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What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?

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

#221

Post by usui »

ianlevesque wrote: post #212
floatingatoll wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats and instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (who pays them a kickback each time they do this), and then charge you for that detour to earn their kickback when you demand they take you to Morton's like you asked in the first place. Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver? Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment? Is Google's search result…

It's a poor analogy. Google isn't taking you to the wrong website, they are showing you the alternatives at the same time as the search result you wanted.

Wait. Is thst true though? I'm a technical person, with a lot of very specific searches. Around 70% of the time, I don't actually get the results that answer what I'm looking for, no matter how many quotation marks I surround my strings and no matter if I use site:x.com, and various other Google hacks I've had to come up with to try and find my relevant results.

The reason this happens is because the Google result shows my words in the excerpt, but when I click in, there's zero percent of the content to be found. That feels like a bait-and-switch akin to the taxi analogy.

My relevant results now either don't exist, or is in an absolute sea of mind-bogglingly bad results that it wears me out such that I would rather have had no results to begin with.

In this sense, I feel like Google is absolutely purposefully showing me results that I didn't want to go to.

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

#222

Post by usrusr »

worker767424 wrote: post #166
mbesto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Put some money on the altar, who knows what might happen if you don't. The Algorithm is only impartial until it isn't. You surely don't want to go to irrelevancy?

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

#223

Post by bsder »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #7
simonsarris wrote: post #2

> Technically, when someone does a Google search for “Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet,” they probably would have clicked on one of the first 10 organic results, EVERY ONE OF WHICH leads to their website. But, y’know what ol’ Billy Ma’s performance marketers couldn’t then do: prove their value to their bosses. > [picture of that search term and williams sonoma ads with shopping links] The main problem here is that i…

> if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this specific product. The results of other brands might be annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results are still displayed on the first page.

I have searched for "Digikey something" and wound up with clicking on a "Mouser ad".

At this point, Google's first page is so bad that I can almost build an anti search engine. Search for a term, and then exclude all the sites on the first page from ever showing up permanently ever again.

runnaroo showed things could be done better. The problem is that doing better doesn't seem to convert to profit.

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

#224

Post by lukestevens »

photochemsyn wrote: post #130
engineeringwoke wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People on this board love the idea that anyone who isn't an engineer is an idiot and everything that everyone else does that isn't writing code is somehow worthless. In broad strokes, they think that all people who do people-facing work are charlatans that are constantly trying to hide how worthless they are because talking to people, etc. can't possibly provide value. Then, they (like so), ask you to break down your…

It's also fair to say that if you let the marketers drive business decisions it's a recipe for disaster. Pushing low-quality product out the door just to hit some quarterly sales goal, that's what marketers will push. Epic failures with disastrous long-term consequences are the typical result (Boeing MAX for example).

If you think the Boing 737 MAX disaster was caused by those idiots in marketing calling the shots then you just proved engineeringwoke’s point.

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

#225

Post by titzer »

vkou wrote: post #205
titzer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? 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.

> a multi-national serving multiple markets

You think Google search doesn't adjust its search results based on your geography? It absolutely does, and that's just one of hundreds of inputs into its completely inscrutable machine-learning driven tangle of a ranking algorithm. Your trust is very badly misplaced if you think that Google can't be/isn't already corrupted by the corrupt governments it must deal with to do daily business.

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

#226

Post by kbenson »

usui wrote: post #221
ianlevesque wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a poor analogy. Google isn't taking you to the wrong website, they are showing you the alternatives at the same time as the search result you wanted.

Wait. Is thst true though? I'm a technical person, with a lot of very specific searches. Around 70% of the time, I don't actually get the results that answer what I'm looking for, no matter how many quotation marks I surround my strings and no matter if I use site:x.com, and various other Google hacks I've had to come up with to try and find my relevant results. The reason this happens is because the Google result sh…

It is. If you want a more accurate analogy, it's like getting into a cab and asking to go to Morton's Meats and the cab driver saying "are you sure? I know this really great place called Shelley's Steaks that's better and cheaper! What do you say?" and then you get to make a call as to whether to trust the cab driver (google) has your best interests at heart or not, and whether to go where you originally wanted or to where you were recommended.

This happens in real life all the time. Cab drivers get kick backs from specific places they have relationships with if they deliver people there, so you have to wonder whether they're actually recommending a better place for you or a better place for them, just like you do with Google.

And yes, I've been referred to a place by a cab driver when asking for a recommendation and found it didn't actually serve my needs at all, and in retrospect it was obvious from the conversation I was steered there without care for what I really wanted.

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

#227

Post by cwp »

Didn't drill into the details here, but I think there's one area where digital advertising is indisputably useful: the cold start. So many start ups have benefitted hugely from buying Facebook/Twitter/Google ads when they hit that point where all their friends, investors and employees are already using the app, and they've maybe to got a handful of organic users, but how do they get from a few dozen to a few thousand users?

This is really the sweet spot for digital advertising. The cost is low, both because you don't need that many new users to make a huge difference, and because the volume is so low that the targeting works really, really well, and conversion rates are really high. For a more established business, sure, you're getting people that would have bought anyway. But in this case, you're getting people that would have bought if they knew you existed, which they don't.

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

#228

Post by kbenson »

RugnirViking wrote: post #216
_carbyau_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason for the saying: "Cut out the middle man." 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.

"All too often the middleman is milking both sides." By definition a middleman is milking both sides. Were a middleman not there, it would definitionally be better for both parties. The only case where this is not true is the one where the middleman makes no money

No, that assumes perfect market information. Middlemen can provide benefit by allowing people to offload research and reputation tracking to a third party that they trust, allowing them to invest time and effort in that one entity instead of a bunch of smaller ones.

For example, do you buy off Amazon or NewEgg, Best Buy, etc or do you just use Craigslist, Ebay, the local paper, or even the local flea/market swap meet for electronics? You can probably find stuff for half as much or even less at some of those locations, but it might cost you a lot in research time or lost money in the end...

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

#229

Post by kbenson »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #117
Puts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That could be the boycott of the 21st century. Don't like how a company is behaving? Get a social media campaign to have people make intentful searched in different search engines, click through, go to a signup form/add stuff to a cart, and then just leave.

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

#230

Post by pydry »

ianlevesque wrote: post #212
floatingatoll wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats and instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (who pays them a kickback each time they do this), and then charge you for that detour to earn their kickback when you demand they take you to Morton's like you asked in the first place. Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver? Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment? Is Google's search result…

It's a poor analogy. Google isn't taking you to the wrong website, they are showing you the alternatives at the same time as the search result you wanted.

Reminds me of the tuk tuk drivers in Thailand who will show you alternative destinations like a tailor who gives them kickbacks before dropping you off at your destination.
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