91–100 of 263 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who do you think pays for the content you consume?
Advertisers do. If the economics stop making sense then the content stops being created. As a consumer it’s not my concern as to how money is made. That’s the creators job.
>But the cool part is that you can also track when someone views your ad, and then a bit later types in your web address to make the purchase without ever clicking the link. >In other words you can track both people who click through an ad directly, or who see your ad and then visit your site a bit later How does this work?
The ad network records a post-view conversion if either:
1. The ad network cookie that was set when the ad was served is still present, or
2. A user was logged in to the publisher's site (Google, Twitter, etc) when they viewed the ad, and is also logged in when they visit the advertiser's site.
#2 is also how most cross-device tracking occurs. For example, if you're logged in to Twitter on your phone and see a Twitter ad, then type in the advertiser's URL on your desktop where you're also logged in to Twitter (and the advertiser has Twitter's conversion pixel on their site), Twitter will record a cross-device post-view conversion.
Here are examples:
Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising/campaign-types/i...
AdWords (for YouTube impressions): https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375431?hl=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/business/a/performance-marketing-st...
Aside from blocking the ads, uBlock Origin blocks the conversion pixels/requests for the largest ad networks.
Often a conversion pixel snippet is used alongside retargeting/remarketing. Some ad networks use #2 above to do quite sophisticated retargeting, not just targeting those who viewed a specific page. For example, Google lets advertisers retarget AdWords ads to those who liked a video in the advertiser's YouTube channel: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2545661?hl=en&ref_...
14k is nothing. Lookup how much a single billboard beside a highway costs. I watch youtube all the time. I some ads, at least the first few seconds. I have never clicked on one deliberately and certainly would never be a convert, but i do know these companies exist. That is worth something.
$3k/month for a billboard here
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…
1. Using predefined broad audience categories rarely works. Doing keyword targeting or specific video targeting usually works out better.
2. $10 cpm isn't high. I regularly spend $40+ on Facebook that can be 5x+ profitable ROI. Judging an ad buy only by cpm is short sighted at best.
3. 14k is a very small budget. I regularly spend 5-10k per day for folks. It takes volume and frequency to optimize. Even the amounts I spend as a freelancer makes me a small fish in regards to any serious agency and their clients.
4. It is far far too early to measure the effects of the campaign. CLTV (customer lifetime value) takes years to realize. Modern analytics tools are very useful to inform us on performance. They are not the end all be all and don't do an awesome job of multi touch attribution.
5. 1 ad isn't really a great test. For clients spending any real amount of budget I can pretty easily push out 300+ ad variations a month. To find something that gets you the kind of results you want it takes time, effort, and paying close attention to what's working and what isn't.
Overall it's an interesting case study but I caution folks to not simply take this as "youtube doesn't work" but rather what this person did on youtube doesn't work.
1) A video ad is potentially a poor environment for direct response signups in this case. People usually just want to watch the video they clicked on (unless maybe you're advertising on videos about Japanese candy — but in that case it might me more effective to sponsor videos by a popular video producer / channel (what SquareSpace does with Lessons From The Screenplay etc). At least with a sponsorship you can have a link in the description that doesn't disappear in 30 seconds.
2) Going a bit further, something like this is ideal for content marketing on Instagram (et al). I looked for an example of an account that posts novel Japanese candies. Low and behold the top two are both content marketing for similar services. https://www.instagram.com/tokyotreat/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/japancandybox/?hl=en
$14k will get you a lot of pretty photos, posts, hashtags, follows, comments, etc. You continue to own your audience going forward and you end up with a neat little online publication / channel, which is a great jumping off point for other types of organic publicity (news quotes, etc).
Disclosure(?): I do content marketing / PR and formerly worked for a video platform on the product side.
> 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.
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…