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P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

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Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#151

Post by jansan »

WalterBright wrote: post #49

As an ad exec once said, "half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, we don't know which half."

Well, I just found out which half I wasted on Google AdWords. I had a campaign targeting the US. It was much less effective than I had expected, and just yesterday I found out why: There is a little option in advanced settings that lets you decide if you want to display your ads to users "in your targeted countries", or "interested in your targeted countries". The second is the default option, and if you do not change it, it will display your ads in Belarus, India, Turkey and wherever, altough you have an US-only audience. I got lots of calls from the Adwords sales team, always trying to tell me how to spend more money on Adwords. Nobody every pointed at the wrong setting, although they had all my settings and campaigns clear in front of them. I have the feeling that Google owes me a few thousand dollars.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#152

Post by mden »

dhimes wrote: post #127
inimino wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you identify the invalid clicks?

In some cases you'll see that they leave your page immediately- too fast for a human to process that it's not what they want if they've actually clicked on an ad. Like, one or two seconds.

One or two seconds sounds pretty long to me. I think I close accidental ad clicks well under a second a lot of the time as I realize what I did without waiting for the site to load.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#153

Post by loceng »

wyc wrote: post #8

Bob Hoffman at the Ad Contrarian called this in January: "P&G To Online Ad World: We've Had Enough" - https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/p-to-online-ad-wor... Digital advertising is rife with (what should be considered) fraud. Advertisers feel as though they are getting fleeced, and the advertising middlemen reap massive margins. The accountability isn't where it needs to be; there are websites that hide ads u…

Is there no government agency(ies) who track this to protect businesses from fraud? Otherwise with these practices in place, clearly the businesses selling ads are simply seeing what level of bullshit businesses will tolerate - how far into businesses' profits they can dig before the businesses say fuck this.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#155

Post by wslh »

You can ask: if this is not working for P&G why will this work for you. I have mixed experiences. If I am attacking a niche where the user will act immediately after finding you exist then it works, if you are targetting a big market with a lot of competitors it is not worth the money and time except you discover new specific keywords.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#156

Post by dragonwriter »

dhimes wrote: post #127
inimino wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you identify the invalid clicks?

In some cases you'll see that they leave your page immediately- too fast for a human to process that it's not what they want if they've actually clicked on an ad. Like, one or two seconds.

One or two seconds is not too quick for a human to reject your page after clicking on an ad.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#157

Post by nickhalfasleep »

How many brands could just cut out the traditional or sales-based advertising and go for quality and word of mouth growth like ANKER?

Nothing sells me on a product like a happy customer. I scroll past the adds and related items on sites and dive right for the comments. Or just ask around work for what people use for X.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#158

Post by ikeboy »

>After cutting back on certain digital ads, “we didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate,”

>P&G, whose brands include Bounty, Crest, Tide and Pampers, spent $2.45 billion on U.S. advertising, not including spending on some digital platforms

So, even if digital advertising performed on par with everything else, it would only affect the growth rate by 5% of the effect other advertising had. Surely other factors contribute to variability at least enough that an overall effect cannot be determined using this data?

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#159

Post by ameister14 »

I've worked in and around marketing/advertising for the last 6 years in different capacities and have found that the emphasis on audience hyper-segmentation and retargeting to the exclusion of other methods is the single biggest piece of bullshit out there. Targeting people based on what they are apparently interested in vs. places they go that reflect those interests doesn't give better results and can turn off your customers. It sounds cool to marketing teams and it works to get you contest entries, but it doesn't usually translate to more conversions than a well managed campaign would give.

If I buy a mattress, advertising more mattresses to me doesn't make me more likely to buy them; I bought the thing already. Advertising mattresses to a person on a mattress review website, though - that works. Of course, that's harder to do.

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