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How can we know if paid search advertising works?

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Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#31

Post by JustARandomGuy »

vgeek wrote: post #30
JustARandomGuy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that shortly after this made the rounds in the marketing communities I'd love to read more about this. Do you have any recommended "marketing communities" that I should visit?

https://searchengineland.com/google-ebay-penalty-cost-197031 This relates to the ebay penalty. I think one of SEland's founders actually left to take a job at Google as an evangelist. You can probably search for "ebay seo penalty" and find more references. Other notable penalties that were well documented include RapGenius and GV backed Thumbtack and Nest, which quickly had their penalties reversed if I recall correc…

Very kind of you. Thanks.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#32

Post by tkluck »

austincheney wrote: post #3

Google does make money from ads, but that is not their primary business. Yes they have AdWords and they bought DoubleClick around 2007. They also have YouTube that took them forever to figure out how to monetize. They bought Urchin (Google Analytics) specifically to monetize AdWords. Google’s primary business is search. They monetize search in a couple different ways. The primary revenue model for search is micro auc…

> Ads aren’t worth very much. Google ads generate [...] maybe fractions of a penny.

Suppose someone types "hotel Paris" into a search engine. Then the ads auction is the search engine turning around and saying "here's someone that's (probably) about to spend a thousand euros on _some_ website. How much if I send them to yours?" You can't buy that kind of intent-to-buy for only pennies -- that's 2-3 orders of magnitude off.

There's definitely ads that are sold by the kilo-impressions, but search ads generally do not fall in that category.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but have no relevant inside information. A public resource for this is https://brandastic.com/blog/how-much-do-google-ads-cost/:

> In 2022, the average Google AdWords cost per click is about $1 to $2 on the Google Search network. Some newer niches may still see lower costs, while more established businesses, might see higher cost-per-click averages.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#33

Post by VHRanger »

ghostly_s wrote: post #25

Unfortunately with the technical jargon compounded by numerous typos I utterly failed to comprehend what points this article was making.

FWIW this is a blog aimed at statisticians and economists, so intermediate undergraduate statistics is more or less assumed in the authors language

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#34

Post by ocdtrekkie »

vgeek wrote: post #2

The article fails to mention that shortly after this made the rounds in the marketing communities, eBay suddenly got a very large SEO penalty. Conspiracy theories aside, I once inherited a large Adwords account with nearly 25% of spend dedicated to branded KW bidding. Simply dialing back bids by 90%+ dropped impression share from 95% to 80%, but the paid branded clicks just shifted to organic branded clicks-- confirm…

Yeah, once you realize the most profitable Google search terms are already the top organic result paying to be on top, you realize Google's business is the guy who shakes down storefronts for "protection" to avoid their windows being broken in by the local gang on a global scale.

"That's a nice brand you built there. Ya know, it'd be a shame, a real shame, if one of your competitors was to end up above you on the search results page. I could, uh, make sure that doesn't happen."

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#35

Post by tempestn »

vgeek wrote: post #2

The article fails to mention that shortly after this made the rounds in the marketing communities, eBay suddenly got a very large SEO penalty. Conspiracy theories aside, I once inherited a large Adwords account with nearly 25% of spend dedicated to branded KW bidding. Simply dialing back bids by 90%+ dropped impression share from 95% to 80%, but the paid branded clicks just shifted to organic branded clicks-- confirm…

We've found exactly the same thing. It's extremely important to differentiate between branded and non-branded keywords. (And to be diligent about filtering out all variations, misspellings, etc., of branded searches from non-branded campaigns.) While our testing didn't show 100% waste in branded advertising, we did find approximately 80-90% of branded clicks would otherwise have come through organically. So we do still do a small amount of branded search advertising, but with an assumed actual CPC of 10x the nominal CPC (and therefore quite a low maximum bid). For non-branded ads, we assume the true CPC is much closer to the apparent one.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#36

Post by runnerup »

BizarroLand wrote: post #15
hollasch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what you mean by "unfettered access"?

They were uncomfortable giving ebay the ability to wire their money into their checking account out of fear that ebay would then later take money directly from their bank account, not even considering that if ebay did anything fraudulent their banks and the federal government (assuming they are American) would have their backs in reclaiming the money.

I can sympathize. I'd rather not fight that legal fight in the first place if I can avoid it. Plus I'm not a lawyer, and the Terms of Service are a thousand pages long. Am I entitled to small claims court or did I sign away that right and have to go to their arbitration firm? I'm not sure if the agreements I clicked through could say "I forfeit my right to any money and every dispute will be decided solely by eBay, Inc." and if it does I haven't read the thousands of pages of case law necessary to know in which situations that's invalid and I do still have some rights.

I'd rather just not play ball. Especially given that eBay harassed people who inconvenienced their business with bloody pig masks, live cockroaches, and death threats against the spouse[0].

0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/ebay-execs-sent-...

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#37

Post by colinmhayes »

austincheney wrote: post #14
xenomachina wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results. Google monetizes search with ads. The micro auctions are for those ads. They even say "Ad" on each of them. If you have evidence that they're doing paid placement in the actual search results, I'd love to see it. FWIW, I do wish Google's ads were more obviously visually distinct from search results (a…

> Google monetizes search with ads. Google monetizes search but not with Google ads. This is the primary distinguisher. Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content. Google's online advertisement businesses don't sell space on Google pages, but online ad products for other peoples' pages. Google considers all of this as ad revenue, but distinguishes search from their advert…

>auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content

This is an ad.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#38

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

xenomachina wrote: post #11
austincheney wrote: post #3

Google does make money from ads, but that is not their primary business. Yes they have AdWords and they bought DoubleClick around 2007. They also have YouTube that took them forever to figure out how to monetize. They bought Urchin (Google Analytics) specifically to monetize AdWords. Google’s primary business is search. They monetize search in a couple different ways. The primary revenue model for search is micro auc…

> The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results. Google monetizes search with ads. The micro auctions are for those ads. They even say "Ad" on each of them. If you have evidence that they're doing paid placement in the actual search results, I'd love to see it. FWIW, I do wish Google's ads were more obviously visually distinct from search results (a…

They don't have to do paid placement. They know which sites are running their ads and can prioritize them to maximize impressions based on their pervasive tracking.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#39

Post by ZephyrBlu »

skilled wrote: post #22

Substack prefetching my email address based on historical data is kind gross. I appreciate the downvotes, but it is a clear dark pattern. Unless I have accepted their terms and didn't read through them. It is the only site that does it, and they do it for everyone who is a Substack customer.

You're complaining about them pre-filling your email when you have an account? How is it a dark pattern? It's convenient. It's not like they're automatically signing you up to the publication.

Re: How can we know if paid search advertising works?

#40

Post by jjulius »

austincheney wrote: post #14
xenomachina wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results. Google monetizes search with ads. The micro auctions are for those ads. They even say "Ad" on each of them. If you have evidence that they're doing paid placement in the actual search results, I'd love to see it. FWIW, I do wish Google's ads were more obviously visually distinct from search results (a…

> Google monetizes search with ads. Google monetizes search but not with Google ads. This is the primary distinguisher. Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content. Google's online advertisement businesses don't sell space on Google pages, but online ad products for other peoples' pages. Google considers all of this as ad revenue, but distinguishes search from their advert…

>Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content.

So... an ad.

"A rose by any other name" and such.

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