131–140 of 372 posts
Overstated. This article assumes that: - All online advertising is Google search - That brand search advertising is representative of the entire industry There are plenty of companies making double-digit ROAS (return over ad spend), especially direct response advertisers.
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I think your answer is in your comment. Why would the digital marketing guys at Amazon say that their advertising doesn't work and their budget should be cut? They want a bigger budget with more responsibility, not less!
Unlike most companies, Amazon can easily track ad display or click to purchase. While they still can't establish causality (you might have bought it even without the ad), it's still fairly easy for them to calculate if the ads are worth it.
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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 agree that advertising as a whole might be a bubble. In fact, my next piece is about TV advertising which is arguably worse. See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273476 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.
I spent 6 years working in ad-tech, and I was researching the incrementality effect of ads, selection bias and stuff like that for last 3 years. I want to let you know that your article is good. Online advertising is not a bubble, but your article perfectly explains why it is much harder than it seems.
Coming 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…
But if you have a small to medium online shop, I think it makes sense to have someone run ad campaigns for you on as many domains as possible - and pay only for high quality traffic. If you re-sell shoes from Nike, you will have a very hard time getting a click from someone who would have bought at your shop anyway, because your competitors will pay for Google PLA and other ad campaigns and anyone who is looking for a good offer will run into their ads.
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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 agree that advertising as a whole might be a bubble. In fact, my next piece is about TV advertising which is arguably worse. See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273476 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.
Coming 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…
For smaller, lesser-known companies, I think advertising is much more effective. The chance is much lower that people will know about your product and buy it than if you spent more on advertising.
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> I also have a way to beat adblockers that I'm afraid of bringing to light Proxying ads through as first-party content? If you really are invested in making them work ethically, consider these ground rules: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
I find, as a consumer, I disagree with the text only requirement. Videos are certainly off limits as a nuisance. However images convey a lot of information very quickly, and can be visually "skipped" in a way text cannot. When presented an ad for protein powder alongside my workout diets article, I want to see what it looks like. The presentation of the product is an important factor in whether or not I pursue it. It…
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I agree that advertising as a whole might be a bubble. In fact, my next piece is about TV advertising which is arguably worse. See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273476 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.
Hey Jesse, I spent 6 years working in ad-tech, and I was researching the incrementality effect of ads, selection bias and stuff like that for last 3 years. I want to let you know that your article is good. Online advertising is not a bubble, but your article perfectly explains why it is much harder than it seems.
> a Super Bowl ad cost three million dollars. Why? Because that’s how much it cost. What does it yield? Who knows. This article is awesome. In my free time I'm building an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages. No tracking of users. I'm hoping to allow people to host and run their own all inclusive self contained advertising platform for just a licensing fee. I also have a way t…
> I also have a way to beat adblockers that I'm afraid of bringing to light since I only want it tied to my own companies completely non tracking and ethical ads. Beating ad blockers is not hard. Just serve them from the first party domain. If you’re not tracking users outside of whatever the first party tracks, you don’t need third party cookies either. As a former ad tech guy though... I think the biggest hurdle yo…
But I've been seeing an increasing amount of talk and effort in the online marketing community about finding ways to bring this first party data into the existing third party data collection machines.
If websites start doing this, all it will do is bring the privacy heat down harder, directly on the publishers themselves. I hope that websites manage to operate without sharing that data with the martech world, but I fear that they won't.
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Amazon more or less won didn't it? It doesn't have total domination of ecommerce but frankly it'd run into anti-trust issues if it did. No company is going to do ecommerce bigger than amazon without getting broken up so yeah... amazon.
Moving more and more away from Amazon. If I especially like a product or company, I'll see if it costs about the same to buy direct and do that. I've found that lots of companies actually have better deals on their site or offer a coupon.
(1) Yes, I know that Amazon sells some millions or some such different products, but my experience shopping (recently moved and have done a LOT of shopping) is that the company making the product can have a good enough Web site that shows much wider range of products, e.g., for wool blankets many more colors and patterns.
(2) To me the key to Amazon is their quite well done Web site that makes it easy (a) to find products and (b) to get relatively good information about them. But can do well on (a) with just keyword searching at Google, Bing. For (b) can do well at the Web site of company making (importing, whatever) the product.
Then, yes, Amazon also pleases customers with better, faster, cheaper shipping options, their Prime program, good returns policies, relatively close warehouses (Walmart stands to do really well on this as they get their Web site polished), customer reviews of products, Amazon Choice house brand, one account for all the wide Amazon product choices instead of (having to type in banking, shipping details for) accounts at each of a few dozen companies, etc. I have found that if just go shopping at whatever on-line retail sites, can get some bad products, worse than my experience at Amazon; so, Amazon can have some trust from selecting relatively good product. It may be that Amazon can be responsive: The mid-tower case server I built supports error correcting coding (ECC) on both the motherboard and the processor; so I explained to Amazon that for their main memory sticks (DIMMs, duel in-line memory modules) they should offer ECC; they did, and maybe my suggestion helped. Still, IMHO the keys to Amazon have been just (a) and (b).
From the shopping I've done recently, it appears that a lot of retail Web sites just copy a LOT of software architecture and design from the Amazon Web site. So, we can expect that building such a retail Web site is becoming a widely, well understood art and, thus, no longer an advantage for Amazon. Indeed, the company might host their site at Amazon's cloud server farm AWS -- irony here!
Net, it looks to me like the US manufacturers and/or importers can start to do well cutting out the middleman Amazon. Ah, Internet disintermediation!!
Uh, shipping from many local warehouses? When I was at FedEx, and maybe still, shippers could just truck their inventory to Memphis and, thus, get faster, cheaper delivery to their customers -- order in before midnight and delivery before 10 AM the next day, that is, in about 10 hours. Well, FedEx and UPS could still do such -- open a few hundred warehouses, let vendors stock the warehouses with big trucks and deliver to customers with little trucks (bicycles, taxicabs, drones?). Again, a dozing if not sleeping giant here is Walmart.