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

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

#171

Post by jameshart » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

toinbis wrote: post #134

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 th…

You should read the article. You might learn something about the dubious value of attributed traffic.

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

#172

Post by tomrod » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #40

colinmhayes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way to know until they do an A/B test like eBay did I guess. EBay was certain that they needed to do the on brand ads before this economist showed up too.

Even the eBay test can be misleading - if everyone sees competitor B anytime they search for eBay, eventually they are going to give it a try.

This is untrue. A small proportion, but most people searching for something specific what that something that is specific.

If I search for a Dell computer, no way will I buy Apple.

Likewise if I use Bing to search for Chrome, no way will I download edge except for user error.

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

#173

Post by yupper32 » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

rexreed wrote: post #146

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 p…

> 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?

I think this sounds deeper than it actually is.

What you're describing is just capitalism. A consequence of capitalism is that sometimes people figure out how to make addicting products and then capitalize on it (cigarettes, drugs, social media). Eventually we figure out the harm and work hard to stop the damage as much as we can. Cigarette usage is down to historic lows in the US, for example. Sometimes it takes a while and takes a lot of fighting.

Another consequence is massive incentives to advance society. You can't deny that the vast majority of technology advances over the last 20 (or 40 or 60 or 80) years have been incredibly beneficial to society. And the advances wouldn't have happened if we didn't also risk the occasional bad actor coming up.

We're still figuring it all out as a society. We've weathered worse and will come out of it stronger.

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

#174

Post by myth2018 » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

During pandemics, I got really suspicious about adwords.

My ads were working reasonabilly well considering the low investment I was making, with a fair amount of prospects filling my contact form on a low but steady rate. I was satisfied with the return I was getting.

However, the pandemic caused a significant drop on my product's demand. I thought I was going to get little to no contacts from the moment the lockdown was announced on, but:

1) I kept getting clicks at basically the same rate -- therefore my budget kept being depleted as it used to be;

2) Bounce rates increased A LOT;

3) The few actual people who got in touch were not actually looking for the product I announced, but similar ones (which I didn't announce nor sell);

So, according to my experience, I can't say adwords totally doesn't work.. but I'd say their algorithms are optimized to spend your money regardless of the results you're going to obtain.

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

#175

Post by alphabetting » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #150

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd rather ignore some ads which are less intrusive than places like Amazon than pay a subscription fee to use search, gmail and docs which are funded by ads.

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

#176

Post by vlovich123 » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #47

vlovich123 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think the only on-brand search ads that should be allowed are ones for totally unrelated products OR those ads are placed below what on-brand search results would provide. Google has no incentive to fix this though because it's an extra tax they charge the entire online advertising space (+ all the other search providers do it). Carefully crafted legislation could put an end to this tax.

> Yeah, I think the only on-brand search ads that should be allowed are ones for totally unrelated products... The problem is that this is subjective and would need to be automated somehow. I think Google's original sin here is making the ads look so much like organic search results. Someone placing an ad against a competitors brand name would not be a huge issue if organic results were still front and centre like in…

This is actually trivially automatable. First of all, brand keywords are something Google supports explicitly for this kind of targetting so they know from that direction.

More generally though, if you paid for an advertisement and the natural search result has you first anyway, then you should not be charged for any clicks to this advertisement.

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

#177

Post by gamerDude » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

peanut_worm wrote: post #168

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.

You’re kidding! A single click costs more than a dollar?

Sometimes. The "intent" scenarios can be pretty valuable.

"I need a lawyer in ___ right now". That lead can be worth a lot.

"Looking to buy a new car today", etc.

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

#178

Post by ameister14 » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #156

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…

#2 is basically an industry standard for ad firms (at least good ones), you'll usually only get people buying those ads to fill budgets or to do branded advertising that's only purpose is to raise brand awareness. I don't really agree with your #1 point, but that really depends on your vertical. You couldn't really do that well in service industries or financial/legal services, etc.

Oddly enough, display ads crush it for restaurant catering

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

#179

Post by dorgo » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:32 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…

>Ad Quality measurement

It's called Quality score (soon to be discontinued) and has 3 components. Only one of which is landing page related. And nothing prevents competitors from building "more relevant" landing pages than the original brand.

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

#180

Post by aerosmile » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

dsizzle wrote: post #147

aerosmile wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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-...

Thank you for sharing this. Facebook received a lot of criticism for how they lobbied publicly against iOS14. Their reputation is ruined, and anything they say will always be taking with a cynical afterthought. But as much as it pains me to say it, they are 100% right in saying that iOS14 is indirectly going to create a lot of damage for SMBs and companies trying to disrupt the status quo. There's more nuance to it, but think of it this way: if your marketing budget plans on reaching 100m Americans each year, then the negative impact on micro targeting is not quite as bad since you're going for the mainstream customer anyway. But if you're trying to reach only 1m people, then losing micro targeting is a matter of life or death.