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

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#281

Post by dhimes » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #258

TeMPOraL wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason when some fellow citizen acts against you, you may need to sue them yourself - Google provides a platform with some set of rules, but they can't proactively ensure nobody is doing something malicious to other parties (especially if the malicious act is allowed by the rules), nor they can codify and enforce "don't be an asshole" rule.

Your analogy doesn't really hold up. This isn't another person coming after you directly, it's the other person manipulating a third party to cause the third party to come after you, and the third party saying "not my problem that I'm easy to manipulate like that". For a criminal-justice-system analogy, it's similar in concept (though not in extremity) to SWATting. And I don't think we want governments to wash their…

"Swatting is the act of deceiving an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing an emergency services dispatcher) into sending a police and 9-1-1 response team to another person's address, based on the false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat, murder, hostage-taking or other alleged incident."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting

TIL

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#282

Post by matt4077 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

agopaul wrote: post #213

matt4077 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm spending ca $150/mo on google and getting a few hundred in revenue from it – not even including repeat purchases from these sales (about 80% y/y retention). It's been like that for 8 years. Facebook on the other hand... Probably spend $2000 trying all sorts of things over the years and I'm not sure if there's a single new customer that can be attributed to it.

Are those Google ads Search or Display?

Search ads only.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#283

Post by matt4077 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #256

matt4077 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm spending ca $150/mo on google and getting a few hundred in revenue from it – not even including repeat purchases from these sales (about 80% y/y retention). It's been like that for 8 years. Facebook on the other hand... Probably spend $2000 trying all sorts of things over the years and I'm not sure if there's a single new customer that can be attributed to it.

What product so you sell? If industrial drilling equipment, Facebook is hard. If it's a t-shirt that makes a trendy joke, Facebook will do well.

Physical consumer goods with orders in the $30-$200 range.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#284

Post by pythonaut_16 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

Fiahil wrote: post #74

dajohnson89 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we've learned over the years to ignore all ads. Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I'm not served ads.

Oversaturated and desensitized, yes, but too few non-technical people are bothered enough to install an ad blocker. This is an issue because the biggest security threats, today, come from ad-network-delivered-junk. It has become so much of an issue that my advice on which antivirus to install has shifted from xxx to uBlock Origin. It's just basic computer hygiene, and I would really like if content creator would move…

This is definitely a more technical solution than the average user might use, but I've had some great success with network wide adblocking via the Pi-hole package for Raspberry Pi, and setting my DHCP server to point to it as the primary DNS.

It runs a local DNS cache that blacklists ad domains (so basically how uBlock Origin works but utilizing DNS instead of just dropping the elements on the page).

There are a few sites I've had to whitelist but in general I don't even think about it running anymore, but all devices on my local newtork are ad free.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#285

Post by shostack » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

blockchan wrote: post #231

I did Adwords for 1 person mom shops and bigger companies in industries ranging from tourism and general aviation to jewelry and software development. It was all profitable. Ad agencies are borderline scammers - they measure traffic and clicks as performance, which makes you to spend more money to increase "performance" and pay more agency fees. Sometimes I burned $15000 before first conversion, but ROI was always po…

You are painting agencies with overly broad strokes. I used to help lead the paid search group at a top search agency. Rest assured we did not try to pass off clicks as anything but that. Occasionally we had clients with branding goals and we worked with them to make sure we were adding incremental value, but most were direct response (ie. "Show me the money or you're fired").

A percent of media model isn't perfect, but if a client isn't seeing results, the relationship won't last long, and word gets around.

Now, there are scammy agencies out there, but it is hardly the norm. I loved stealing business from them because it was shooting fish in a barrel with all the problems on those accounts.

Be careful about making such broad, and highly inaccurate statements... They really don't help paint you in the best light.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#286

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #135

Is it common that people move the mouse cursor around while reading a page? What on earth for? Unless it's mindless fidgeting with the physical mouse, wouldn't it slow their reading down?

Most people do not take their hands away from the mouse, and will scroll with the mouse wheel. People are unable to do those things without moving the mouse in some way.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#287

Post by ubernostrum » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:39 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #274

ubernostrum wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy doesn't really hold up. This isn't another person coming after you directly, it's the other person manipulating a third party to cause the third party to come after you, and the third party saying "not my problem that I'm easy to manipulate like that". For a criminal-justice-system analogy, it's similar in concept (though not in extremity) to SWATting. And I don't think we want governments to wash their…

Identity theft is a perfectly reasonable analogy. If someone steals my identity and ruins my credit rating, the onus is on me to inform the credit reference agency. It'd be nice if Equifax could telepathically divine whether a credit transaction was legitimate or not, but it simply isn't possible. Google are similarly unable to distinguish between a blackhat SEO scheme and this sort of weird SEO DDoS.

Except there are a lot of people (myself included) who see the handling of "identity theft" as banks and credit agencies trying to pass the buck for their own poor approaches to security and verification.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#288

Post by ubernostrum » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #276

ubernostrum wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that someone else gaming Google's algorithm becomes my problem and requires me to solve it rather than Google?

Why is it that if someone steals my wallet in the street I have to describe them to the police?

Your analogy is incorrect.

If the police simply refused to respond until you'd done the full investigation yourself and handed in the proof, and then the only thing they'd do was acknowledge "yup, that guy stole your wallet, we won't assume he legitimately possesses that wallet anymore but we also won't do anything to get it back or prosecute him", then you'd have an analogy.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#289

Post by shostack » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

WalterSear wrote: post #53

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…

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…

I can say from much first hand experience that Google's in house teams don't typically deliver what I would consider great work. And that was with the top tier of support at a search agency. I'm not entirely surprised at your results.

Most savvy people I know managing search for a living would but run something Google put together without quite a few changes.

Some of this comes from lack of understanding the business as well as someone on an account or in house, some is lack of experience since you often can have people barely out of school working on this stuff. Even when I had veteran teams there were still tweaks needed.

Things like keywords that didn't make sense, poor targeting settings, etc. were not uncommon. I know they've made big efforts to improve here, but they still have a long way to go.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#290

Post by ubernostrum » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

mratzloff wrote: post #280

ubernostrum wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that someone else gaming Google's algorithm becomes my problem and requires me to solve it rather than Google?

You are the most motivated party.

I would like to see this change.

If Google's approach is encouraging or enabling fraud, I'd like to see to it they're the ones who are motivated to change their approach. Making them legally responsible for the actions of their algorithms, preferably with penalties steep enough that even they can't ignore the resulting fines, might not be a bad start.