51–60 of 68 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no value to "impressions". Impressions != sales. Sales are the only thing we should be counting as value. Focusing on impressions is how we get click-fraud in the first place.
How can I buy a product or service I'm not even aware exists? That's the value of display advertising.
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No, people want to buy things, and there are a lot of things competing for their attention. Advertising, at its most basic, is just how we inform potential customers that we even exist. Yes, some (a lot? Most?) advertisers get way out of hand. But advertising is not itself evil. It's a tool that may or may not be misused.
> It's ... designed to ... supplant critical evaluation of ones needs.... > No, people want to buy things That's rather the point. The desire to buy things is driven not by critical evaluation of need, but by psychological trickery that falsely associates buying stuff with a whole range of actual needs. If ads promoted critical evaluation of a person's needs in relation to available products, that would be a differen…
How else are consumers going to find out about products? There's no world product registry where products get evaluated on their merits and ranked objectively. There's no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". Even putting a big sign on the front of your building "Joe's Diner" is a form of advertising. Otherwise, people will walk by without any notion that there is food there they might want.
There's no such thing as "If you build it, they will come."
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As easy as it might be for some people to buy into your narrative, on HN, it realllllly isn't true. The basic statistics to calculate the RoI on a banner ad spend isn't particularly difficult when you have a software dev/web dev available. No matter how much click/impression fraud there is...you are trying to track conversions not clicks/impressions at that scale. If I know I spend $500 and get 10 sales, it isn't a s…
I am talking about ROI. If you're bootstrapping a project, I doubt you can get a good enough ROI in online advertising for your first 100 sales. If I had the kind of money to make online advertising work for the conversion rates I've seen on my projects, I wouldn't be trying to start a business in the first place. If you were starting a project on your own, tomorrow, and the only money you had was the money in your o…
Yes, if your conversion rate doesn't make sense for you, don't do it.
I'm not going to go arguing how to make $500 into 10 sales. It depends on what you are selling, what the competition is bidding for ads, your lifetime value of a customer, etc.
But you asked how you can go to $500 -> 10 sales?
2500/30 = ~83.3 clicks/day
$.20 * 2500 = $500 :: 2500 clicks
2500 * .004 = 10 :: 10 sales @ .4% conversion rate
This is really not a strange/weird/unusual scenario for a combination of 20+ low competition CPC ads on Bing, Google, etc. Given small budgets, that is what you'd aim for as you don't have the money to compete with the high cost keyword bidders.
I'm confused why you think that is hard to achieve?
These numbers aren't particularly optimistic given most people aim/expect a ~1% conversion rate, so if it was .8%, you could double your CPC, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am talking about ROI. If you're bootstrapping a project, I doubt you can get a good enough ROI in online advertising for your first 100 sales. If I had the kind of money to make online advertising work for the conversion rates I've seen on my projects, I wouldn't be trying to start a business in the first place. If you were starting a project on your own, tomorrow, and the only money you had was the money in your o…
The math is the same whether you have a company going through $500 a month in marketing or $5 million a month. Yes, if your conversion rate doesn't make sense for you, don't do it. I'm not going to go arguing how to make $500 into 10 sales. It depends on what you are selling, what the competition is bidding for ads, your lifetime value of a customer, etc. But you asked how you can go to $500 -> 10 sales? 2500/30 = ~8…
You keep throwing theoreticals around, inventing numbers to match your narrative. "If horses were 10 feet tall, then we'd be able to ford this river." A 10 foot tall horse is called an elephant, and we can't afford elephants. How do we ford this river with the one horse we have? And your answer is, "well, if animals were 5 times larger than they usually are, then I don't understand how you don't understand."
I'm saying it doesn't scale linearly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The math is the same whether you have a company going through $500 a month in marketing or $5 million a month. Yes, if your conversion rate doesn't make sense for you, don't do it. I'm not going to go arguing how to make $500 into 10 sales. It depends on what you are selling, what the competition is bidding for ads, your lifetime value of a customer, etc. But you asked how you can go to $500 -> 10 sales? 2500/30 = ~8…
I'm not disputing your formula, I'm disputing your inputs. It's the part you've explicitly dismissed that is the problem. You can't say "our $5 million/month spend for 100,000 users proves that you could spend $50/mo and get 1 user." You keep throwing theoreticals around, inventing numbers to match your narrative. "If horses were 10 feet tall, then we'd be able to ford this river." A 10 foot tall horse is called an e…
And yes, I've done this with $500/month as the spend. If you go through my comment history you'll notice I used to work entirely with small businesses as a contractor which I've mentioned at least a couple times I believe.
I wouldn't use up-to-date hypotheticals from my current job given its a scale almost no one on HN would operate at. :/
I'm not really sure what your conviction this isn't possible comes from?
Obviously, $50/month/sale is not going to work out for a book that sells for $10 but that is a different problem.
I hadn't considered this article's perspective before, but I think it is very compelling. A lot of commenters (and likely readers) are probably focusing heavily on the perceived impact of the "fraud" of reporting X amount of impressions and/or clicks, when only Y amount of them were "real." They feel like they are paying for X but only getting Y. I think the simple point this article effectively made is that ad compa…
And if you're clever, you can place your campaigns so that you minimize exposure to fraud, such that you pay for X and get X, while at the same time your banner ads are cheap because the market in general is wary of fraud.
Of course, this lunch isn't totally free in that it costs time and money to avoid fraudulent placements and sites known to have low bot rates have ad space that trades at higher CPMs.
I detest advertising. It's literally designed to undermine reason and supplant critical evaluation of ones needs and priorities. As for web advertising, maybe I was the last person on the planet to figure this out but sometime late last year the web just became unusable on most popular news sites. Popover ads that come up before you can read the content and multiple large ads inline with the content and that "no mans…
No, people want to buy things, and there are a lot of things competing for their attention. Advertising, at its most basic, is just how we inform potential customers that we even exist. Yes, some (a lot? Most?) advertisers get way out of hand. But advertising is not itself evil. It's a tool that may or may not be misused.
I can't help but wonder why all advertisers don't switch to payment by click-through-and-buy, rather than just by click or impression. You can't fake that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, people want to buy things, and there are a lot of things competing for their attention. Advertising, at its most basic, is just how we inform potential customers that we even exist. Yes, some (a lot? Most?) advertisers get way out of hand. But advertising is not itself evil. It's a tool that may or may not be misused.
People would still buy things without advertising.
I hadn't considered this article's perspective before, but I think it is very compelling. A lot of commenters (and likely readers) are probably focusing heavily on the perceived impact of the "fraud" of reporting X amount of impressions and/or clicks, when only Y amount of them were "real." They feel like they are paying for X but only getting Y. I think the simple point this article effectively made is that ad compa…
Most of the advertising on my site is not for products available for online purchase and my readers are architects and designers looking for inspiration for future design projects. So whenever a company inquires about advertising I try to find out their goals - branding, online sales, etc... If it is to drive online sales, I believe it is my responsibility to let them know that those campaigns perform terribly.
At that point, they can decide what to do, but at least they won't and shouldn't be surprised or feel taken advantage of if the campaign doesn't perform in a way I told them it wouldn't.