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Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

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Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#151

Post by WalterSear »

somedangedname wrote: post #138
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…

> ...we worked with Google's in-house team I'm no expert but I don't think the incentives were aligned properly there. Here's a Reddit thread that says it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1nwzdy/what_do_your_go... Maybe work with an agency next time?

Sage advice. I'm bookmarking that for the next time I need to talk about marketing strategies with people.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#152

Post by ns8sl »

Yeah, we figured this out (at least for Google) years ago. I ran a SAAS company that advertised heavily on Google for years. As time went on, the ROI dropped to almost zero. We really couldn't figure it out until we started to analyze what publishers were doing.

Publishers buy fake traffic from bot networks in order to generate more ad revenue. Almost all ad networks make an effort more or less to filter this traffic, but don't really do a great job. I'd say almost every ad network besides Google and Facebook are worse. There are ad networks that do not care at all what kind of traffic they host. I could name names but I don't want to get sued.

The counter-intuitive part of this is that no one in the ecosystem wants it stopped. What you say? Not even the advertisers? Yes, even the advertisers themselves rely on legacy incentives. For example, if your a buyer of digital advertising and your bonus is based on generating one million clicks to your site, guess what you're going to do to get that bonus - that's right - your going to buy shitty traffic on the cheap.

The bottom line is that digital advertising is horribly broken. Companies are getting totally ripped off and most of them aren't savvy enough to know it.

Think about how bad this is for the economy. Startups can't get off the ground via digital advertising anymore.

Anyway, last point - after getting robbed of a few hundred grand, we developed a product to detect fraudulent traffic integrated into ecommerce analytics:

https://truestats.com

Before I get accused of advertising - anyone that wants a free account from seeing this here contact support@truestats.com and we'll set you up. I really care more about fixing this nightmare than making money.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#153

Post by goldfishcaura »

@somid3 I would like to invite you to our analytics community: http://www.innerjoins.org

and to @vivekd's request for data on this topic: https://my.caura.co/investigating-fraudulent-clicks-in-googl...

- plenty of data here. Happy to provide a SQL interface for it if you can prove that you've got the chops

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#154

Post by cconcepts »

rackforms wrote: post #114

I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a mont…

The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page three.

It wasn't till we realised we had 10,000+ spammy links pointed at our site that we wondered whether we had been the victim of some malicious attack. We couldn't recover the penalty to the site no matter how hard we worked and have had to rebuild at a new domain as a result.

For small businesses like us, is it really possible for a competitor to just destroy our online credibility like that or am I just paranoid?

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#155

Post by rpedela »

arbesfeld wrote: post #81
rpedela wrote: post #49

A bit off-topic, but how did you create those videos? It seems like a useful tool to test/optimize design, find UI bugs, etc. EDIT: They used FullStory ( https://fullstory.com ). I missed that when I read it the first time.

There are quite a few of these screen-capture tools around (Inspectlet, Mouseflow, Hotjar), most of them for UX optimization. If you're looking for a more developer-focused product, you can also check out LogRocket ( https://logrocket.com ).

LogRocket looks interesting and may be very helpful for debugging problems in production or optimizing performance. But FullStory or something like it fits my current needs better. I just want a video of real users interacting with the site to see where they get confused. And I don't want to spend a lot of time integrating code to get it to work. That is what FullStory is promising but I haven't tried it yet.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#156

Post by hackerboos »

edblarney wrote: post #148
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…

"There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. " You'd be surprised how a lot of marketing budget is wasted. Especially in brand advertising, where there is no directly measurable ROI. Toothpaste, paper towels, cars, cereal - they spend gazillions on those brands. But think of this: most 'ad spend' is spent on completely commoditized products - I'll guarantee you the 'no name' toothpaste is as goo…

How many times do you hear "if I don't spend my budget it will be reduced next year"?

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#157

Post by Taek »

cconcepts wrote: post #154
rackforms wrote: post #114

I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a mont…

The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page three. It wasn't till we realised we…

Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results.

SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#158

Post by WhitneyLand »

rackforms wrote: post #114

I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a mont…

>My site was targeted with millions of low quality links

Are you saying competitors maliciously sabotaged your ranking? Or that you bought SEO services from an unscrupulous company?

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#159

Post by somid3 »

goldfishcaura wrote: post #153

@somid3 I would like to invite you to our analytics community: http://www.innerjoins.org and to @vivekd's request for data on this topic: https://my.caura.co/investigating-fraudulent-clicks-in-googl... - plenty of data here. Happy to provide a SQL interface for it if you can prove that you've got the chops

love the analysis

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#160

Post by WhitneyLand »

vivekd wrote: post #32
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…

I agree, I don't know much about digital marketing but I know that anecdotal evidence, which is all the author is presenting, is next to useless. I've heard other claims from people about how they made enormous sums on facebook. The real issue is that neither of these claims constitute data. Only large scale research tracking traffic across many websites would let us come to meaningful conclusions and that sort of re…

Who says ads are a goldmine? I'd like to read up on that.
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