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What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

candyjapan.com

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Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#71

Post by judge2020 »

exchomedev wrote: post #46
e12e wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And perhaps spying through Google searches and chrome? I guess Google never spies on you except by proxy via analytics - but then, if they correlate views on YouTube with analytic hits, that's not really true. Anyway, the above, as well as: > If that still doesn't make your campaign profitable, there are broader exclusions and bid adjustments you can make based on age, gender, device, location, parental status and ho…

Google does use the "anonymous" usage stats from Chrome to inform AdWords. Source: I personally developed on this feature. Response to rebuttal: the tree you're looking at isn't actually what's complied into the Chrome binary.

Fairly obvious that Google uses upstream chromium then adds in all of the proprietary g APIs and anonymous usage statistics after the fact.

Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#73

Post by clay_the_ripper »

Speaking as a marketer: getting positive ROI on ads is hard. That’s why people hire professional marketers to market things. I often find that non-marketers think they can do marketing, and then when it doesn’t work, they tend to blame the platform. I hire engineers to do engineering work, and likewise business owners should hire marketers to do marketing work.

Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#75

Post by jackgolding »

petercooper wrote: post #15
ttul wrote: post #9

People inexperienced in online adversities often think that they can pay for conversions. That is not the case. You’re paying to get your message out. Very very few people will immediately act because of an ad. But if you hit them enough, they may later convert. Tracking those late conversions is imprecise. This does not mean advertising is useless. But it is not generally a game for those with a tiny budget or a sho…

This lesson struck me hard when I was working with a major conference organizer. Even upon surveying them, they'd struggle to establish how attendees had heard of the event first. For the majority of attendees there was no direct way to correlate ticket purchases with ad spend because almost no-one immediately buys a $1000+ ticket after clicking an ad :-)

Market research is the easiest way to solve these problems!

Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#76

Post by cornstalks »

glandium wrote: post #31
eveningcoffee wrote: post #20

> YouTube allows you to pay to show an ad before a video plays. Is also the reason why I installed an adblocker. I do not know if anybody still remembers the time when ads were not intrusive and did not try to hog all the CPU cycles.

I haven't used an ad blocker so far, because I don't browse a lot of sites with ads, but have started seriously considering it when, last week, Youtube started to feed me with unskippable five minutes long ads. Five. Freaking. Unskippable. Minutes. Infuriating. Fortunately(?), reloading the page made them skipped.

That sounds like a bug. All ads longer than 30 seconds should be skippable: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/2679940?hl=e...

That sucks, and certainly would be frustrating. If something like that happens, sending feedback (right click and select “Trouble shoot playback issue”) can help (and no, those feedback reports aren’t just sent to /dev/null; they really are helpful!). Additionally, some employees have been known to lurk on r/youtube, but they might request the debug info for the playback (again, right click on the video; do this while the ad is playing and save it for later if you/someone needs it).

Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, but I’m just posting this in a personal capacity and don’t represent my employer in any way.

Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#77

Post by gk1 »

libertine wrote: post #16
ttul wrote: post #9

People inexperienced in online adversities often think that they can pay for conversions. That is not the case. You’re paying to get your message out. Very very few people will immediately act because of an ad. But if you hit them enough, they may later convert. Tracking those late conversions is imprecise. This does not mean advertising is useless. But it is not generally a game for those with a tiny budget or a sho…

Precisely - "marketers" these days don't grasp the concept of brand building. Just because you can measure directly results it doesn't mean the goal is to get a direct conversion - specially from a platform like youtube where people are actively consuming content - not buying stuff. The idea of compound investment into brand building doesn't seem to exist. I don't know if these guys thought that decades of TV adverti…

What marketers are you talking about? Who are "these guys"?

I work with marketers and I am one myself, and the concept of brand-building is as familiar as loops are to software developers.

No doubt you've encountered misguided individuals, but please don't generalize from specifics.

Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#78

Post by delroth »

exchomedev wrote: post #46
e12e wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And perhaps spying through Google searches and chrome? I guess Google never spies on you except by proxy via analytics - but then, if they correlate views on YouTube with analytic hits, that's not really true. Anyway, the above, as well as: > If that still doesn't make your campaign profitable, there are broader exclusions and bid adjustments you can make based on age, gender, device, location, parental status and ho…

Google does use the "anonymous" usage stats from Chrome to inform AdWords. Source: I personally developed on this feature. Response to rebuttal: the tree you're looking at isn't actually what's complied into the Chrome binary.

I currently work at Google, and from what I know and have seen about how we handle privacy internally I'd be really surprised and appalled if that was the case. Mind sending me more details? My nickname @google.com.

Anonymous reporting in Chrome has been one of the leading use cases for differential privacy at Google. See e.g. https://github.com/google/rappor and https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which specifically mentions the Chrome use case. This seems to indicate the people who work on this do care at least in some amount about privacy.

(Given the fact that you use a throwaway account I'm very much not expecting to see anything else than FUD, but hey, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.)

Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan

#79

Post by libertine »

Silhouette wrote: post #59
libertine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely - "marketers" these days don't grasp the concept of brand building. Just because you can measure directly results it doesn't mean the goal is to get a direct conversion - specially from a platform like youtube where people are actively consuming content - not buying stuff. The idea of compound investment into brand building doesn't seem to exist. I don't know if these guys thought that decades of TV adverti…

Precisely - "marketers" these days don't grasp the concept of brand building. I'm not sure that's true. Some people are just working on a different scale. Brand-building is fine if you're Coke or BMW or McDonald's. You have millions to spend, you can saturate channels, and then people might actually think of you in preference to your competition when they're in the market for a drink or a car or a burger. On the othe…

I agree that the work of marketers differs from scale, but it doesn't justify bad decisions.

I don't agree that brand-building is fine just for major brands, where they fight for small % of a saturated, well defined, market share.

Like you said, it's all about scale, and actions of a bootstrapped startup should adjust to it - not to be spending thousands on Youtube campaigns (picking up this post example). If you want some immediate useful action you should focus on media and placements where you have a higher percentage of people that a near to take immediate useful actions - maybe a video platform to consume video content is not the best choice to start with.

Brand building can be as simple as the way you address your customers, how your company looks, how the buying/service experience is, etc - things that change the perception of something random and generic, yet foundational to any brand.

McDonald's was the place to get tasty food without having to wait sitting down for it.

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