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Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

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Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#361

Post by woogiewonka »

abalashov wrote: post #55
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this immediately stood out to me as the real issue. Even for smallish products I click on an ad and rarely buy on the first visit. But I remember the name and come back to look for the product later on. This is why tracking is so important. @Parent what is a conversion to you? Maybe you should add something light that the user can do that gives you a sense of their interest other than a purchase.

Usually, that latter function is served by the contact form. The intent of the site is to give them just enough info that they are motivated to contact us to learn more, after which they go in our CRM (Close.io, following @patio11's recommendation of it) and get extensive follow-up over what is, as you correctly surmised, often a very protracted evaluation and sales cycle. It's not uncommon for the subsequent back-an…

The problem is in your approach. Try switching from asking to giving in exchange for email. Then nurture the lead through email and you'll see much better results. The money is in the lists.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#362

Post by coldtea »

kyledrake wrote: post #298
coldtea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? Because they tell us: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en > How does one determine their site is "punished"? Because it suddenly falls behind in results?

That is not a measurable process. A site could fall behind for any number of reasons, including bugs in their algorithms. I'm never going to say to myself "welp, our pagerank went down, time to use Google's weird tool to clean up the negative SEO attack again." Without a real way to understand what's actually going on, you're just shooting at the darkness. It feels more like worshiping a cargo cult than doing somethi…

>Without a real way to understand what's actually going on, you're just shooting at the darkness.

That's no more a reason to doubt spam links' effect than to doubt any other suspected metric, as all as "shooting in the darkness".

What are you gonna do, lie down and have the site end up as low as it can get? Sometimes you do need to fight in the dark, and gauge any changes you make from the reaction you get.

"I'm never going to say to myself "welp, our pagerank went down, time to use Google's weird tool to clean up the negative SEO attack again."" -- is not really an option.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#363

Post by mikkom »

Twirrim wrote: post #338
mikkom wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one would be a target of automated spammy link attack - let's say a competitor would order 100 spammy links a month for example 3 a day - how could one defend against this kind of attack? (I'm not in such situation, just speculating) What I'm wondering is how easy it is really to get to top at some more obscure search term by just using nasty black hat tactics. I'm also wondering if this is actually the easiest wa…

automated disavowing, maybe? Sucks, but may be necessary.

But how could you know what links are real and what are not if not even google knows it? If you are trying to get legin backlinks at the same time then this would be almost impossible.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#364

Post by closeparen »

jdietrich wrote: post #274
ubernostrum wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy doesn't really hold up. This isn't another person coming after you directly, it's the other person manipulating a third party to cause the third party to come after you, and the third party saying "not my problem that I'm easy to manipulate like that". For a criminal-justice-system analogy, it's similar in concept (though not in extremity) to SWATting. And I don't think we want governments to wash their…

Identity theft is a perfectly reasonable analogy. If someone steals my identity and ruins my credit rating, the onus is on me to inform the credit reference agency. It'd be nice if Equifax could telepathically divine whether a credit transaction was legitimate or not, but it simply isn't possible. Google are similarly unable to distinguish between a blackhat SEO scheme and this sort of weird SEO DDoS.

>but it simply isn't possible

The credit rating agencies could establish reasonably secure channels directly to consumers (passwords would be a start, dedicated tokens would be best), and require explicit authorization through the secure channel for new lines of credit. No account system is perfect, but it'd be a hell of a lot harder to break than "prove your knowledge of full name, address, DOB, and SSN" which are shared and stored all over the place, and bound to leak.

The financial industry or the government (probably at the financial industry's behest) could sign/distribute cryptographic identities along with plastic ones. Opening a new account could require a signature from a signed certificate.

Banks could send prompts to your smartphone asking you to approve/reject ACH and even credit card transactions, ala Venmo. Or you could sign them from a device you control, as with Bitcoin. (Instead, when we get cryptographic signing for payments at all, we get cards which sign all transactions presented to them by devices the consumer doesn't control, without verifying the cardholder's intent except through the merchant's terminal, whose UI could be lying. And we're still stuck with shared secrets for online payments).

A lot is possible, the financial industry has simply chosen to put consumers (and itself) through the hassle and expense of cleaning up after fraud because it's cheaper than a serious attempt at an authentication system.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#365

Post by iopq »

kofejnik wrote: post #242
iopq wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> Few people in Russia use Google for Russian language searches This is not true, Google has >20% share in Russia iirc

I didn't say nobody, I said few. 1/5 is not that many compared to the usage in English-speaking countries.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#366

Post by dx034 »

edblarney wrote: post #148
Gustomaximus wrote: post #24

I see these posts all the time of DIY Adwords/FB and then a claim it doesn't work. This would be like me, a non-carpenter, trying to build a house, seeing how bad it looks and then claiming building materials suck. There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. So because Adwords/FB didn't work for you doesn't mean their traffic is 90% useless. And dont get me wrong, I completely acknowledge there…

"There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. " You'd be surprised how a lot of marketing budget is wasted. Especially in brand advertising, where there is no directly measurable ROI. Toothpaste, paper towels, cars, cereal - they spend gazillions on those brands. But think of this: most 'ad spend' is spent on completely commoditized products - I'll guarantee you the 'no name' toothpaste is as goo…

Creating brand loyalty is very expensive, but can definitely be worth it. I guess most of us have brands they buy without any specific reason, other than that they somehow like them or that they always used them.

While it's very hard to measure the effect of ads trying to create this loyalty, it doesn't mean that it's not worth it.

I've discovered that for myself where I saw ads on Facebook that I didn't click, but later saw a product in store and tried it out. If you just follow conversions, you'd say that the Facebook ad was worthless, whereas it actually influenced my buying decision.

I'd argue that most money on ads is well spent, but to be effective, you must have a huge budget. People need to see your ad multiple times, so that they'll be familiar with a product. If you don't have that budget, it'll be very hard to use ads effectively. But that's no fault of FB or Google, that's just psychology.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#367

Post by wusatiuk »

cconcepts wrote: post #161
Taek wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results. SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.

So how do I combat against this? We're a small, honest company providing great products and services for the companies that need them but we're getting killed online because no one can find us. I've forked out a lot (for us) on adwords and the return has been negligible to say the least. Does this mean that the democratizing power of the internet has been swallowed up for small, lean companies like us who cant afford…

you can definitely rank as a small business as well in the organic search results, without any adwords budgets, but SEO is not as easy as it was 6-8 years ago - that´s for sure. if you are interested, i can have a look at your company´s site and provide some ideas / feedback, if you want to.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#368

Post by dhimes »

ytruytr wrote: post #345
dhimes wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip! I don't use Google for advertising at the moment, but I'll keep these in mind if I go back to them.

another tip is that if you don't sell a product Adwords is not for you. Pure content sites will be vaporized by the cost vs the revenue you get from people seeing ads on your site :)

This is exactly what I tell people. Selling lawn chairs and umbrellas: maybe. Selling content/research/intellectual work: nope.

Re: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

#370

Post by phamilton »

agumonkey wrote: post #352
matt4077 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They respond with a vague feeling of familiarity to a brand or product.

But all sorts of brands have commercials..

This is one of the big problems. It's an arms race, with the costs being passed directly on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
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