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What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

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Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#301

Post by dorgo »

mochomocha wrote: post #282
tacon wrote: post #99

This is a rather unimpressive article. Yes, brand advertising is a disaster, just like it has always been. But to say that all digital advertising has unknown ROI is ridiculous. Digital direct response advertising allows very accurate ROI calculations. (Admittedly, a lot of advertisers are not applying the tools to their advantage. They call that the "Google stupid tax". Ditto these days on Facebook.) And direct resp…

Google removes targeting knobs because despite what marketers think, humans consistently underperform algorithms when it comes to targeting. Typically, the people tweaking the knobs have reverse incentives because they don't want their jobs to be automated so they love these knobs. But they are just constraints on the bidding systems that end up delivering poorer performance of the campaigns. YMMV but for the vast ma…

I think it's not about whether algorithms are better than humans. It's about whose profits these algorithms optimize. Google's algorithms tend to optimize Google's profits.

Advertisers utilize algorithms too. But it gets more difficult when Google removes/limits access to information and knobs.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#302

Post by dorgo »

buboard wrote: post #111
tacon wrote: post #99

This is a rather unimpressive article. Yes, brand advertising is a disaster, just like it has always been. But to say that all digital advertising has unknown ROI is ridiculous. Digital direct response advertising allows very accurate ROI calculations. (Admittedly, a lot of advertisers are not applying the tools to their advantage. They call that the "Google stupid tax". Ditto these days on Facebook.) And direct resp…

> Digital direct response advertising allows very accurate ROI calculations How many ads are direct response? How many are simply clicked because they are just above the same website's entry in search results (i.e. users were already heading to that site, the ad was just there as google tax)? How many legitimate clicks on an ad that did not led to sale are discarded by google as "invalid clicks" (my adsense report ha…

>(i.e. users were already heading to that site, the ad was just there as google tax)?

I saw research which indicates that it is a good idea to pay the google tax. Users heading to your site may get distracted by your competitors or other stuff. The more ads are shown the less organic results (which are not easy to control) are visible without scrolling. In best case, the search results are showing your ad immadiately followed by your organic result, making up the whole screen real estate. Wherever the user clicks, he ends up on your site. Also, cost per click tends to be lower for brand search terms.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#303

Post by matheusmoreira »

kposehn wrote: post #179
josephjrobison wrote: post #170

A very easy way to break this argument is to not look at huge known companies like eBay and Amazon, but brand new companies 1-2 years old that have grown almost entirely by online ads. Eventually word of mouth kicks in, but there are plenty of smart operators that built their entire brand and revenue off of ads. Works best in online direct to consumer brands.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

> Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences.

So advertising industries use people as guinea pigs to study the "real effect of their ad dollars". No ethics committee, no informed consent, nothing.

Yet another reason to block all ads.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#304

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

Iv wrote: post #297
buboard wrote: post #127

Great to see an article like this. This subject is almost suspiciously under-researched by journalists. There 's definitely something rotten in the promises that internet advertising has become somehow more effective. If that were true, wouldn't businesses notice? Wouldn't they spend a bigger part of their revenue on ads ? Wouldn't that return even bigger ROIs? Yet businesses spend roughly the same for over a century…

> because advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification [citation needed] I am of the opinion that internet would be a much saner place if advertisement was purely and simply banned.

I’m banning advertising via ublock origin and I can attest that the web indeed becomes a saner place without ads.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#305

Post by [deleted] »

Iv wrote: post #297
buboard wrote: post #127

Great to see an article like this. This subject is almost suspiciously under-researched by journalists. There 's definitely something rotten in the promises that internet advertising has become somehow more effective. If that were true, wouldn't businesses notice? Wouldn't they spend a bigger part of their revenue on ads ? Wouldn't that return even bigger ROIs? Yet businesses spend roughly the same for over a century…

> because advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification [citation needed] I am of the opinion that internet would be a much saner place if advertisement was purely and simply banned.

[deleted]

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#306

Post by lucasverra »

alexeichemenda wrote: post #279
buboard wrote: post #127

Great to see an article like this. This subject is almost suspiciously under-researched by journalists. There 's definitely something rotten in the promises that internet advertising has become somehow more effective. If that were true, wouldn't businesses notice? Wouldn't they spend a bigger part of their revenue on ads ? Wouldn't that return even bigger ROIs? Yet businesses spend roughly the same for over a century…

>Wouldn't they spend a bigger part of their revenue on ads ? _For context, we've worked with thousands of advertisers worldwide_ They do, up to a certain extent. ROI isn't the only element to look at here, what also matters is at what max scale you can keep this ROI. Let's take e-commerce as an example scenario: A digital channel can deliver a solid ROI (>200%) at $10K-$50K / month. Advertiser is excited, wants to sc…

great insight. any source for that claim ? thks

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#307

Post by username90 »

buboard wrote: post #120
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #30

If you think about it, the very line that the smartest minds of our generation are working on making people click on things is itself marketing designed by marketers to sell the prestige/status of working for a big advertising company. That actually is genius in its own way... but just as the quants in finance during the early booms were "the smartest guys in the room, until they weren't and you realised they all wer…

> smartest minds of our generation are working on making Considering the deterioration in software functionality that i m experiencing the past years across the board (from superheavy web apps to mobile apps that for no reason remove features to desktop apps that function worse than even mobile apps) - i m not even sure they re employing the " smartest minds of our generation"

In my experience the smartest people don't want to work on UI's, which is probably the reason they are bad. The smartest go work on other parts of the stack, doing things like machine learning or infrastructure.

The only place where you have the smartest people making UI's are in games, they often have very impressive performance and functionality. But even in games people hate making UI's, it is just that in games people care about the product so they bite the bullet and do it themselves.

Note that I am not saying that UI is easy or unimportant, making UI's is both hard and super important which is why it is a huge problem that we can't find good people for it.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#308

Post by cameronbrown »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #56
cameronbrown wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is not mass media. Plus don't forget Y Combinator funded many ad-based platforms. HN isn't free either.

A fair point. So I see two takeaway questions: would we be fine/better off without mass media funded by advertising(it's obvious what my answer to this would be since I don't generally listen to it or watch it, though I acknowledge it going away won't likely happen). And the second, would content we like to consume/ be worthy of consumption be produced anyway, and my contention is that it would still, just like it di…

I don't know, really. I don't want to go back to a time where artists struggle to eat, to make a metaphor. Independent creators are using advertising revenue now too.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#309

Post by lucasverra »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #304
Iv wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification [citation needed] I am of the opinion that internet would be a much saner place if advertisement was purely and simply banned.

I’m banning advertising via ublock origin and I can attest that the web indeed becomes a saner place without ads.

on ios im using a remove ads DNS thought VPN app. It is a nicer experience for sure
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