Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has adblocked everything since my teenage years, the whole ad industry seems to be making orders of magnitude more money than it should. I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads. Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products. Do we really trust ad tech accounting? They've been caught inflating numbers over and over again. The whole house of cards seems like it cou…
To my surprise yes ads are very effective. Without getting too specific, my close relatives run their own business as home improvement contractors. In the early days, before they had their reputation built, I setup a google adwords campaign for them — having never run an ad campaign before. It was a simple PPC campaign that included keywords in google search results and geofenced it to the SFBay. Here are some number…
If you want to sell everyday consumption or end consumers items, this scheme will eat all your income/benefit.
After reading about all the flaws in automatic online advertising through clicks on this thread, it looks like a big scam prospering more or less in favor of opacity, lack of fine tuning or targeting and fraud.
Referral systems and social influencers seems to be a better option, as long as your product is good and would not shame the ones endorsing it. Betting on viral marketing and endorsement seems to be more natural and a better bet, but require maybe more work and preparation than blind automatic system.