New Mexico, or Mexico for that matter. Instead we want to “Target” people within 30 miles of our warehouse.

Additionally, we do not want our ad shown to the CEO of Ford Motor Company, wealthy people who live in Beverly Hills, toddlers interested in nursery rhymes or senior citizen communities. We instead want our ads to be viewed by men and women, ages 24 to 45 who are INTERESTED in “reselling”. We want to show our ad to people who have already looked at wholesale websites or have Google Searched information abaout buying Liquidations.

Here’s a great example of my personal lack of understanding about data:

The very first ad I ever ran was through Facebook. It was a very long time ago and back then I had absolutely no comprehension regarding the importance of “targeting”. I ended up spending $400 in A DAY for literally NOTHING, all because I chose to run the ad to anyone, anywhere. My fault…. 100% my fault.

After my financial drain, I took a break from advertising after that but eventually I went back to it. This time I researched and learned. This time around I used Google Analytics to learn about my buyers; I learned their age, sex, interests, income levels and more. I was able to use this VALUABLE DATA to compose a new ad that specifically catered to them. This time around I was able to score lots of “likes”, “follows” and sales too!

Over the next 5 years I really focused on learning, and learning, and…. Learning. Eventually I knew my demographic inside and out. I learned how to run “A/B Ad Campaigns” to see what works and what doesn’t. I took that data and refined it over and over. Now when I run an ad I know exactly what I am doing and the ads are almost always highly successful; of course there is an occasional fail here and there. But at the end of the day, all of the success has come from…. *drumroll*.... DATA!!!!!! So, if you take away the websites ability to capture data about their users, you are also taking away the company's opportunity to advertise in a Targeted manner. Without targeting you will be running the same ad I did when I blew through $400 in a day and ended up with nothing more than a $400 waste of money.

If companies are forced to show their ad to the pre-K student who is watching Peppa Pig on YouTube or the citizen of Belize who has never even owned a winter coat, this creates substantial loss for the company, which means the company will completely stop advertising. Equally, this means a buyer is never going to discover the awesome, family wholesale company from Michigan who is selling exactly what they want and even ships it for free.

On that note; you may *think* that by eliminating data collection you will eliminate advertisements; this simply is not true.  Ads will always exist; the question becomes "would you rather see ads that INTEREST you or random ads that are even more annoying because they're stuff you would never buy?"  If you love crafting, I can assure you that you are much more interested in ads about crafting than ads about the new football jerseys or extreme sport fishing. AND, by seeing advertisements about crafts you might even find a company who sells the garment glue you love to buy for a fraction of the price, whereas if you are consistently shown ads about Monster Trucks and hot bikini model calendars, your overall experience is going to be dull.  

By not collecting data, everyone loses at the end of the day. So the answer isn't eliminating data collection, the answer is to make people aware of the data that is being collected and make sure they understand what specifically the data is being used for.