Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless • Hacker News Board

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#91

Post by gk1 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:31 AM UTC

Gustomaximus wrote: post #24

I see these posts all the time of DIY Adwords/FB and then a claim it doesn't work. This would be like me, a non-carpenter, trying to build a house, seeing how bad it looks and then claiming building materials suck. There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. So because Adwords/FB didn't work for you doesn't mean their traffic is 90% useless. And dont get me wrong, I completely acknowledge there…

Here's a more familiar analogy: Imagine a marketer cobbling a bunch of [pick your language] code together with help from StackOverflow and, when it fails or runs slow, declaring that [language] code is slow and useless with some recorded execution times as evidence.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#92

Post by leatherdaddy » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:39 AM UTC

rdslw wrote: post #60

WalterSear wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last company, we worked with Google's in-house team to build adword campaigns, eventually spending the better part of a million dollars over the course of 9 months or so, with free assistance from them in the development of campaigns and with their ongoing guidance and advice. From our meetings with them, they were quite confident that our strategy was appropriate, that there existed an audience that we could r…

Can you name the company?

Theranos

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#93

Post by bebop22 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:43 AM UTC

Agree with this post. Approximately 90% bots in our FB ad network acquisitions. It's a total scam.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#94

Post by DougN7 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:44 AM UTC

abalashov wrote: post #23

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about whic…

Make sure you control which countries your ads can show in. 90% of my budget for high tech equipment was getting spent in Bangladesh. Pure fraud. Once you start clamping down a LOT, results can get better.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#95

Post by somid3 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:47 AM UTC

DougN7 wrote: post #94

abalashov wrote: post #23

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about whic…

Make sure you control which countries your ads can show in. 90% of my budget for high tech equipment was getting spent in Bangladesh. Pure fraud. Once you start clamping down a LOT, results can get better.

For the US market, I'd love to see a breakdown of visitors via Google and Facebook and see what % of them use an IP that is associated with a VPN.

If the % is high, then there is a case to be made that most of the clicks are from abroad VPNing into the US.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#96

Post by somid3 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:48 AM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #85

abalashov wrote: post #23

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about whic…

What proportion of your prospects do you guess are running an adblocker?

Thats irrelevant since I'm analyzing clicks from Google and Facebook and then looking at their movements via Fullstory. How does an adblocker alter that process?

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#97

Post by oblib » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:51 AM UTC

I haven't use google ads in years but I did study my logs and watched them in real time and came to the conclusion they were either hitting me with bots or foreigners getting paid to click their ads. It was blatant theft in my opinion.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#98

Post by abalashov » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 12:53 AM UTC

DougN7 wrote: post #94

abalashov wrote: post #23

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about whic…

Make sure you control which countries your ads can show in. 90% of my budget for high tech equipment was getting spent in Bangladesh. Pure fraud. Once you start clamping down a LOT, results can get better.

Indeed; I limited my impressions to the USA and a handful of developed nations, as well as a handful of middle income countries I know to be good markets for my product.

Bangladesh didn't make the cut. :-)

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#99

Post by neya » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 1:00 AM UTC

I recently started writing a book on programming and set-up a landing page for it, to do a pre-launch campaign and I set up some ads on Facebook.

Fortunately, I work in the Analytics industry, so I set-up scroll tracking on my website using Google Tag Manager and started noticing the same patterns as the author as well. Just so to add on to the author, I even excluded the top fraud-prone countries (Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, etc.)

In effect, the only pre-orders I've gotten are from Amazon's own internal organic advertising combined with my personal Social media posts. I tried increasing the budget, but that didn't work out either.

Mind you, I track almost every important action on my site (click a button, fill in a form, etc.). The behaviour of these "bots" are very strange and the only thing I've gained in this gamble is an ultra high bounce rate (~90%, < 2 seconds session duration) like the author. Again, I feel it's too early for me to conclude that these networks are useless as I keep reading posts from other people saying Facebook works extraordinarily well for them.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#100

Post by Steve_Moneytis » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 1:00 AM UTC

It depends on what you want the new users to do. Ads mostly bring visitors who don't know about your company. If you are in a business where branding or trust is important, it's more difficult. If you are in a commodity business where prices matter, I think it's easier.

That's normal they have a different behavior. Comparing Google Ads and Facebook Ads is hard as there is a user behavior difference between them.

- Visitors from Google Ads often have a purchase intent - Visitors from Facebook Ads are currently entertaining thanks to Facebook photos & videos. (you need to create a need, a urgency to sign up / purchase)

-> my startup has experienced that. Google ads bring qualified users to Moneytis.com (comparison of money transfer options), whereas Facebook ads bring curious people to sign up on neomy.io (fun alerts about currency exchange rates)