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What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

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Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#131

Post by Lewton »

colinmhayes wrote: post #13
simonsarris wrote: post #2

> Technically, when someone does a Google search for “Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet,” they probably would have clicked on one of the first 10 organic results, EVERY ONE OF WHICH leads to their website. But, y’know what ol’ Billy Ma’s performance marketers couldn’t then do: prove their value to their bosses. > [picture of that search term and williams sonoma ads with shopping links] The main problem here is that i…

Freakonomics had an episode with an economist that worked with Ebay on ad buys. This sort of "buy ads on your own keywords" was shown to have zero impact on sales to the point that they cut completely stopped advertising when the search included "ebay".

I just searched for "ebay" on google and the top result is an ad for ebay.com?

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#132

Post by cwkoss »

chmsky00 wrote: post #34

Advertising as we know it emerged as a melding of government propaganda research and behavioral economics during world wars, so of course it’s often scammy. It sounds “deep state” but it’s actually plainly documented in government files and written about by reliable sources. Remember we’re still emerging from an era of whispering the same old story of morality and obligation to each other. I am not at all interested…

The "Century of the Self" documentary series about Bernays and the rise of propaganda/marketing is really great. Recommend it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#133

Post by ssharp »

zippergz wrote: post #100
ssharp wrote: post #99

I was at one company several years ago and made two big changes to digital advertising: #1 - Eliminated all paid search other than some limited branded search terms and shifted all the money to affiliates who were way better at making profits on the keywords we were competing on #2 - Eliminated all display advertising after running numerous experiments showing it provided almost not incremental conversions, even thou…

Maybe your situation or industry is an exception, but my view is that affiliate marketing is one of the most corrosive influences on today's internet. It drives a truly mind boggling amount of spam of all types, from affiliates who add literally no value other than inserting their affiliate code into the transaction. The proportion of content on the web that provides no true new information, but exists solely to driv…

A lot of things can fall under the "affiliate" umbrella but what we did was doing 1-on-1 deals with content providers who were acquiring a lot of relevant traffic. It was not promo code spamming.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#134

Post by toinbis »

In performance marketing(=KPIS are a)sales volume and b) Cost per action - CPA) it's very simple - you can't scam how much you've spent on ads. Also you can't scam how much you charged the traffic you've bought. Both figures are reported by your finance department with pretty much 100% precision.

Yes, you do have a challanging problem of attribution. But the spend and revenue figures are what matters at the end of the day. And neither of them has any area for scamming (let's ignore edge cases).

Disclosure: only skimmed through the article and my arguments above are just directed towards the headline. However credible and opinion leader the author - Rand Fishkin - is, the article itself at the first glance did not inspired me personally as a worthy my attentive reading time.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#135

Post by poetaster »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #81
aerosmile wrote: post #77

There are so many holes in these arguments that you could drive a truck through it. Which is so infuriating, because a big part of my professional career consisted of watching all of Rand's SEO videos and really appreciating them. I really thought he was a genius. But then over the past few years, he started sharing more general views on entrepreneurship, and those takeaways just didn't really make much sense. Basica…

Can I politely suggest that you share with us the holes you see in the arguments and how you see them? Whether or not Rand is any good at what he does or says will be clear by your expert disassembly of his arguments.

Hmmm. Marketing works!? Well having been a sucessfull .com era ad co. founder, I suceeded in raking in the cash of the uniniated (automobile, etc, so no tears) only to see companies literally obliterated by marketing. TV was then still 20 times the spend. Still, marketing had 0 clue. Fun to drink with at the theatre, sure. I was CTO, so, shrug? No, I was incensed and tried to talk other managers client side out of giving ME money. I know some clever people in marketing, but when they smell budget, it's a movie shoot in the sahara time.

I do think things are better in some sense today. But it is a hungry beast, marketing. Oh, and lies and statistics.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#136

Post by rfwhyte »

This article should be taken with a huge grain of salt, as it's coming from a company that sells a service that is essentially is a competitor to the performance media channels it lambasts.

Any article that says "Don't buy X buy Y" loses a lot of credibility when it's written buy a guy who sells Y.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#137

Post by andrewyates2020 »

Hi, I started a company, Promoted.ai (YC W21) that solves this. My background is from Facebook ads eng and Pinterest ads eng. Large advertisers are already aware of this, and so is Facebook and Google. At Facebook, I led a research team to help big accounts to drive more incremental conversions. At Facebook at least, there is a lot of energy to try and generate the most true performance lift and measure it as correctly as possible.

However, every advertising platform will take your money if you give it to them, so buyer beware.

True incrementally is a challenging measurement issue and therefore even more challenging to predict for delivery via ML. It's real, though, just hard.

Buyer beware. When buying ads, think the stock market. If you hear stories about 20x ROI from random people, do what you when you hear 20x ROI on stock picks: nothing.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#138

Post by trentonstrong »

andrewyates2020 wrote: post #137

Hi, I started a company, Promoted.ai (YC W21) that solves this. My background is from Facebook ads eng and Pinterest ads eng. Large advertisers are already aware of this, and so is Facebook and Google. At Facebook, I led a research team to help big accounts to drive more incremental conversions. At Facebook at least, there is a lot of energy to try and generate the most true performance lift and measure it as correct…

Would like to hear more about these 20x ROI stock picks.

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#139

Post by coldtea »

simonsarris wrote: post #2

> Technically, when someone does a Google search for “Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet,” they probably would have clicked on one of the first 10 organic results, EVERY ONE OF WHICH leads to their website. But, y’know what ol’ Billy Ma’s performance marketers couldn’t then do: prove their value to their bosses. > [picture of that search term and williams sonoma ads with shopping links] The main problem here is that i…

Wouldn't that be solvable if it was forbidden to place ads using as search terms the tradename of another company?

Re: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

#140

Post by naravara »

Kalium wrote: post #128
naravara wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would, and then those companies would be above the Williams Sonoma organic placements. When you put it that way this sounds like racketeering.

If you take as a foundational assumption that the brand name in the search string means the traffic is in some sense owned by the brand, then you're absolutely right. It's essentially racketeering. Certainly brands often view traffic that way. Personally I resist the idea that a brand owns my attention because I used a keyword, but that's one of my many personal quirks.

It's a little dicer in the cases where we can pretty much infer that they're trying to get to a specific thing and would have happily used a direct URL to the page if they had the wherewithal to do so. In this case the ad placement is basically a brand trying to hijack my attention while I'm in the process of seeking a thing out.

I struggle to think of a meat world analogy. It would be something like if I dialed my girlfriend up on the phone and, instead of routing me straight to her, I had to navigate through a switchboard asking me "How about talking to these sexy singles in your area instead?" And in order to prevent this, my girlfriend would then have to pay the company to route my call straight to her.

Of course this isn't a perfect metaphor because there's a lot of different ways people use a search bar, especially now that search bars are merged into URL bars. But that sort of gets at what it is about this that feels sleazy.

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