Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

kalkis-research.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 195 posts

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#181

Post by Udik »

manigandham wrote: post #171
Udik wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. I'm not saying that the advertisers are wasting their money. I'm saying that it seems that both the advertisers and the ads network could have made more money with a better targeting. At least in my case, they've wasted the cost of the impression and the potential gain from showing a more relevant ad in that space. And this is probably happening millions of times a day.

It is, but the cost of better targeting gets exponential more expensive. Also people complain about targeting and tracking and delete cookies so there's that whole situation (which really only hurts them by giving them worse ads).

> It is, but the cost of better targeting gets exponential more expensive.

Does it? I don't see why. It's not like you have to manually go through the data.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#182

Post by shimn »

adwf wrote: post #121

I've always been a bit baffled by why it's called ad-fraud online, but nowhere else. You don't call it fraud if your TV ad is aired and I miss it because I'm making a cup of tea. No matter how many viewers you were told the show has. It's not fraud if I don't notice your roadside billboard because I'm focusing on driving. No matter how many cars you were told drive by. Advertising has always been a crapshoot with a l…

I was under the impression that ad fraud was more seen as how those sites put 6 iframe windows of ads one on top of another so while they were all loaded and "seen" by visiter, only one of them was visible. The main thrust of ad fraud was "this ad cannot possibly be seen by a consumer". As with all things, some may pervert the definition for gain but on the whole: you'd call it fraud if you paid for a billboard and the company put up your ad but then plastered somebody else's ad on top of it.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#183

Post by manigandham »

Udik wrote: post #181
manigandham wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but the cost of better targeting gets exponential more expensive. Also people complain about targeting and tracking and delete cookies so there's that whole situation (which really only hurts them by giving them worse ads).

> It is, but the cost of better targeting gets exponential more expensive. Does it? I don't see why. It's not like you have to manually go through the data.

What magic data is there? As I said, there are privacy concerns which are already limiting the quality/quantity of data available and leading to more generic ads. Outside of that, it takes ever more data and the required storage, processing and algorithms to derive exactly what your intent is.

You can look at any algorithm problem and see the decreasing returns (netflix recommendations are a good example). This industry is not full of idiots, there are thousands of data scientists and researchers working on this. If it was that easy, it would already be done.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#184

Post by adwf »

shimn wrote: post #182
adwf wrote: post #121

I've always been a bit baffled by why it's called ad-fraud online, but nowhere else. You don't call it fraud if your TV ad is aired and I miss it because I'm making a cup of tea. No matter how many viewers you were told the show has. It's not fraud if I don't notice your roadside billboard because I'm focusing on driving. No matter how many cars you were told drive by. Advertising has always been a crapshoot with a l…

I was under the impression that ad fraud was more seen as how those sites put 6 iframe windows of ads one on top of another so while they were all loaded and "seen" by visiter, only one of them was visible. The main thrust of ad fraud was "this ad cannot possibly be seen by a consumer". As with all things, some may pervert the definition for gain but on the whole: you'd call it fraud if you paid for a billboard and t…

Yeah, and the world would be better off without that, but it's incredibly hard to detect.

My point however, is that it is already factored into the price. When a TV station says this show has 10 million viewers, the advertisers understand that it's actually only 5 million who are going to be watching their ad, because of channel flipping, fast-forwarding, cups of tea, etc. It is already an understood factor in the pricing. Whereas online, they don't appear to want to make the same concession towards bots/iframes and so on.

You could argue, particularly for free-to-air TV channels, that anyone not watching the ads is breaking the "social contract" and defrauding the station. That's the exact same argument that Wired makes when they block adblocking readers.

There's always a percentage of your ad buy that will go completely unseen offline. It's no different online.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#185

Post by sgoraya »

endymi0n wrote: post #32

What a load of BS. From all the demand side platforms I've dealt with, Google is by far the most serious about fraud prevention. They realized early on that while fraud boosts their short term revenue, they'd have a massive PR problem afterwards if this stuff continues. Nobody's vetting both publishers and advertisers as extensively as Google, their automatic ad verification and fraud prevention algorithms are top no…

> Google is by far the most serious about fraud prevention.

I agree - they've had 'Verification' in DFA > DCM > DDM and the associated tools and reports keep getting better. And if you have ReportBuilder skills, you can really ID and find discrepant/fraudulent data.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#186

Post by goldbrick »

Udik wrote: post #138
goldbrick wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You contradict yourself. > Advertisers in turn pay Google because it makes them sell more. > Taking the money of the advertisers and not boosting their sales doesn't pay on the long run. Which is it, advertising on Google boosts sales or no?

> You contradict yourself. No. Please try to understand what I wrote.

No. What you wrote does not make sense.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#187

Post by novaleaf »

fireworks10 wrote: post #126
novaleaf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article may be hype, but the Google Adwords monopoly is very real and I wish it died. I run a SaaS startup (PhantomJsCloud) and tried adwords. No advertising competition, and targeted very specific actionable search queries. Google charges upward of $5.00/click. I can understand they want to cut spammers saturating every random search query, but how am I going to get a positive RoI on that kind of cost?

AdWords determines your ad's AdRank by its Quality Score (expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience) in addition to your cpc bid. Perhaps you had a low quality score (below 8), so Google requested a higher CPC to compensate?

thanks for the input, yeah I think I need to do more "inbound marketing" before attempting adwords (display). I have a 4 to 6 quality score, and nothing is displayed unless the CPC is astronomical.

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#188

Post by novaleaf »

calbear81 wrote: post #179
novaleaf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article may be hype, but the Google Adwords monopoly is very real and I wish it died. I run a SaaS startup (PhantomJsCloud) and tried adwords. No advertising competition, and targeted very specific actionable search queries. Google charges upward of $5.00/click. I can understand they want to cut spammers saturating every random search query, but how am I going to get a positive RoI on that kind of cost?

Have you done the calculation on conversion rate you would need at your current SAAS subscription cost to find out how much you could afford to pay per click?

yeah, and it's a lot less than $5! basically I had to stop adwords display ads. It doesn't seem to be usable by startups with non-traditional keywords, at least until I SEO the site more (then will try again)

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#189

Post by taneq »

red_admiral wrote: post #55
coredog64 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least with Amazon, when I search for a gag gift, I can tell them later to ignore my page view for recommendations. I would love ability for same with Google.

If you know in advance that you're about to search for a gag gift, open a new private browsing window.

Yeah, these days I use a private window if I'm searching for anything that would throw off my normal profile. That plus adblock means it hasn't been an issue for a really long time so maybe it's better these days.

I just always found it really annoying when I'd spend a couple of days researching a purchase, and then for the next month I was getting ads for the thing I'd just bought. I don't need one of those any more, I've got one!

Re: Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble

#190

Post by shostack »

ssharp wrote: post #51
Udik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish" Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics. I'm a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend m…

A few comments on this: 1) The company might be better off capping their impressions to you. 2) The company might be better off focusing on setting their remarketing pixels further down the funnel (unless you entered their funnel as part of the process). 3) How do you reasonably expect the company to treat you differently than they do actual leads? I'll assume the majority of traffic that goes to their website is int…

Thanks for bringing some sanity to these comments. These sorts of articles tend to bring out those who know absolutely nothing about the space or how it works. That said, this reminds me I need to build an exclusion list for our jobs page ;)
Post reply on HN