The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#2Desensitization to ads caused by perverse tracking and targeting. It's not getting better.
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#3After 10 years of spending 100k on average per month, we stopped spending in 2019 and put money into cold calling. Conversions tripled and we could only spend half our yearly budget in our call campaign. Google is expensive and returns now suck even more than they did in 2017.
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#4I am not rejecting the author's analysis, but the industry is moving towards cost per conversion. Even marketers for small time ad agencies have gotten savvy and realized that the click is nothing but a proxy.
Also, I never realized Google actually posted CPC numbers, I don't track B2C in depth, but considering the amount of synthetic traffic, CPC numbers can be meaningless.
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#5After 10 years of spending 100k on average per month, we stopped spending in 2019 and put money into cold calling. Conversions tripled and we could only spend half our yearly budget in our call campaign. Google is expensive and returns now suck even more than they did in 2017.
Are your cold calling ops in house?
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#6Desensitization to ads caused by perverse tracking and targeting. It's not getting better.
There is no such thing. People still buy online marketed products a magnitude times more than non-marketed products. In fact, advertisement techniques are now so advanced that consumers believe they were not "influenced" in their purchasing decisions.
"Hahaha, my ad-blocker and 7 proxies make me un-trackable"
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#7After 10 years of spending 100k on average per month, we stopped spending in 2019 and put money into cold calling. Conversions tripled and we could only spend half our yearly budget in our call campaign. Google is expensive and returns now suck even more than they did in 2017.
Not accusing, but it's still worth considering - could it just have been that your targeting was bad?
I worked in a heavily regulated industry with some of the Top 10 most expensive keywords and we spent about $150 million a year on advertising with a solid 1/4 of it going to digital (almost exclusively Google) and it was worth it. Digital spend got customer acquisition costs way way down and we spent significant effort into trying to _reduce_ our call center operations (mostly via automation).
It's important to invest in people to crunch the numbers and get your targeting right.
TV was still king though.
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#8I am not rejecting the author's analysis, but the industry is moving towards cost per conversion. Even marketers for small time ad agencies have gotten savvy and realized that the click is nothing but a proxy. Also, I never realized Google actually posted CPC numbers, I don't track B2C in depth, but considering the amount of synthetic traffic, CPC numbers can be meaningless.
Absolutely.
I feel like in the early days of digital advertising everyone was used to broadcast where there's a phenomenal amount of waste (you have to buy commercials at times and on channels when there's no listeners to get pricing down. Also a significant amount of the ad you're buying doesn't actually run and you have to employ people/services to verify your ads ran and get rebates).
The amount of data for digital got an entire generation of marketers savvy on cost optimization from the razor thin budgets for staffing and digital campaigns with a much higher velocity (short 2 weeks campaign vs 3-6 month TV campaigns).
Now just having reach isn't enough. Google got a lot of years of band-aiding the problem with PageRank and marketers still want to do better. Now Google is facing competition for spend by the very companies they partnered with for add-on services.
Instead of "get eyeballs to my site and charge me" it's "improve the interaction with my brand and charge me"
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#9Not related to the article, but this video autoplay is super annoying. An alternative version for those who also find this annoying: https://outline.com/5Vd9BS
Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
#10After 10 years of spending 100k on average per month, we stopped spending in 2019 and put money into cold calling. Conversions tripled and we could only spend half our yearly budget in our call campaign. Google is expensive and returns now suck even more than they did in 2017.
I find it incredible that cold calling works for you; everywhere I've ever worked in the UK and across Europe, cold-callers get short-shrift - with no exceptions.