Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless • Hacker News Board

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#221

Post by digi_owl » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:13 AM UTC

cconcepts wrote: post #154

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…

The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page three. It wasn't till we realised we…

I dunno how much it has evolved, but Google got started by weighting search results based on how many other pages linked to that page. More links and your pages was found closer to the top of the results page.

So a easy way to game that was to set up "link farms" that pointed to each other, but not really offering anything worthwhile except a bunch of words people were likely to search for.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#222

Post by bigbugbag » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:15 AM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #207

usaphp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your product specialized to technical users? I've noticed that businesses with more technical clients have harder time getting customers via ads, because most technical users don't click on ads

I suspect most technical users don't see ads anymore.

haven't ads disappeared from the web 10 years ago ?

It is always a harsh return to a sad web experience when I have to use someone else computer who don't know about ad blockers. Almost unbearable, to the point that I first grant them the magic of ublock orgin before anything else. They thank me profusely and never go back to the ad riddled experience of the web.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#223

Post by sherlockgopher » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:22 AM UTC

xtian wrote: post #179

sherlockgopher wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://gist.github.com/pilt/1281299

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#224

Post by coldtea » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:23 AM UTC

iopq wrote: post #220

coldtea wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who?

Nobody in China uses Google other than English speakers. Google is notoriously bad at breaking Chinese characters up into words. Few people in Russia use Google for Russian language searches, this is because Google is not as good at declining Russian nouns and conjugating Russian verbs. Yandex gives more results of a higher quality for certain searches.

>Nobody in China uses Google other than English speakers. Google is notoriously bad at breaking Chinese characters up into words.

That has no bearing on whether Chinese businesses care. Obviously there are tons of Chinese businesses that sell outside China, including retail businesses, and their customers DO use Google.

Same for the Russian case.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#225

Post by bigbugbag » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:36 AM UTC

victorhooi wrote: post #137

Fnoord wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. There are 3 problems with this statement. 1) There is a lot of free content, easily found, and content gets more rapidly out of date nowadays. Paid content must deal with this (newsworthy, in depth competition). 2) Your view is US centric; the vast majority (read: not all) of internet users from other countries generally have less money to spend.…

Let me address your three points in order: 1. There is a lot of free content - yeah, the internet is full of free content, but much of is click-bait garbage, or re-posted a billion times. Let's be honest - true, honest-to-goodness original journalism costs money. Good writing costs money. Investigating journalism costs money. Getting people to actually go out into the real world, and interview people, or write about…

1. are you aware that newspaper were dying before the web ? they were mostly financed by advertising which owned them, also they pretty all been bought by rich people or giant corporations. Then out of the content available on the web (I'm not talking of the internet because I've never seen a journal publish on newsgroups or other parts of the internet that are not the web) newspaper are but a really tiny tiny fraction of the content available. The web was designed as a non-commercial sharing space, so it's no surprise that people expect it to still be used that way. At some point advertisers and marketers (who should suck on tailpipes [1]) invaded the web by the selling the idea that you could make money out by hijacking the traffic of a website. The internet and the web built on top changed the rules of the game and your failed business model is not my problem is the attitude you have to deal with from now on.

That said on the matter of independent (read no advertising) investigative journalism publishing online the number of available spots are limited and the first to move will seize the better place on the market. Look at how mediapart.fr established itself in France and how many stories they get out compared to the other newspapers. They are a success established on initial funding giving no power to the funder and now entirely paid by the readers.

Lesson here is there are people willing to pay and support a truly independent online newspaper, the demand is here and the old newspaper who are dependent on ads and controlled by who has the most shares are not fulfilling it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaD8y-CGhMw

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#226

Post by nrjdhsbsid » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:37 AM UTC

abalashov wrote: post #23

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about whic…

Sorry to break this to ya but I've never had an issue getting at least some traffic through AdWords.

Bounce rates that high mean something is extremely wrong with your site or the keywords you're advertising for. I've purposely setup some bogus ads to use as controls and I still only get around 85% bounce rate. If your site is interesting enough people will sometimes stick around even if they reach you randomly.

Niche products tend to do better with advertising, less competition.

Basically if it's a complete failure you're doing it wrong. Whether you can get a positive ROI is a different story

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#227

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:54 AM UTC

maksimum wrote: post #194

bumblebeard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm cheap then. I have no interest in paying any amount of money to read most of the things I read online. It seems to me that it's not so much that people are demanding this content for free as it is that people don't think it's worth paying for. It's not that I particularly wanted to see an article about the usefulness of advertising as it is that it's something to read on the bus. I would probably just loo…

You're definitely not alone. For some reason comments are often more interesting than the articles themselves, and people never think of monetizing their comments. Somehow karma is enough of a reward. If I had to watch an ad for 30 seconds or pay $0.25, the proceeds of which would be distributed to commentators by proportion of karma they earned in the comment section ... I probably wouldn't bother. It doesn't make m…

Paying commentators would immediately destroy the quality of comments as people tried to exploit the system.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#228

Post by bigbugbag » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 9:58 AM UTC

victorhooi wrote: post #43

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.

What exactly is "dumb" amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority. People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they're not cheap, they would totally pay for content. Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it's a race to the bot…

> Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free.

Web users are not cheap. They expect stuff to be free because this is what the web has been designed to: sharing knowledge for free between people. But truth is it is not free, we are paying through privacy invasion and the reason for both of these is google. Google provides whatever you want with no immediate price to pay, though we actually pay in the end, and you can compete with google especially since google has established dominance.

The reason I say we pay in the end is not obvious but self-evident when you think of it, google gathers personal profiling data, exploits it to sell ads paid by advertisers, advertisers include the price of advertising in the product, we buy the product thus paying for the content in the end. The trick is we may have bought the product anyways though now we pay a bit more to pay the advertising costs. That's how we pay google to provide us with seemingly gratis stuff.

> Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far). You're starting with a bad assumption. There is a model that worked for years even before this assumption became rampant: do not expect revenue by having a website or webpage that is not an online shop. example: www.debian.org

Then if your content is good enough your audience will pay for you to make more, see the dice tower getting its funding on kickstarter [1], or the webcomics with patreon, and so on. The point being, there are models that work to get a revenue from publishing online outside of ads, but you need a sizeable audience first.

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomvasel/the-dice-tower...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomvasel/the-dice-tower...

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#229

Post by nrjdhsbsid » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 10:16 AM UTC

abalashov wrote: post #23

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about whic…

Just checked your site. It's well put together but the language is far too technical for AdWords. Engineers don't usually make the kind of business decisions to buy these things at larger companies, it's VP level people.

Find your kinds of customers and tailor a landing page with stuff that they want, instead of having the site explain everything like a users manual.

Ex: Calls centers do not care at all about the other uses for your product, so for ads for "call center phone systems" don't show them any of that.

You can leave the existimg content there, it will help with SEO and people that want to look deeper. Just make sure the first few pages from ads are exactly what they're looking for and nothing else. They will read more into it if they're interested.

The big thing you're running into is bounce rates because most visitors spend 30 seconds or less deciding if your product is what they want. If you can't convince them "yes, it's perfect" in three sentences most will leave. The easiest and surprisingly effective way to do this is to make the title of the page huge and make it match their search query exactly.

Your sales site should focus on uses, not features. Nobody cares about anything technical so take off the stuff about being built in Node etc... The people looking to buy this don't even know what that is. Too many words they don't know is scary, maybe this isn't what they're looking for.

Dumb down everything so that moronic managers will forward a link to your site to the guys that actually know wtf you're talking about :)

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#230

Post by Fomite » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 10:34 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #206

Fomite wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Buying ads is easy. Buying effective ads is not.

Agreed. I'm just objecting to the notion that Facebook makes buying ads hard to protect their advertisers.