[HN Gopher] The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric ___________________________________________________________________ The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric Author : PolandKid Score : 40 points Date : 2020-02-05 21:41 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com) | DailyHN wrote: | Desensitization to ads caused by perverse tracking and targeting. | It's not getting better. | DevKoala wrote: | There is no such thing. People still buy online marketed | products a magnitude times more than non-marketed products. In | fact, advertisement techniques are now so advanced that | consumers believe they were not "influenced" in their | purchasing decisions. "Hahaha, my ad-blocker and 7 proxies make | me un-trackable" | zenincognito wrote: | After 10 years of spending 100k on average per month, we stopped | spending in 2019 and put money into cold calling. Conversions | tripled and we could only spend half our yearly budget in our | call campaign. Google is expensive and returns now suck even more | than they did in 2017. | staticautomatic wrote: | Are your cold calling ops in house? | busterarm wrote: | Not accusing, but it's still worth considering - could it just | have been that your targeting was bad? | | I worked in a heavily regulated industry with some of the Top | 10 most expensive keywords and we spent about $150 million a | year on advertising with a solid 1/4 of it going to digital | (almost exclusively Google) and it was worth it. Digital spend | got customer acquisition costs way way down and we spent | significant effort into trying to _reduce_ our call center | operations (mostly via automation). | | It's important to invest in people to crunch the numbers and | get your targeting right. | | TV was still king though. | DevKoala wrote: | I am not rejecting the author's analysis, but the industry is | moving towards cost per conversion. Even marketers for small time | ad agencies have gotten savvy and realized that the click is | nothing but a proxy. Also, I never realized Google actually | posted CPC numbers, I don't track B2C in depth, but considering | the amount of synthetic traffic, CPC numbers can be meaningless. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-02-05 23:00 UTC)