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

The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#51

Post by C1sc0cat »

6nf wrote: post #19
busterarm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eff…

Facebook is killing it. It's harder than ever to justify spending a lot of money on Google.

Not sure I would agree with you FB adds and audience seem to be low quality and your not targeting direct buyer intent here.

By that I mean people don't directly search for products like they do on search engines and say amazon.

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#52

Post by C1sc0cat »

privateSFacct wrote: post #26
zenincognito wrote: post #3

After 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.

What is this product? When people cold call me to sell me investment advice I hang up. When I get a betterment / personal capital / fidelity advert in my feed talking about their new whatever, I'm at least mildly interested and sometimes click through. Do people really fall for the boiler room stuff still - it's VERY hard to believe that beats google / facebook / instagram (for product sales) etc

yes cold calling about investments would sound to me like boiler room scams - id be reporting that the Authorities.

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#54

Post by H8crilA »

flokie wrote: post #38
H8crilA wrote: post #27

I wish that shareholders would frequently vote on what data is included in the financial reports. Either that or have the SEC be much much more pressing on the issue. Perhaps even a minority of shareholders (say 30%) should be allowed to enforce data publication rules. Why should the management decide on which data is disclosed and which is not? It should rather be entirely decided by the management's supervisors, th…

The SEC does decide.... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-sec-wants-to-know-why-...

I mean yeah, but they should be much more pressing.

And I doubt they have enough bandwidth to monitor the thousands of publicly traded companies, so would make much more sense to just legislate a standard way of a shareholder mechanism for explicit control of the non-GAAP metrics.

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#55

Post by [deleted] »

RandallBrown wrote: post #31
busterarm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same Facebook that inflated view numbers? We ran Facebook ads when I was there and they just didn't convert at all. It was pissing money away. We got better engagement from posting on Twitter for free.

Just a little anecdote. I've never purchased anything I've seen in an online ad except Facebook and Instagram. Their targeting is so good that I almost don't mind seeing the ads.

[deleted]

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#56

Post by arbol »

rurp wrote: post #44
busterarm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eff…

This might be a silly question but how did you measure the effectiveness of the TV ads?

You can analyse traffic to provide a probabilistic view of web or app hits and conversions driven by TV. This works by identifying spikes of traffic within a 5 minute window following a TV ad.

Source: https://tvsquared.com/

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#57

Post by slig »

londons_explore wrote: post #47
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. For me it's almost the opposite: if I see it on FB/Instagram, my first thought is it's a scam (and I'm often right).

If you click those scammy ads to see if they're a scam, Facebooks AI will see you are interested in them, and show you more scammy ads.

You don't even have to click it. Watch a Instagram ad to the end and they know you're interested and will show more of it.

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#58

Post by dhimes »

Scoundreller wrote: post #30

Ugh, one of the graphs is for YoY decline in CPC rates, but it it shows 2015 at the right and 2019 at the far left . Who does that? And it shows it by quarter, so is this a rolling window? Then: > As long as Google can keep growing the blue line -- growth of paid clicks faster than the red line its ad click deflation -- then it is golden. > Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total numb…

And when an ad pays well, publishers create content that will show that ad

{rant: This- this right here- sums up my frustration with the evolution of the web. Getting ready to launch a new site, I looked around a bit at "SEO." The push was exactly backwards. It was, "given that you have some keywords you want to "optimize" for, here's the web content you need."

That's exactly backwards, and leads to people producing junk just to get clicks because certain keywords "perform well."

What we need is, "write something authentic, then find the keywords that will lead people to see it." Sure, make sure you put the keywords in the right places like headings and such, but the focus should be on writing something authentic, not noise. }

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#59

Post by jfoster »

koolba wrote: post #40
RandallBrown wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a little anecdote. I've never purchased anything I've seen in an online ad except Facebook and Instagram. Their targeting is so good that I almost don't mind seeing the ads.

> Their targeting is so good that I almost don't mind seeing the ads. Wouldn’t that make you more apprehensive of their ads? As it’d be more likely to lead to you parting ways with your money.

Parting ways with money is good. Money is the intermediary. You create value to get money. You part ways with money to realise other types of value on the other end.

If you accumulate a lot of money it means you have created lots of value but you haven't been able to use this intermediary to realise other types of value in exchange for the value that you created.

Re: The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric

#60

Post by busterarm »

6nf wrote: post #49
busterarm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same Facebook that inflated view numbers? We ran Facebook ads when I was there and they just didn't convert at all. It was pissing money away. We got better engagement from posting on Twitter for free.

>This is the same Facebook that inflated view numbers? You can't inflate conversions. View numbers are not that important if you're getting real sales results. Facebook is much better bang for buck in general. We run the same ads on both platforms all the time and it's not even close.

Our conversions from Facebook were also garbage. People would click through our ad and fill out a form even though the ad had nothing to do with them.
Post reply on HN