101–110 of 933 posts
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Facebook and IG ads work. I agree that display network ads do not.
Ya for sure. I was a Googler so my examples were biased, these aren't the only ad formats that work but there are fewer than most people (even in ad tech) realize.
You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another. You don't have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty. All big companies do this. Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually…
Uber turns off a shitload of ad spending, nothing bad happens to new user acquisitions.
I'd say there are about a million better uses of a million dollars than just pissing them away on a scam.
There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…
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That theory can easily be tested by turning off the ads in question and seeing what actually happens. Can always turn them on again later if needed.
Would you be willing to make that decision knowing full well that it could reduce revenue that is 100% traceable to that decision? I mean, obviously there are ways to make this politically acceptable in your organization, but you better be completely confident that it won’t bite you in the ass.
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I also had a small Google ad spend ($350 over 3 weeks), that I setup to run exclusively in the USA, and had the same experience where IP addresses recorded by hotjar were all from India, all new signups from the ad spend were '.gmail' email addresses and although I had about 100 signups not a single one entered a credit card.
Yeah, same here. We have done some spam mitigation, but we still get so many bogus sign ups and form submissions. In this instance, who is committing the fraud? Is it Google to ensure you spend your entire budget? I don’t see anyone else benefiting from these bots and click farms. We’re so small and new that it can’t be a competitor.
You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another. You don't have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty. All big companies do this. Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually…
Except Uber, apparently? Or would the method you're talking about not have discovered that something fishy was going on? (I don't work with ads so I don't know the limitations of the type of experiment that you're talking about)
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That theory can easily be tested by turning off the ads in question and seeing what actually happens. Can always turn them on again later if needed.
Google Ads also has a built in report for seeing uplift of ads + organic and organic only
There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…
> No one is willing to run the experiments necessary The people that would have the power to run this experiment have their entire careers depending on things staying as-is. Running the experiment carries a significant risk of exposing that the advertising operations they're responsible for provide much less ROI than they pretend it does. The unwillingness of anyone to run such an experiment is already an answer. Why…
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With Google ads you can select the countries where you want the ads to run in. If you go worldwide and chose to maximize clicks, Google Ads will mainly run them in India and other emerging countries because it's much cheaper to get clicks from there.
Yeah so that’s the weird part that I didn’t mention. These ads only run in the US.
Google Ads default settings for location targeting is based on "Presence or interest" in a location, not whether the user is actually in the targeted country. That means even if you have "United States" selected as your target, your ads will still show mostly to people outside the US who "show interest in" the US.
To fix it: Campaign Settings > Location > Location Options, and under "Target" select "Presence". Never use the default "Presence or interest" option, as it will result in exactly the scenario you're describing.
This is my #1 pet peeve with Google Ads. Using the default setting is an incredibly common (and expensive) mistake people make setting up new campaigns.