111–120 of 181 posts
So HN wants Google not to track prople but still exactly and completely accurately know the location of each and every one of them for Ad targeting? That sounds incompatible.
What about just not serving the ad to an IP in Turkey without even looking at the person using it?
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Are they impulse buyers, or highly specialized? From time to time I see a cool thing that seems targeted to me, do click it, see the outrageous price, then do research and find the best price/quality ratio on Amazon. I assumed most people did the same really. An example from years back: I thought the Little Giant ladder was an awesome idea, but ridiculously priced. I bought a gorilla knockoff type ladder instead.
I'm not sure, but my girlfriend clicks on ads on instagram and buys things directly from there on a regular basis. I think the people who go on HN might be in a little bit of a bubble about the efficacy of advertisements.
I've been running PPC ads for highly targeted keywords for the last 5 years which have generated a ridiculous return. In general ppc is steady and reliable once you have you're keywords and ads running for a while and are well optimized.
On the other hand, I've recently been trying dropshipping, advertising the product on Facebook.
I did a small test for a unique product, I sourced it from China for around 5 usd and sold them for 25 usd.
People actually bought them on site even though Amazon has them at a much lower price.
Facebook literally knows people who are high spenders / frequent purchasers and will put your ads in front of them. It's actually stupidly powerful.
Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…
> And Google removed an option to disable mobile apps altogether lately. can you adjust bid to -100% for mobile?
And as you can expect, Google has 10 times stricter requirements for websites showing their ads, than for Android apps...
Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…
How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification?
Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my side project to get actual people on my service. And I'm on a ridiculous budget, I can't afford the "throw money on the wall and see what sticks" method with 500$.
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The old saw was that 50% of advertising is useless, it's just that nobody knows which 50%. I guess that's why people are so excited about click tracking, analytics, etc, etc.
I think it's more like 99%. When I was running advertising for a small business we put vouchers in to track advertising. The only people who brought in vouchers were people who were already customers who said they were already coming. So, we spent money to reduce our revenue. (I do the same, hunt for vouchers after making a buying/visiting decision.) I was on national TV and national radio (UK) - none of that blipped…
Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…
> if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification? Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my…
Therefore, the budget is only "eventually consistent" - i.e. at the end of the campaign or after a day or so, the number you're being charged is accurate. However during the campaign itself it's not possible to guarantee that things won't go slightly over budget as each individual ad auction cannot feasibly check the central budget.
That said, it definitely feels like there should be a way to implement this such that it backs off as the budget is approached, so that overshoots are likely to be minor, rather than 100% of the budget as apparently happens on a regular basis.
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Their whole ad empire is desperate for a massive audit. Google had to be sued to deliver a $400,000 refund they owed but later claimed couldn't be delivered, claiming 3rd parties had been paid the funds when it was their own platforms. It turned out Google had accidentally kept $75 million. https://marketingland.com/class-action-lawsuit-accuses-googl...
As someone who has adblocked everything since my teenage years, the whole ad industry seems to be making orders of magnitude more money than it should. I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads. Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products. Do we really trust ad tech accounting? They've been caught inflating numbers over and over again. The whole house of cards seems like it cou…
Even if only a small percentage (e.g. People are making huge amounts of money/doing huge amounts of business directly as a result of the ads, and that is not just Google and Facebook, but everyone all the way down to little mom and pop businesses.
When you track things down to the level of sales it very often works (not always - depends on products/business models etc), and that is why people are using online ads. AdWords and Facebook ads would have fizzled out years ago if people were not benefiting from advertising their business
Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…
Oh yes, those baby clicks on YouTube. Annyoing as hell. Stay away from broad affinity / in-market groups or you'll end up spending 20%-40% of your budget on channels for toddlers. By time though you'll build up a nice list that you can exclude, but it's going to cost you in the start.
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As someone who has adblocked everything since my teenage years, the whole ad industry seems to be making orders of magnitude more money than it should. I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads. Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products. Do we really trust ad tech accounting? They've been caught inflating numbers over and over again. The whole house of cards seems like it cou…
If Google’s ad business dries up, what do you think they will pivot to? It scares me to think about what a desperate company with that much data would do.
Still 90% of their profit comes from ads. They are much less diversified than Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
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> if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification? Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my…
As I understand it the reasoning given tends to be that ad auctions happen extremely quickly, and therefore too quickly to check some single source of truth for your current budget. Therefore, the budget is only "eventually consistent" - i.e. at the end of the campaign or after a day or so, the number you're being charged is accurate. However during the campaign itself it's not possible to guarantee that things won't…