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

Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

youexec.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 382 posts

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#351

Post by majani »

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…

Google's in house teams usually have no real world experience converting Google Ads to sales. It's the same way game developers are usually not esports pros. There's a big difference between knowing how a product works and being great at making it work

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#352

Post by agumonkey »

matt4077 wrote: post #350
agumonkey wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do other people respond when watching ads ? Do they think - "meh it's all bs ..." - "hmm I'd like that! can't wait to go to the mall and get one" - "oh I didn't know this, it could help me " ? I recall feeling 3) once in my life, it surprised me because that was my first deep positive reaction to an ad. Even though I've seen similar products all my life. Does marketing count on negative bias in their theory ? "he…

They respond with a vague feeling of familiarity to a brand or product.

But all sorts of brands have commercials..

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#353

Post by abalashov »

nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #320
abalashov wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature of the organic audience is such that if they found their way to the site in the first place, they are very likely highly specialised in IP telephony and know the answers to these questions. They are typically looking for more details, not a gentle layman's introduction. When they contact me, 90%+ of the time they have highly specific questions, and there is no need to convey what the product is or what it…

Detailed content is great for SEO and will get you extremely well targeted visits. At least from what I've seen the majority of business comes from people that want to be told what to do and not those that already know. Chances are somebody with detailed knowledge already knows all the players in the field and are just weighing their options s. There's a whole pile of people trying to setup a phone system or call cen…

That is an astute observation.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#354

Post by victorhooi »

b2600 wrote: post #146
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…

I think there is some tremendous gap between what a site believes it's value to be and the value to the person behind the keyboard. My opinion is the reverse of yours. Internet users aren't necessarily cheap, the sites overvalue the content they provide. Just because someone provides content doesn't mean it's good enough to make a living. If people leave site A because they charge for site B that's free but of less v…

The issue isn't so much you not viewing the site - but rather ad-blocking.

Not having readership is one thing - but people who still want your content, but refuse to pay, or view the ads, well that's another.

I respect people who don't view sites like say, the NYT, or WSJ or The Economist etc. because those sites show ads. Or that won't buy the hardcopy magazines because there is ad space.

What I can't respect is people still trying to view those sites and defeat their anti-ad-blocks.

Or who complain about how link-baity the articles on HN are, or why there are fluff pieces here - but don't think, hey, good content costs money

I suppose if those sites went the way of intrusive, pop-under/pop-over ads, I might chance my tune - but on the whole, I've found the text/small image ads so far on them a reasonable exchange.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#355

Post by pryelluw »

WalterSear wrote: post #347
pryelluw wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we fail even if the stars are aligned. It sucks, but the market is irrational.

Pretty much. And much of the time, we will never know if it was the stars, or the unavoidable missteps that we make.

That's why failing early and quickly is important. It frees up resources and allows for us tk recalibrate. If I had a dollar for every person Ive talked to that was "waiting for the chance to hit it big". People dont realize that success is a by-product of failure.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#356

Post by victorhooi »

flukus wrote: post #192
victorhooi wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you've actually thought your logic through to completion. You claim that you would "never consider paying for a news site", because it'll just get re-posted somewhere else. I urge you to think and reflect on what you've just claimed. Investigative journalism costs money. Going out and interviewing people, or taking photographs costs money. Digging through old archives, or filing Freedom of Information…

Most countries, at least in the west, have high quality government funded news services.

Would you be comfortable with the only investigative journalism being carried out by the government?

Sure, the BBC (British) or ABC (Australia) model seems to work well - but there's been funding spats in the past.

It's not that hard to imagine a world where the Prime Minister thinks "These silly ivory-tower journalists are just using their rag to rail on me! Why the heck am I signing off on more funding. Cutbacks!".

That and there's many countries where I'd rather an independent journalistic service.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#357

Post by ChoGGi »

somid3 wrote: post #96
davidgerard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

ublock origin has anti-tracker lists, and to use fullstory you add fs.js to the . I could see it being blocked (like I just did in my custom list).

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#358

Post by agumonkey »

phamilton wrote: post #349
agumonkey wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My consumerism seems to be restricted to a few kind of products for which I feel about for very specific reasons. I'm still subject to influence, because I have eyes, but it's mostly negatively, advertising is a cheap trick void of information to me. I can't buy something because a handsome male pretended to use it in a video. Even those with informations are often lying to put a spin on their product. Health product…

I would bet the influence is not significant to you — you would get the same product for the same cost either way in most cases, but it is significant for the brand you end up arbitrarily choosing.

You mean that investing in marketing branding and advertising is still the best ROI for most companies ?

I don't really understand your point but I'm not educated in the subject either so ..

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#359

Post by tetromino_ »

maxdo wrote: post #247
iopq wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in China uses Google other than English speakers. Google is notoriously bad at breaking Chinese characters up into words. Few people in Russia use Google for Russian language searches, this is because Google is not as good at declining Russian nouns and conjugating Russian verbs. Yandex gives more results of a higher quality for certain searches.

That's bulshit, Google auditory is bigger even in Russia, not saying about other russian speaking countries. prof: https://www.searchengines.ru/google_oboshel.html

Your article says that Google has overtaken Yandex in terms of the total usage for the traditional and mobile version of the Google website and its mobile apps (emphasis mine).

So a reasonable explanation is that Russians are increasingly using Google's apps: gmail, google calendar, the google now launcher; which probably has something to do with the fact that these apps come preinstalled on their phones. Not necessarily that they prefer Google for searching for Russian-language websites.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#360

Post by yosefjaved »

I'm making the assumption that the 90% is your bounce rate for traffic from Facebook and Google Advertising.

I'm also assuming that you probably have left all channels (mobile, tablet, desktop, various display channels, etc) on, and not using remarketing/retargeting.

If all that is true, then what you're seeing is normal. Heck it can even be higher than that in a lot of cases. Ideally, you need to be working on reducing that useless traffic over time.

But this easier said than done especially if you have a a small budget that will be completely gone within a few weeks.

PPC is such a hard thing to do because you need consistent funds for at least 1-4 months to truly test what works and what doesn't. If you don't have that, then there is no point in doing it.

My word of advice is either stop doing PPC and focus on less costly things, or if you're going to do it, then start by using only one ad network (doesn't matter; just pick one) and working within a single channel of that network.

Once you feel comfortable within that one channel, then start adding another channel and another channel over time within that ad network.

Post reply on HN