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We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

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Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#71

Post by josu »

baddox wrote: post #40
josu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point he is making, and I agree that the importance of advertising is declining. However, I wouldn't be able to explain Samsung's success without looking at advertising.

How about economy of scale in manufacturing, and (mostly) competent design and engineering teams?

From a consumer's perspective all I see is a bunch of high end cell phones with very similar features and priced the same. Nevertheless, many people decide to buy the Samsung flagship phone over the Sony, LG or HTC.

Better economies of scale could be the reason if they decided to price their phones lower, but they don't. So that it's not the reason why people are choosing Samsung.

About the competent design, I don't see the Galaxy being superior to the HTC one or the Z2.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#72

Post by hga »

hawkharris wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a fascinating article in The New Yorker called "Twilight of the Brands." [0] The author's basic argument is that brands have historically filled an information gap. Before the Internet, when consumers didn't have tons of on-demand info about products, brands were a compass that pointed them in the right direction. If the last Sylvania TV you bought worked well, you might buy another one without hun…

One big issue for me is that brands have become drastically less useful in predicting product quality.

Very few of the major brands that were big when I grew up in the '70s haven't thrown away their quality in favor of ... I'm not sure. Sony is a good example, even good through the '80s as well, as long as you didn't get something manufactured in Mexico with cold soldier joints, as my family back in SW Missouri did, fortunately they knew how to deal with that problem.

Today every purchase I make is proceeded by research, caution or whatever to make sure I'm still getting the same thing, or that the New And Improved version isn't significantly worse, or that the manufacturer hasn't thrown away quality in their new model.

For me, outside of some rare exceptions like Amazon, or some providers of higher end products, brand equity is all but dead. No amount of advertising can counteract the facts on the ground for someone who's been around long enough, and I'll bet even young whippersnappers are getting wise to this new scheme of things.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#73

Post by nl »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #26
esw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called remarketing. If they're showing you an ad for a product you actually bought, they're doing it wrong. It's supposed to show you an ad for something you looked at, but didn't buy.

If it's not being done purposely for reasons others have mentioned, then I wonder if it comes down to the company's integration with Google. Presumably, Google wouldn't know if a sale took place unless the merchant somehow notified them. I'm guessing this might be with a pixel, script, or similar on their order confirmation page. So, if the merchant failed to implement this, Google would never know to stop showing th…

No, the merchant stops bidding for the as once you complete the purchase.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#74

Post by hackuser »

cm2012 wrote: post #68

As someone responsible for $xxxxxx monthly spend in online advertising, it clearly works. We measure it pretty much from end to end.

> As someone responsible for $xxxxxx monthly spend in online advertising, it clearly works. We measure it pretty much from end to end.

Do you know how much profit you would have earned without the advertising? How do you determine that (if you can say)?

That is, without the ads, some customers would purchase more or more profitable products; some would purchase the same, and some would purchase less. But how would it net out -- and more interesting to me, how do you measure that?

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#75

Post by josu »

Zigurd wrote: post #46
josu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point he is making, and I agree that the importance of advertising is declining. However, I wouldn't be able to explain Samsung's success without looking at advertising.

If that were mostly attributable to advertising, I think you would see an equivalent success built on a horizontal brand - that is, an OEM without Samsung's vertical integration. Otherwise an equally valid conjecture is that Samsung bought-in to the idea that the only way to consolidate success is through establishing a brand. As Intel did, for example. But I don't think anyone could argue that Samsung's ad campaigns…

I agree that establishing causality is very difficult and especially when it comes to the advertising business.

Nevertheless, my point is that when it comes to high end Android phones it is starting to look like a commodity market. So in my opinion the only way to explain Samsung's success is either their ad spending or sheer luck, which may as well be a really good explanation.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#76

Post by hackuser »

1stop wrote: post #10
coldcode wrote: post #4

We have no idea if ads work anywhere but it doesn't stop the ad industry.

Yeah we do: Coca-cola <-- The product offers no value other than "brand". (Brand is advertising).

> Yeah we do: Coca-cola It tastes good. How is it different than any other form of pleasure that is sold, such as (non-artistic) video games, alcohol, any luxury good, fashion, etc.

EDIT: ... or World Cup soccer, on my TV now.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#77

Post by superuser2 »

hawkharris wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a fascinating article in The New Yorker called "Twilight of the Brands." [0] The author's basic argument is that brands have historically filled an information gap. Before the Internet, when consumers didn't have tons of on-demand info about products, brands were a compass that pointed them in the right direction. If the last Sylvania TV you bought worked well, you might buy another one without hun…

One place where marketers have gotten around this quite adeptly is Windows PCs and laptops.

Try searching for reviews on a laptop you find at Best Buy. There are none. The model number is 10+ random characters and completely meaningless. Comparison shopping between laptops on the basis of reviews is impossible. Consequently, they have you buying on 1) brand and 2) specs, which is right where they want you, and completely ignoring things like build quality and MTBF of parts which might be revealed by long-term reviews.

This is one of the (many) refreshing things about Apple. Macbook Pro is Macbook Pro until the next refresh.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#78

Post by rumcajz »

omonra wrote: post #18
raverbashing wrote: post #15

The premise of the article is naive at best You can use web analytics to measure a conversion rate from ads. Hence user clicks ad -> sales happens (in the best cases). That's Internet Ads 101 In fact, with online ads the "if it works" part is much more measurable than for other medias "Last year, a group of economists working with eBay’s internal research lab issued a massive experimental study with a simple, startli…

The point of the article is that the sale would happen regardless of the ad. Ie showing an ad on Google to someone who types 'Ebay' in the search string is a waste of money - since Ebay shows up as the first natural result anyways.

Isn't it a way to prevent eBay's competition to show ads on 'eBay' keyword?

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#79

Post by mdpane »

gerbal wrote: post #69
jseliger wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Samsung are two great examples of higher end companies whose products aren't appreciably superior or inferior to most of their competitors I'm not sure this is true: Samsung is not a (particularly) higher-end company, and their phones at least are lower cost than Apple. In the case of Apple, their phones were appreciably better up until two years ago or so. Their laptops have been physically better in fit a…

I didn't mean that Apple doesn't make good products. They make pretty damn good products. But the products are only part of Apple's marketing strategy. Much of what has made Apple successful is the idea of what a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone is. For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed. In the case of macbooks, the hardware has been roughly on par with equ…

For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed.

I wouldn't say it was just better marketed, although that is true. It was also better designed, both in its hardware and software. An iPod in your hands felt and looked great and the scroll wheel made it intuitive to use. Anyone could easily pick it up and check out what you had in your library.

Before I had one, I had an iRiver iHP-120[0], which had a plethora of features an iPod didn't have. But it was ridiculously hard to use if you didn't know what you were doing.

[0] http://edmundstarbanks.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/iriverihp...

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#80

Post by gumby »

blumkvist wrote: post #63
gumby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...after buying something I frequently see ads for the same exact product from the same exact vendor... There is a theoretical justification for that (note: "theory" not used in the scientific sense!) -- for large ticket items like cars, recent buyers are more likely to notice an ad for the expensive item they just bought. Some ads are aimed at them to make the whole "experience" somehow better, to offset buyer's r…

Please make a difference between marketing and advertising. Advertising is a very small part of marketing "science".

That's a fair point, but I meant advertising as one of the tools of marketing (like datastructures are one of the tools of computer science). Sorry I was not clear.

Thus in my last sentence I was generalizing to say that marketing, even formal marketing analysis with statistics and A/B models, is still a mixture of heuristics, data, and superstition. And its practitioners

Since it's a kind of social science, I say that in contrast to fields like economics and psychology which also have plenty of charlatans but whose major practitioners are well aware of, and discuss, the epistemological flaws that still remain in the foundations of the fields. By comparison most marketing "theoreticians" remind me, at best, of alchemists.

There's no question that marketing is crucial to any successful business. But we have to realize that it's typically simply just gut judgement.

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