“Retargeting” — showing you ads for something you’ve looked for at some online store even as you visit other sites, in the hope that the reminder will persuade you to complete the purchase — is a common marketing practice. But Amazon’s outsized inventory and the time many of us spend there can make its retargeted ads more obvious and obnoxious than most.
I realized this firsthand a few weeks ago, when a few searches to check prices for a toilet seat left me staring at Amazon photos of toilet seats through the rest of the evening’s Web reading.
You can avoid this problem by doing your online shopping in a private-browsing or incognito-mode window. But it’s easy to forget to do that when you have 10 different pages open in tabs in your browser and you’re also switching between the Web, e-mail and other apps.
Instead, you can tell Amazon to stop sending you ads based on your shopping habits.
Read on to find out how to disable this. Thanks to Rob Pegoraro for pointing this out. I get so annoyed when I see things I’ve searched for in Amazon ads on other sites.