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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?

#251

Post by lmm »

stoicking wrote: post #162
NumberCruncher wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Facebook has a history of screwing advertisers ("want your page to show up in people's feeds? Get more follows, here's how to buy ads targeting that", then one year later "we've decided to downgrade pages in people's feeds"...), bankers (their IPO pricing), and essentially everyone they have a business relationship with. I'd expect them to stretch the truth as far as they can get away with.

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

#252

Post by GeneralMayhem »

verve_rat wrote: post #121
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same, but 99% of people do not, so it's really a drop in the bucket. I do wish there were some regulation such that if a user is searching for a trademarked or copyrighted term, that the best organic search result for that term should be required to show up first. I'm fine with showing competitor ads, but I don't think they should be able to show up above the trademark owner's ads.

It feels like it is close (but not really) to a trademark violation. If I search for "A" and get a screen full of results for "B", if I need to scroll to even see mentions of "A", then that feels like it is really close to "passing off". I could see an argument for saying that this "passing off" causes customer confusion that requires trademark enforcement. I realise that would probably be an impossible argument to w…

US case law is extremely clear that bidding on and running ads on trademarked keywords is not a trademark violation, so long as you aren't misrepresenting that the replacement is the trademarked thing; see e.g. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/bus....

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

#253

Post by SilasX »

vkou wrote: post #190
worker767424 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

lol yes, from Firefly: "About fifty percent of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."

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

#254

Post by lmm »

rexreed wrote: post #146

So much of what we rely on today for Internet applications and infrastructure has at its core a fallacious advertising revenue model. As companies who spend money on advertising realize the low returns they are getting, they will turn off that ad spend, which will turn those platforms into increasingly needy and demanding in your face advertisers, being more intrusive with your data. Since the average "user" is the p…

We get the society we deserve; Facebook et al give people what they pay for. If they're optimizing for the wrong thing then maybe we need to get better at paying for the right thing.

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

#255

Post by GeneralMayhem »

floatingatoll wrote: post #208
vkou wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Eh... that's not a great analogy. The equivalent of your story would be if you clicked a link for Morton's on the Google SERP and it actually redirected you to Shelly's.

What Google is doing is more like taking your destination, then asking "hey, you might like this other steakhouse more, want to give that a try instead?" before driving. Potentially annoying if the answer is always no, but... the answer isn't always no.

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

#256

Post by worker767424 »

floatingatoll wrote: post #208
vkou wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The abuse is worse on the merchant's side, but on the consumers, it's more like getting a cab to go to Morton's Meats, instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (because they got a kickback), then say they'll take you to Morton's for no extra charge, but tell you how great Shelly's is, and you're already at Shelly's, so is it worth the extra effort?

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

#257

Post by worker767424 »

lmm wrote: post #236
vkou wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hidden kickbacks are a racket though. Google has very deliberately been making their ads less and less distinct from their top search results, in a frog-boiling way.

Remember when they made a point about how they had a blue background and were on the right rail? Then they got moved above the organic results, then the blue changed to yellow, and every PM working on SERPs shrunk the size of "sponsored" and made the yellow a shade lighter for the next 5 years and got a nice bonus for it.

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

#258

Post by [deleted] »

syrrim wrote: post #249
worker767424 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google is offering a service, namely a way to connect your customers to your website. Arguably, on brand ads are just a way to pay for that service.

[deleted]

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

#259

Post by smsm42 »

tehjoker wrote: post #232
vkou wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol if you think that isn't happening right now. Google made a change to its algorithms sometime in the past 5 years to surface "authoritative" sources, meaning sources that toe the state department line. For example, the World Socialist Web Site, which has a consistent anti-war line reported being demoted. "Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms" (8/2017) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/…

There may be an air gap between Google and the government, but there's certainly zero air gap between Google and the Democratic Party.

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

#260

Post by chmod600 »

underwater wrote: post #250
dorfsmay wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay the taxi to take you to an address. You don't pay anything to google, you decided to use their ad funded "search engine", which they don't charge you anything for, and you complain that you get... Ads?

Down that road lies the argument that Google should be treated like a public utility. If the only mode of transport available were sponsored taxis, then people would be rightly demanding for the ability to pay for a car or use a government run public transit system.

There are other search engines that work just fine.
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