[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)