What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

Post by gumby » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

Puts wrote: post #57

mbesto wrote: post #18

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> 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.

Post by vkou » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #181

alphabetting wrote: post #175

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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.

There are other options. For example, funding a publicly-owned search engine with $1 billion a year in infrastructure and development costs would be 50x cheaper than what the US spends on foodstamps. It'd be 1/10th the NSF's annual budget. Not that that's the best option, but we could consider some new ideas.

Post by Kalium » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #140

Kalium wrote: post #128

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If you take as a foundational assumption that the brand name in the search string means the traffic is in some sense owned by the brand, then you're absolutely right. It's essentially racketeering. Certainly brands often view traffic that way. Personally I resist the idea that a brand owns my attention because I used a keyword, but that's one of my many personal quirks.

It's a little dicer in the cases where we can pretty much infer that they're trying to get to a specific thing and would have happily used a direct URL to the page if they had the wherewithal to do so. In this case the ad placement is basically a brand trying to hijack my attention while I'm in the process of seeking a thing out. I struggle to think of a meat world analogy. It would be something like if I dialed my g…

Post by alphabetting » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #194

vkou wrote: post #193

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A publicly owned search engine, that will absolutely not be used for propaganda purposes by, say, the Department of State, or by a megalomaniac elected representative. Need to build consent for a war with ? Give me access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be done.

I didn't say it was the best option. But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? I mean, we can subject things to public oversight.

Post by lifeisstillgood » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

aerosmile wrote: post #111

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #97

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Incrementality studies: https://www.adroll.com/blog/marketing-analytics/beginners-gu... Interesting article 1. "industry" is moving away from last touch attribution (pretty much what Rand complains about) 2. "Incrementality strives to identify the causal event of a conversion," The way to identify the causal action seems to be : errr ... that's difficult

You linked to an article that offers no guidance on how to actually do it, which is more indicative of the article itself than of the methodology. One of the vendors in this space has a good amount of content on this topic, which you can find at the bottom of this page: https://www.measured.com/ . Dislaimer: I have nothing to do with this vendor or the industry in general (apart from successfully spending money on pe…