What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam? • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by JacobThreeThree » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

drevil-v2 wrote: post #117

Puts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a dollar.

Way more than a dollar. If you really want to cost a company a pretty penny, click on the ad after searching for an "intent" to do something rather than the exact brand. Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars.

I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a big factor that contributes to how the Google Ads "black box" determines how to rank ads is via an Ad Quality measurement.

Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your competition.

This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their competitors to be there.

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

#142

Post by thomasahle » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #116

thomasahle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not been there. Isn't this just the usual problem with advertising? You have to do it because the other players are doing it. If nobody did it, it would still be the same cake to be shared. This case is more on the nose, but only because of some fairness…

When people search Pepsi Cola they expect to get a link to Pepsi or information about it. They don’t expect to see Coca Cola or RC Cola, etc. now in this case Pepsi makes sure search isn’t polluted by paying Google good money to always be the top results for that term. Now, if you searched on the generic ‘cola’ or ‘soda pop’ then yes you expect to see those who bid higher to be at the top and at the bottom those who…

I guess that's more a customer satisfaction problem for Google, than it is a problem for advertisers.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

aerosmile wrote: post #129

NumberCruncher wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rand implies that you have to do your own studies [...] which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you So FB, who earns on my spending, offers me to measure for me whether my spending makes sense for me. Why would FB ever tell me to spend less? Don't they like money?

It's fair to question credibility, but you have to realize that their results can be compared against 3rd parties, and it would lead to a lot of reputational damage (and also legal risk) to systematically defraud your advertisers. All it takes is one smart team to out the entire enterprise.

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by fungiblecog » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

All I can say is "No shit, Sherlock".

I'm constantly bombarded by ads for stuff I've already decided to buy (or more usually that I already bought last week). This stuff has zero value. The point of advertising has always (until now) been about taking your product to people who didn't know it was there. Targeted advertising would be a funny joke if so many people didn't take it seriously.

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

#145

Post by bagacrap » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

s17n wrote: post #27

The example given in the article seems very off-base: the author is vaguely planning to purchase some type of planner, and he gets an ad for a specific planner from a specific retailer. There has to be a pretty tiny chance that he would have ended up at that exact site without the ad, so if the ad does lead to a conversion, it's incremental revenue.

Not to mention, "you’ve just visited some articles recommending fancy paper notebook products" makes it sound like he viewed some spammy top 10 list full of paid affiliate links, so he's probably succumbing to performance advertising regardless of Facebook's later involvement.

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

#146

Post by rexreed » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

So much of what we rely on today for Internet applications and infrastructure has at its core a fallacious advertising revenue model. As companies who spend money on advertising realize the low returns they are getting, they will turn off that ad spend, which will turn those platforms into increasingly needy and demanding in your face advertisers, being more intrusive with your data. Since the average "user" is the product and not the customer, users will continue to see fewer and fewer features that don't help with advertising revenue and the quality of the overall service to the user (not the customer, the advertiser) will decline.

We're already seeing that. The quality of Google products continue to decay. Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly both becoming shallower advertising hustles (LinkedIn just this week turned off post notification for events to force people to buy LinkedIn ads). As other apps and websites get snapped up by these FAANGs, we'll start to pine for the Internet that was 2008. The decay is already well under way.

What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray?

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

#147

Post by dsizzle » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

aerosmile wrote: post #104

ChuckMcM wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- Brian's comments about Airbnb's approach to performance marketing are used to imply that Airbnb's lessons apply to other businesses. Very few businesses - especially those that start from small numbers and need to grow them - have 90% of their traffic mix come from repeat customers. Using Brian's comments helps fuel the narrative that brand marketing is a better investment than performance marketing, which is corre…

To your point that AirBnB's and other global brands don't extend to most businesses, Facebook's recent outage provided such an experiment and indeed a lot of small businesses saw massive effects https://mashable.com/article/facebook-outage-small-business-...

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

#148

Post by titzer » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

Puts wrote: post #57

mbesto wrote: post #18

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. This is what is known as "on brand" Search ads. I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not…

Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a dollar.

I've done that once in a blue moon, but it doesn't really accomplish anything except transferring that money to Google. Since I used to work for Google, thanks, I guess :-)

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

#149

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by titzer » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #141

drevil-v2 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way more than a dollar. If you really want to cost a company a pretty penny, click on the ad after searching for an "intent" to do something rather than the exact brand. Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars.

I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a big factor that contributes to how the Google Ads "black box" determines how to rank ads is via an Ad Quality measurement. Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your compe…

The very fact that you have to bid on clicks for your own damn website by paying Google, because Google has prioritized ads to the point of displaying them higher and making them almost indistinguishable from the "organic" search result proves they have intentionally created a tax on the internet.

It will get worse, to the point where to get auto-completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not even sure if that isn't already the case!