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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

#291

Post by shostack »

crablar wrote: post #107

This is due to the ad fraud bubble. We have covered it extensively on Software Engineering Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud

So the bots are driving billions in trackable revenue for companies then? Branding advertisers aside (which search isn't always great for), direct response advertisers don't often care about some of these metrics between spend and sale other than directionally.

Sure you might have attribution questions, but a bot likely won't spend like a person would.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#292

Post by dhimes »

abalashov wrote: post #234
nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked your site. It's well put together but the language is far too technical for AdWords. Engineers don't usually make the kind of business decisions to buy these things at larger companies, it's VP level people. Find your kinds of customers and tailor a landing page with stuff that they want, instead of having the site explain everything like a users manual. Ex: Calls centers do not care at all about the oth…

Thank you for the suggestions! The intentionally deep technical content of the site may be motivated by reasoning backward to your thought process: Usually it's the technical guys, tasked with researching and finding a product that fits the requirements, who find the site and forward the link to their managers. The managers have no idea what any of it means, but "it looks like good stuff", so "contact them and find o…

LOL I have a site that is totally and exclusively devoted to Study Skills. My quality score for the keyword "study skills?" 1/10

Now, I understand what's happening. I haven't loaded up the tags and stuff. I'm appealing to the people who might be looking for something like this. It's very different from selling umbrellas, but we are forced to fit the same mold.

I think the general conclusion is sound: Having such a dominant company that suffers no ill consequences of its mistakes is bad for small business.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#293

Post by shostack »

geocar wrote: post #251
somid3 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. What would be amazing is if there was a way to audit their advertising algorithms to know it is fair. I tried their new Contact Form tool, but the cost per lead is about $17/lead. At the end of the day, if someone is advertising a product that is incredibly good, they should be able to use CPM instead of CPC. The point I am trying to make is that I believe the CPM model is dependent on making CPC & othe…

Publishers want to get paid for the opportunity (CPM) but Advertisers want to pay a portion of their revenue (PPA): PPL, PPV, PPC and PPM are all proxies for that customer acquisition, so if you want to buy effectively, you need to start by figuring out what your costs per acquisition are. If you can't even hypothetically afford anything close to $17/lead, you might not be able to purchase customers yet, but if you c…

This. Not every business has the economics to make advertising work at certain scales.

For many, $17/lead is fantastic because they have an AOV or LTV that supports it. Not every business can do that, so other forms of marketing may make more sense at that stage.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#294

Post by vkou »

drewcrawford wrote: post #187
victorhooi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is "dumb" amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority. People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they're not cheap, they would totally pay for content. Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it's a race to the bot…

Most people do pay dumb amounts of money for content. They pay their carrier for the bandwidth to download the ads. That's in the ballpark of a nickel per page [0]. You can't say that micropayments doesn't work when ads ARE micropayments . They're just micropayments with a particular set of properties. The only question remaining is which of those properties are necessary. Is it actually necessary that your nickel ca…

And yet, when I turn on ad-block for a month, my cable internet bill does not go down.

So, no, it is by no means a micropayment. And even if I were charged for overage, and I were over my monthly limit, I wouldn't be charged at a rate of $1 for 20 MB.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#295

Post by austenallred »

Taek wrote: post #157
cconcepts wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I manage SEO for a company in a very competitive and spammy SEO space (payday loans). (A good guy trying to fix the space.)

I spend an average of 10-15 hours/week disavowing bad links our competitors build. I've automated most of it now so it's going faster, but it's out of control.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#296

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #229
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…

Just checked your site. It's well put together but the language is far too technical for AdWords. Engineers don't usually make the kind of business decisions to buy these things at larger companies, it's VP level people. Find your kinds of customers and tailor a landing page with stuff that they want, instead of having the site explain everything like a users manual. Ex: Calls centers do not care at all about the oth…

How about having the technical page but also having an overview page for managers (who are hopefully used to the concept of technical people writing them summaries). Maybe the main ui for such a product's site could even be explicit with e.g. 'executive summary' and 'technical summary' tabs.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#297

Post by danarmak »

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…

> Is the dream of the open Internet already dead?

At most, the dream of ad-funded websites might be dead. (I wish!)

This dream created a lot of value by providing free services to Web users. But it also created a lot of harm by enticing those users into closed gardens full of surveillance, which service providers created to gather data to drive ad revenue. I think on net the harm is much greater; we'd have a much more open Internet today if people had gotten used to paying a few dollars a year for ad-free webmail, IM, social networking, search engine access, etc.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#298

Post by kyledrake »

coldtea wrote: post #211
kyledrake wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? How does one determine their site is "punished"? I have seen the consequences of paying for SEO. They spam your site URL on random web forums. If you pay for SEO, you are very likely paying people to use bots and sweatshops to spam your site url via low qual…

> Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? Because they tell us: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en > How does one determine their site is "punished"? Because it suddenly falls behind in results?

That is not a measurable process. A site could fall behind for any number of reasons, including bugs in their algorithms. I'm never going to say to myself "welp, our pagerank went down, time to use Google's weird tool to clean up the negative SEO attack again."

Without a real way to understand what's actually going on, you're just shooting at the darkness. It feels more like worshiping a cargo cult than doing something actually productive.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#299

Post by SerLava »

coldtea wrote: post #211
kyledrake wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? How does one determine their site is "punished"? I have seen the consequences of paying for SEO. They spam your site URL on random web forums. If you pay for SEO, you are very likely paying people to use bots and sweatshops to spam your site url via low qual…

> Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? Because they tell us: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en > How does one determine their site is "punished"? Because it suddenly falls behind in results?

I have seen people promote several unrelated sites on the same spam network, and watched them rise and fall in lockstep.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#300

Post by WalterSear »

point78 wrote: post #203
WalterSear wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an unfair conclusion. However, our retention rate after the first order was spectacular, and we slowly gathered a core group of users who were using our services exclusively. Unfortunately, despite providing a ubiquitous business service, we couldn't gather customers fast enough to float the boat.

Would need to see the product, but right off the bat seems like fb is the completelty wrong platform to be advertising. Marketing department should have been fired after 5 figures spent?

Facebook ads were actually better ROI than google ads, by something like 2x IIRC. Still not enough traffic/value to save the company.
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