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Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

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Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#171

Post by Fomite »

soared wrote: post #36

OP is simply doing it wrong. Advertising works, and the title's claim only shows how inexperienced op is. I work at a digital ad agency. Ads work if you do it correctly, but it's incredibly easy to waste money. People like op are why google and Facebook make buying ads overly complicated - if it were easy you wouldn't have to spend so much money. If op is reading this, I'd be happy to hop on a phone call and help you…

> People like op are why google and Facebook make buying ads overly complicated

Buying ads is literally one of the easiest things I've ever done on Facebook.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#172

Post by somid3 »

soared wrote: post #36

OP is simply doing it wrong. Advertising works, and the title's claim only shows how inexperienced op is. I work at a digital ad agency. Ads work if you do it correctly, but it's incredibly easy to waste money. People like op are why google and Facebook make buying ads overly complicated - if it were easy you wouldn't have to spend so much money. If op is reading this, I'd be happy to hop on a phone call and help you…

@Soared, aside from the self-marketing of your firm how about you put your money where your mouth is. Let's use the same landing page - I'll make a campaign, you make a campaign, we each spend $500 and we track conversions in a specific period of time.

The one who converts more for less will owe the other $1000 - we can make the accounts public so that (1) the world can see your "expertise" and (2) how "confused" I am. Game?

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#173

Post by sherlockgopher »

kyledrake wrote: post #169
WhitneyLand wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My site was targeted with millions of low quality links Are you saying competitors maliciously sabotaged your ranking? Or that you bought SEO services from an unscrupulous company?

Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? How does one determine their site is "punished"? I have seen the consequences of paying for SEO. They spam your site URL on random web forums. If you pay for SEO, you are very likely paying people to use bots and sweatshops to spam your site url via low qual…

Google tends to ignore these things, just see how poor Google Analytics dashboard is, I hear clicky has a better dashboard as compared to GA.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#174

Post by edblarney »

WalterSear wrote: post #147
edblarney wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you spend $1 Million on ads that were not working? Did you not test your ads to grasp the conversion rate before spending the money?

Wasn't my job to manage ad spends, but I believe that somebody got in a great deal of trouble over the majority of that. On the whole, IMHO, the business people weren't being entirely foolish, or foolhardy with our money - ultimately advertising costs a lot, and some adwords are expensive, and there aren't that many choices if you trying to get leads from a specific type of user.

"but I believe that somebody got in a great deal of trouble over the majority of that."

1M is a pretty big ad-spend for even a medium sized company. If it was a total failure than the leadership had absolutely no clue what was going on. The CEO is to blame.

If you're trying to get 'customer acquisition' then there's no reason that ads could not have been tested - you should have been able to resolve the unknown one for under $50K.

Granted - every situation is different and I understand it's not always so clean - but still - 1M is a lot especially if it affected the company. Sounds really bad.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#175

Post by rackforms »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #158
rackforms wrote: post #114

I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a mont…

>My site was targeted with millions of low quality links Are you saying competitors maliciously sabotaged your ranking? Or that you bought SEO services from an unscrupulous company?

A valid question.

So I've never done any "SEO" work on the site outside of Google's own recommendations with regard to site content, ease of use, etc.

In other words no link building, keyword stuffed pages, etc.

I'm still in the dark all these years later, but my best guess is:

a. I had a blog and forum that, like most of that time (2012's), has occasional spam posts.

b. Those posts would often, but not always, be referenced by the spam links pointing to my site.

c. I had very high rank in Google for several years leading up to the penalty.

Because of this I don't think it was a necessarily a competitor, but rather spammers trying to leech off of that high ranking.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#176

Post by rackforms »

emmanuel_1234 wrote: post #117
rackforms wrote: post #114

I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a mont…

" I guess my point is the current situation, basically 2 companies controlling so much traffic, seems, well, bad for small business in this country " Why " in this country "? Isn't it a problem for the entrepreneurs in the rest of the world too?

Yes, and I should have said as much.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#177

Post by maksimum »

cconcepts wrote: post #161
Taek wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results. SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.

So how do I combat against this? We're a small, honest company providing great products and services for the companies that need them but we're getting killed online because no one can find us. I've forked out a lot (for us) on adwords and the return has been negligible to say the least. Does this mean that the democratizing power of the internet has been swallowed up for small, lean companies like us who cant afford…

Try finding influencers with high pagerank (page 1-2 for your business type) and paying them to review/feature your products and link to your site.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#178

Post by Whitestrake »

Nition wrote: post #149
dajohnson89 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we've learned over the years to ignore all ads. Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I'm not served ads.

This sounds like a joke but when an obtrusive ad comes up I literally only see Close, X, etc now. Totally tune out the whole thing except the parts that look like they might make it go away.

I'm with you - totally unable to remember the contents of the last lightbox popup I dismissed, and I'd challenge anyone to honestly recall theirs if it wasn't within the last few minutes.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#179

Post by xtian »

sherlockgopher wrote: post #173
kyledrake wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? How does one determine their site is "punished"? I have seen the consequences of paying for SEO. They spam your site URL on random web forums. If you pay for SEO, you are very likely paying people to use bots and sweatshops to spam your site url via low qual…

Google tends to ignore these things, just see how poor Google Analytics dashboard is, I hear clicky has a better dashboard as compared to GA.

What does that have to do with anything?
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