From the article: > Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing. I've seen this play out at places I've worked. After raising a funding round, marketing sold the leadership on letting them burn the lion's share of it, even though launching new marketing campaigns was never on the list of reasons we initially went out to raise money.
This feels like a multi-billion dollar industry in which every entity involved has the ability to sink the entire thing, and simply stated, nobody does because they all make money from it.
What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
121–130 of 372 posts
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi this is the author of the article. You're just making the exact mistake this article is about: you assume people who click on your ad and then buy something, bought something BECAUSE of your ad. From the article: "Suppose Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons…
Well its pretty easy to tell if its because of the advertising. Just turn it off for a while and see if it affects revenue.
Otherwise, causal inference is sadly not easy.
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#123I've always wondered about those adverts for the website I'm searching for. If I type its name into Google, I'm already 100% committed to going there. Sometimes I click the advert (it generally depends how much I like the company). The other aspect of online ads that strikes me as ingenious but probably not sustainable is the way Google inflates the auction system with fake money. Anyone who's run a website will have…
This was and is surprising to me. The only explanation I have is competitors bidding on our brand keywords and taking traffic that would have come to us absent any ads. Which makes the whole thing look like a nice racket for Google. Regardless, for now we pay since the alternative is apparently to lose those users.
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi this is the author of the article. You're just making the exact mistake this article is about: you assume people who click on your ad and then buy something, bought something BECAUSE of your ad. From the article: "Suppose Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons…
The effects may be low but what is the alternative? You suggest there's a digital advertising bubble but to have a bubble with the assumption it will burst, you need to show that advertisers can achieve a better return by doing something else. There's no digital marketing bubble more than there is a traditional advertising bubble. There IS however a conflict of interest in advertising that's caused by the agency whic…
I do think it's more accepted in traditional advertising that we just don't know how well it works. In digital advertising there is a grand illusion of measurement.
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#125Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#126Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them. I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online. Who are all…
But, you like accessing content for free, correct? That content doesn't exist and then ads are layered on, the context exists BECAUSE of ads. Like, no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads. This is how mass media has worked from the get-go. Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising. Entire genres of popular music wouldn't have happened otherwise.…
>"Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny...he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky...was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood--more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him--was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product" (emphasis original)
His paper ended up being the New York Sun.
Just something to think about. It wasn't always like this.
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#127We need more of this research, please, because advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification. And it doesn't begin and end with FB+Google
Also: It would be nice if people who comment here and work for Google or FB declared their conflict of interest
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi this is the author of the article. You're just making the exact mistake this article is about: you assume people who click on your ad and then buy something, bought something BECAUSE of your ad. From the article: "Suppose Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons…
The effects may be low but what is the alternative? You suggest there's a digital advertising bubble but to have a bubble with the assumption it will burst, you need to show that advertisers can achieve a better return by doing something else. There's no digital marketing bubble more than there is a traditional advertising bubble. There IS however a conflict of interest in advertising that's caused by the agency whic…
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi this is the author of the article. You're just making the exact mistake this article is about: you assume people who click on your ad and then buy something, bought something BECAUSE of your ad. From the article: "Suppose Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons…
Well its pretty easy to tell if its because of the advertising. Just turn it off for a while and see if it affects revenue.
Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
#130Coming from the other end (after someone clicked an ad), I got to say: ads work well. The metric used @work is: cost of sale. The merchant pays for each click on the ad that is redirected to his product page. What seems like a recipe for wasting incredible amounts of money on an army of click bots is working - because the merchant defines a target cost of sale for those clicks, meaning for example he expects a sale w…
But doesn't this ignore the selection effect discussed in the article? IE to use your numbers say you get a $100 sale for every $10 spent on ads. And say your profit margin (outside of ads) on that sale is 20%, so you earn $20-$10 = $10 in profit. However, what if 3/4 of the people who clicked on your ads would have found you anyway, through organic search results or other means? Then that $10 spend only actually gen…