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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?

#261

Post by floatingatoll »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #255
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…

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…

Especially annoying if they ask four or five times, as shown in that cast-iron pans screenshot.

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

#262

Post by floatingatoll »

worker767424 wrote: post #256
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…

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?

So they're allowed to waste my time and earn a kickback, as long as they give me a free cab ride from their kickback to where I wanted to go in the first place?

That sounds like it only works if my time that they wasted for selfish gain is valued at $0, which is obviously true as far as they are concerned, but certainly isn't true to me.

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

#263

Post by floatingatoll »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #241
usui wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I’ve seen this too, but I’ve always assumed it has to do with meta tags or something.

No, it's due to illegal SEO practices where they serve Googlebot a plate of GPT3 meets keyword spam, and then serve you a page full of advertising and phishing links.

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

#264

Post by floatingatoll »

pydry wrote: post #230
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.

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.

Yes, exactly. Is this accepted as normal by locals too, or is it socially proper only with tourists?

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

#265

Post by idontwantthis »

SEO has ruined search. It's so hard to find a website that isn't trying to sell you something. I tried searching for an explanation of an aspect of astigmatism correction and I couldn't get anything but thinly veiled ads for optometrists and glasses companies, and no in depth explanation of the detail I wanted explained.

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

#266

Post by floatingatoll »

dorfsmay wrote: post #239
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…

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?

Okay, assume the taxi rides are free. The taxi driver is now wasting your time taking you all across town just for a selfish kickback. Meanwhile, you value your time, presumably, so you're getting more and more annoyed as they do this. I don't see how removing the cost of taxi somehow makes this scenario acceptable. What am I missing?

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

#267

Post by dodobirdlord »

bckr wrote: post #245
kbenson wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I can do 10 of these, which would take a few minutes, I could cost a company $100. Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour. If I spend a good work day on this, I could probably cost them $10,000. If I convince 10 people to do this with me for a day, we could cost them $100,000. We might be able to cost them $1M in a week.

> Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour.

Very, very sophisticated systems exist to prevent spoofed identities from counting as ad clicks.

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

#268

Post by tyingq »

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.

"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

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

#269

Post by dodobirdlord »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #218
dorgo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google keyword planner tool shows cpc (cost per click) for keywords. For an online gambling keyword it shows me 14.97€ (for one click). There are other industries with cpc's of 80€ and more.

Is it enough just to click on the link? There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.

No, it's got to be a real person intentionally clicking the link, and very large teams of skilled people work exclusively on figuring out which clicks fall in this category. Cursor movement patterns, delay time, whether the link was actually rendering on the display when it was clicked, IP address, cookies, signed-in identities, previous click patterns, location, all of these things and more factor in. When people talk about Google hoovering up data, it is in large part for this purpose.

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

#270

Post by tshaddox »

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.

A way to pay for that service, as well as generate an extra $40 billion a year.
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