201–210 of 369 posts
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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.
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 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…
This is all just my opinion and I'm sure there are better marketers than me that make this work, but this is what I've seen happen in too many VC-funded/backed companies. And it gets even harder when we're at the super levels of funding that we're now seeing. So if I'm a relatively small company (funded to $50m) that is spending $5m a year on marketing, and I'm competing against a company with $500m in funding and, say $100m on marketing, then it's even worse.
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> 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 desc…
Considering technology, capitalism, are causing a mass extinction on our planet and pushing us to collapse I'm not sure that I can't deny our technological advances have been beneficial. When something is killing you and all life on the planet, it doesn't matter if it's killing you softly.
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…
This is a real problem with Adwords and it needs regulation. Google increasingly push people to give us your money and trust us, but as you say their optimisation recommendations both automated and account 'experts' suit their agenda more than yours.
Adwords is probably still the most effective channel for a typical business but make sure when being run it's by someone that knows what they are doing.
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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.
I trust that a multi-national serving multiple markets is going to give me less nationally biased information than the government of a superpower (with political ambitions that span the globe.)
It's why I generally don't turn to the Voice of America for news.
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> Rand implies that you have to do your own studies [...] which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you So FB, who earns on my spending, offers me to measure for me whether my spending makes sense for me. Why would FB ever tell me to spend less? Don't they like money?
The causal incrementality of ad spend is rarely negative. You expect to see decreasing returns with additional ad spend. For each dollar in ad spend, one advertiser might want to see $3 in revenue, another $5. Incrementality studies then allow advertisers to tune spend to their operating points. Facebook does like money. Do you think lying to the biggest advertisers in the world is the best long-term strategy, or do…
Long-term strategy? https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-allowed-fraud-hacke...
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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.
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It's not a tax, it's a protection racket. You wouldn't like it if someone looking for Williams Sonoma saw results for Sur La Table, would you? Pay up.
An ad directing shoppers to your competitors who pay them is not a protection racket, no more than a travel agency directing travelers to businesses that they have a relationship with. It's the entire business model of aggregators and intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half the world's working population.
Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver?
Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment?
Is Google's search results advertising bidding system ethically equivalent to this?
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It's not a tax, it's a protection racket. You wouldn't like it if someone looking for Williams Sonoma saw results for Sur La Table, would you? Pay up.
An ad directing shoppers to your competitors who pay them is not a protection racket, no more than a travel agency directing travelers to businesses that they have a relationship with. It's the entire business model of aggregators and intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half the world's working population.
All too often the middleman is milking both sides.
Google has value due to the search engine capabilities. But people realising they are being milked changes the value proposition.
I think Google is safe for now, though I don't think that is a good thing.
When you start using these tools, they almost seem to replace what would have been an organic acquisition with a paid acquisition.
As the article notes, why isn't this obvious for most large advertisers on these platforms?
Likely due to:
- Their spend is so large that it hides the fact that they would have gotten a large % of it for free anyway
- Large advertisers rarely stop all advertising for a period of time to notice the % of truely organic traffic (that isn't just opportunistically attributed to the platforms)
- They have been doing it for so long that big spends on these platforms are considered mandatory and not even questioned