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Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

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Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#551

Post by pb7 »

nutanc wrote: post #545
pb7 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone. "If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly t…

>The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that.

Sure, and I want to watch a show and then have all of the commercials run at then end after I turn off the TV.

>More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

So what would your answer to this be?

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#552

Post by aaronmdjones »

pb7 wrote: post #544
aaronmdjones wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in? My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".

Sounds like a pretty valuable service that connects you to the things you are looking for. Why do you feel entitled to get this for free?

What? I didn't ask for anything for free. I'm just telling you what happens. Normal people don't remember domain names. I'd hazard a guess that half of them don't even know what those are. If they want to get anywhere, they put it into a search engine, even if it's something ridiculously common like Wikipedia.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#553

Post by porknubbins »

pb7 wrote: post #537
nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

As a practical matter, search is how 99% of everyone gets to everything. Even if the browser fills in http:// for me so I can just type a name to get a complete URL why would I risk misspelling or mis-domaining a URL and possibly getting a fake or time wasting similarly named site? It doesn’t really matter whether the apple wiki or apple.com comes first because there is no chance I will confuse the two (unlike, say competing online furniture companies).

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#554

Post by latexr »

pb7 wrote: post #537
nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

> If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?

Plenty of people use the search engine as their homepage or reflexively open it when making a new tab, and searching for the name of the service (you don’t have to remember the TLD) becomes a habit.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#555

Post by eternalban »

Run surveillance on masses and defraud businesses: the advertising industry.

Of course it could just be a parallel construct for funneling money to surveillance tech companies such as Google by compliant companies that know they are not getting anything for their ad monies, to serve the policy goals of unseen but powerful interests.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#556

Post by efreak »

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

Tip: URL suggestions are rarely advertising, and pop up faster than the results page does. Check the suggestions before searching.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#557

Post by LeifCarrotson »

nutanc wrote: post #545
pb7 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone. "If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly t…

I'm behind a Pihole and the top result for Ozonetel is ozonetel.com. On mobile, there is a "People also search for" bar that takes me to Google searches for their competitors, but it's mostly the Ozonetel home page, LinkedIn, Twitter, Crunchbase etc.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#559

Post by hedora »

wasdfff wrote: post #236
vb6sp6 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web existed before the adtech industry. It will live after it.

As a smoking crater maybe. The web was orders of magnitude smaller before the adtech.

Yes, a smoking crater full of exotic diamonds.

We don’t need more internet content, we need a higher signal to noise ratio.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#560

Post by xenospn »

jedberg wrote: post #335
legitster wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in digital marketing and this episode made me want to tear my ears off. First of all, they didn't differentiate between display or PPC advertising. PPC you only pay if the user actually engaged with the ad. Nearly all of the anecdotes they used where about online display advertising - a known crock. And we absolutely run experiments all the time! In fact, we tie our ad spend directly to conversions. If anythin…

But the experiments you run pit one ad type or channel against another. Have you ever run any experiments comparing ads to no ads?

I have. When I run ads, I grow. When I stop running ads, I don’t.
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