[HN Gopher] What If Performance Advertising Is Just an Analytics... ___________________________________________________________________ What If Performance Advertising Is Just an Analytics Scam? Author : nsmog767 Score : 278 points Date : 2021-10-13 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sparktoro.com) (TXT) w3m dump (sparktoro.com) | myth2018 wrote: | During pandemics, I got really suspicious about adwords. | | My ads were working reasonabilly well considering the low | investment I was making, with a fair amount of prospects filling | my contact form on a low but steady rate. I was satisfied with | the return I was getting. | | However, the pandemic caused a significant drop on my product's | demand. I thought I was going to get little to no contacts from | the moment the lockdown was announced on, but: | | 1) I kept getting clicks at basically the same rate -- therefore | my budget kept being depleted as it used to be; | | 2) Bounce rates increased A LOT; | | 3) The few actual people who got in touch were not actually | looking for the product I announced, but similar ones (which I | didn't announce nor sell); | | So, according to my experience, I can't say adwords totally | doesn't work.. but I'd say their algorithms are optimized to | spend your money regardless of the results you're going to | obtain. | rapht wrote: | The article does have a point about attributed sales vs | incremental sales - as a CFO (whether I qualify as the "hard- | nosed" type in the article, I don't know), I'm bugged every time | a marketing guy starts talking about how this campaign has | been/will be "ROI-positive", and have had a few heated | discussions on why this is mostly not demonstrable until you're | willing to pull the plug (which you can do with more or less | intelligence in order to minimize your risks). | | On the other hand, while I do indeed believe that the "ROI" from | Performance Advertising is something between just false and | deliberately misleading, the bigger picture that I'm interested | in is marketshare. Because when looking at market share, it's not | a question of incrementality anymore, but whether you're growing | slower/faster than your competitors, and your cost of doing that, | and at what point you're OK to 'buy' marketshare, in the sense of | losing money in the pursuit of growth, and how much. And then, | OK, let's talk about ROI on that basis - most of the time, | achieving this will indeed require tools from the Performance | Adversiting toolbox, which allow you to conveniently track the | amount of marketshare (i.e. sales) you bought. | simonsarris wrote: | > Technically, when someone does a Google search for "Williams | Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet," they probably would have clicked on | one of the first 10 organic results, EVERY ONE OF WHICH leads to | their website. But, y'know what ol' Billy Ma's performance | marketers couldn't then do: prove their value to their bosses. | | > [picture of that search term and williams sonoma ads with | shopping links] | | The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was _not_ | advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would, | and then those companies would be above the Williams Sonoma | organic placements. | | The spend is necessary in a defensive way because Google creates | a bidding war even for the hyper relevant. | | edit: I just checked and if you search "williams sonoma skillet", | if WS was not paying for [green] then the very first "result" | (ad) would be Food52 [red] https://imgur.com/a/9Nnxs6h | | I just tried "airbnb paris" and the first result is, somewhat | predictably, an ad that is not airbnb. But the second one is also | an ad, this time from airbnb. So they clearly didn't keep their | spend dialed down to zero, and are aware of the need to advertise | on their own keyword. | coldtea wrote: | Wouldn't that be solvable if it was forbidden to place ads | using as search terms the tradename of another company? | NikolaNovak wrote: | As an end-user, the results are insane. | | Opening google in incognito mode: | | If I search for "Toyota RAV4", the first (ad) result is | "Hyundai Tuscon". If I search for "AWS Cert", my first (ad) | result is "Microsoft Learn". Et cetera et cetera :| | whimsicalism wrote: | What? That's not the case for me in incognito. | winternett wrote: | There is absolutely nothing independently governing and | monitoring whether performance is correct on ads. It's all done | in private, and you're forced to compete against SEO and many | other things to succeed on a daily and even minute-to-minute | basis. | | This is the real price of a constant threat to Net Neutrality, | and allowing one monopolistic company to dominate mobile | devices, web browsers, search results, and the largest video | service on the entire Internet. | | Their plan to corner and manipulate what everyone's freedom of | choice and to secure their funnel of permanent revenue is | considered cute to investors, but no one realizes how bad this | will get in 5 more years. | | Of course the numbers are fudged when you consider how they've | turned analytics on their once very useful platform into a | confusing mess, and when they announced that they were going to | retire the system after it has killed off competition, because | they can simply gather any analytical report they want | privately from their web browser. | | Public front-end statics are no longer trust worthy because | they can be manipulated to drive platform revenue and | engagement. The best and most accurate stats are provided only | internally, to executive leadership that owns platforms. | | Because we now use them for email, video views, browsing, | phones, etc, they have key insight that can even be used for | corporate espionage, your ideas can literally be beaten to | market because your virtual assistant caught you mentioning | keywords then reported you applying for your patent and | corporate loan. | | Most people have no idea about how bad this all can get. We'll | find out soon enough though. | | When ad revenue drops on platforms, the platforms simply reduce | organic visibility which drives the need for regular ad | spending for companies in order to remain visible on social | platforms... AirBNB is riding a wave of prior popularity and | name recognition, I guarantee they will go back to a certain | point of obscurity at some point because they reduced their ad | spend, and then be forced to promote heavily as they did once | before. | | It's all creates a new cycle of financial deception and | manipulation on platforms. For very profitable companies, | advertising is usually manageable, but for startups, for small | business, and for independent creators, this practice is | devastating financially, and fruitless on top of the financial | loss of paying for promotion. These platforms also made | promises to woo users based on free organic growth, which | somehow conveniently disappeared due to covert and convenient | EULA updates over time. | colinmhayes wrote: | Freakonomics had an episode with an economist that worked with | Ebay on ad buys. This sort of "buy ads on your own keywords" | was shown to have zero impact on sales to the point that they | cut completely stopped advertising when the search included | "ebay". | Lewton wrote: | I just searched for "ebay" on google and the top result is an | ad for ebay.com? | bombcar wrote: | This will work for someone like eBay (people searching eBay | want eBay) but for other "brand-name" terms it may NOT work - | people searching for Travelocity or whoever is the hotness | there may be perfectly happy with the first "similar enough" | link. | colinmhayes wrote: | There's no way to know until they do an A/B test like eBay | did I guess. EBay was certain that they needed to do the on | brand ads before this economist showed up too. | bombcar wrote: | A/B for E/Bay. Hmm. | lazide wrote: | Even the eBay test can be misleading - if everyone sees | competitor B anytime they search for eBay, eventually | they are going to give it a try. | tomrod wrote: | This is untrue. A small proportion, but most people | searching for something specific what that something that | is specific. | | If I search for a Dell computer, no way will I buy Apple. | | Likewise if I use Bing to search for Chrome, no way will | I download edge except for user error. | colinmhayes wrote: | They talked about this on the 2 hour long podcast. It was | actually pretty funny too, I'd recommend it. | ameister14 wrote: | Yes, when you're doing general brand terms that's true, but | when you have a specific product in mind that's no longer the | case. | kposehn wrote: | eBay is a strong brand where people searching for eBay are | going to click on eBay, almost no matter what. For other less | recognizable brands or crowded categories, this is often not | the case. | | Branded search terms are almost always less incremental than | non-branded (ie: "lodge logic" vs. "cast iron skillet"), but | the actual incrementality of the terms is something every | advertiser should be testing continuously. | sam0x17 wrote: | > The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not | advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc | would, and then those companies would be above the Williams | Sonoma organic placements. | | Except they won't click those competitor links, because they | are already specifically looking for Williams Sonoma | naravara wrote: | > The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not | advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc | would, and then those companies would be above the Williams | Sonoma organic placements. | | When you put it that way this sounds like racketeering. | Kalium wrote: | If you take as a foundational assumption that the brand name | in the search string means the traffic is in some sense owned | by the brand, then you're absolutely right. It's essentially | racketeering. Certainly brands often view traffic that way. | | Personally I resist the idea that a brand owns my attention | because I used a keyword, but that's one of my many personal | quirks. | naravara wrote: | It's a little dicer in the cases where we can pretty much | infer that they're trying to get to a specific thing and | would have happily used a direct URL to the page if they | had the wherewithal to do so. In this case the ad placement | is basically a brand trying to hijack my attention while | I'm in the process of seeking a thing out. | | I struggle to think of a meat world analogy. It would be | something like if I dialed my girlfriend up on the phone | and, instead of routing me straight to her, I had to | navigate through a switchboard asking me "How about talking | to these sexy singles in your area instead?" And in order | to prevent this, my girlfriend would then have to pay the | company to route my call straight to her. | | Of course this isn't a perfect metaphor because there's a | lot of different ways people use a search bar, especially | now that search bars are merged into URL bars. But that | sort of gets at what it is about this that feels sleazy. | Kalium wrote: | I think it's an excellent metaphor! | | I think it also exposes the core problem. The metaphor | rests on knowing intent with certainty. It's perhaps | possible that certain clarity and pretty much inferring | might not always be the same, especially with how search | and URL bars have merged. | | But I understand completely. If you genuinely feel like | you _know_ that person 's intent with certainty, someone | else having a crack at their attention along the way | feels like a violation of your relationship. | mdoms wrote: | > if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, | Lodge and Food52 etc etc would, and then those companies would | be above the Williams Sonoma organic placements | | And if they were not above organically they would simply buy | the advertising space that William Sonoma purchased. It's one | of the slimiest things Google does - allows competitors to | purchase advertising space on a query specifically crafted to | find a particular source. It's nothing more than a shakedown. | | https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 | vlovich123 wrote: | Yeah, I think the only on-brand search ads that should be | allowed are ones for totally unrelated products OR those ads | are placed below what on-brand search results would provide. | Google has no incentive to fix this though because it's an | extra tax they charge the entire online advertising space (+ | all the other search providers do it). Carefully crafted | legislation could put an end to this tax. | pbhjpbhj wrote: | Well, on a good search engine, IMO, you'd have a predicted | store based on the manufacturer (eg their preferred seller) | then perhaps a list of top 10 competitors and something | like "most recorded purchases after this search are from | seller X" with "the most popular similar store is seller | Y". | | Of course Google wouldn't give that data out as then many | companies wouldn't need to advertise at all to get top | billing. | vlovich123 wrote: | That's secondary & the reason Google doesn't have this is | likely because the sellers don't want to provide this. | E.g. Amazon doesn't want potential customers being easily | redirected to Walmart purchases. One of the many reasons | Froogle died. | | The simple solution is that your paid advertisements are | free if it gets clicked when you're the top result | anyway. That way it doesn't cost the brand any money to | bid on advertisements for their own brand. | AlexandrB wrote: | > Yeah, I think the only on-brand search ads that should be | allowed are ones for totally unrelated products... | | The problem is that this is subjective and would need to be | automated somehow. I think Google's original sin here is | making the ads look so much like organic search results. | Someone placing an ad against a competitors brand name | would not be a huge issue if organic results were still | front and centre like in the "good old days" of early 2000s | Google. | vlovich123 wrote: | This is actually trivially automatable. First of all, | brand keywords are something Google supports explicitly | for this kind of targetting so they know from that | direction. | | More generally though, if you paid for an advertisement | and the natural search result has you first anyway, then | you should not be charged for any clicks to this | advertisement. | mdoms wrote: | > and would need to be automated somehow | | Or Google, one of the wealthiest companies on the face of | the planet, could hire some staff to handle this. | thegrimmest wrote: | Why is that a shakedown? Shouldn't competitors be able to | advertise their products? Any users who are actually looking | for Williams Sonoma will find it. Any who are open to having | their minds changed, or are interested in competing products, | will be interested in competitors ads. | bliteben wrote: | should your competitors be able to buy 100% of the screen | space on mobile with images where your organic result has | none? 50% sure maybe but literally google doesn't even put | the organic results above the fold on mobile. Often on | google on mobile the organic results are 2 screens down. | partiallypro wrote: | Branded keywords are not always allowed, and restrictions | on those ads are pretty strict. | mbesto wrote: | > The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not | advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc | would, and then those companies would be above the Williams | Sonoma organic placements. | | This is what is known as "on brand" Search ads. I like to call | these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers | are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have | already received had the ad not been there. | | I've seen way too many companies look at their analytics and | say "see we get 20x ROAS on on brand! why would we turn it | off?!?". Because silly, people are already going to go to your | site _without_ you paying for the traffic. I wouldn 't be | surprised if 25% of Google's ad search revenues come from this. | aerosmile wrote: | I agree with the rant how Google introduced a tax that | wouldn't have existed in a world without Google. And, | technically speaking, it would have been possible for Google | to not charge for that tax (but would you have done that in | their shoes? It's not like their market share is suffering). | | But if you are implying that brands should not invest in on- | brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad advice. | It's a known fact that targeting your competitors' branded | terms is ROI positive, which definitionally means that the | affected brand is unable to capture all the customers who | were initially searching for it. | mbesto wrote: | > But if you are implying that brands should not invest in | on-brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad | advice. | | I'll be more explicit - you should test the difference. I | usually recommend companies do a blackout month where they | turn off all programmatic ads and then do a like-for-like | comparison. | | To further emphasis my point before, I've seen ad ops | agencies say "hey you've got an overall 15x ROAS" and then | find out that 80% of their ad spend is on-brand (give them | 25x or whatever) and the off-brand (which is 20% of the | spend) is giving them 5x. So their ROAS is inappropriately | distributed to try to reach an overall ROAS goal. | aerosmile wrote: | There are bad actors in every field. I would just be | careful in using such anecdotes to distract from the | overall message, which as you spelled it out in detail | seems sound (with perhaps just a note that a 5X ROAS is | not bad for most unbranded campaigns, but I get your | point). | aesyondu wrote: | I purposely click the non-ad link when searching in Google | (because I'm too lazy to type the full url). Does that help | at all, i.e., prevents unnecessary ad spend from bidding? | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | I do the same, but 99% of people do not, so it's really a | drop in the bucket. | | I do wish there were some regulation such that if a user is | searching for a trademarked or copyrighted term, that the | best organic search result _for that term_ should be | required to show up first. I 'm fine with showing | competitor ads, but I don't think they should be able to | show up above the trademark owner's ads. | verve_rat wrote: | It feels like it is close (but not really) to a trademark | violation. If I search for "A" and get a screen full of | results for "B", if I need to scroll to even see mentions | of "A", then that feels like it is really close to | "passing off". I could see an argument for saying that | this "passing off" causes customer confusion that | requires trademark enforcement. | | I realise that would probably be an impossible argument | to win under current law (IANAL), but it _feels_ so very | close. | figassis wrote: | And would be trivial for google, with all their content | id tech | Puts wrote: | Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a | brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a | dollar. | titzer wrote: | I've done that once in a blue moon, but it doesn't really | accomplish anything except transferring that money to | Google. Since I used to work for Google, thanks, I guess | :-) | drevil-v2 wrote: | Way more than a dollar. If you really want to cost a | company a pretty penny, click on the ad after searching for | an "intent" to do something rather than the exact brand. | Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars. | inetknght wrote: | > _Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars._ | | Companies pay tens of dollars for a single advertisement | placement? I don't believe you. | | I could believe tens of pennies, maybe as much as a whole | dollar. But exactly what search is worth tens of dollars? | JacobThreeThree wrote: | I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a big factor | that contributes to how the Google Ads "black box" | determines how to rank ads is via an Ad Quality | measurement. | | Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own | website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative | source for a keyword search with your own branded | keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads | will be much higher than your competition. | | This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be | shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower | than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their | competitors to be there. | dorgo wrote: | >Ad Quality measurement | | It's called Quality score (soon to be discontinued) and | has 3 components. Only one of which is landing page | related. And nothing prevents competitors from building | "more relevant" landing pages than the original brand. | titzer wrote: | The very fact that you have to bid on clicks for your own | damn website by paying Google, because Google has | prioritized ads to the point of displaying them higher | and making them almost indistinguishable from the | "organic" search result proves they have intentionally | created a tax on the internet. | | It will get worse, to the point where to get auto- | completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not | even sure if that isn't already the case! | alphabetting wrote: | I'd rather ignore some ads which are less intrusive than | places like Amazon than pay a subscription fee to use | search, gmail and docs which are funded by ads. | titzer wrote: | There are other options. For example, funding a publicly- | owned search engine with $1 billion a year in | infrastructure and development costs would be 50x cheaper | than what the US spends on foodstamps. It'd be 1/10th the | NSF's annual budget. | | Not that that's the best option, but we could consider | some new ideas. | vkou wrote: | A publicly owned search engine, that will absolutely not | be used for propaganda purposes by, say, the Department | of State, or by a megalomaniac elected representative. | | Need to build consent for a war with <Country>? Give me | access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be | done. | titzer wrote: | I didn't say it was the best option. But wow, you just | trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy | ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? I mean, | we _can_ subject things to public oversight. | alphabetting wrote: | Google is pretty big with open sourcing. Open sourcing | search would ruin it though. Spammers would game the | system. | peanut_worm wrote: | You're kidding! A single click costs more than a dollar? | gamerDude wrote: | Sometimes. The "intent" scenarios can be pretty valuable. | | "I need a lawyer in ___ right now". That lead can be | worth a lot. | | "Looking to buy a new car today", etc. | dorgo wrote: | Google keyword planner tool shows cpc (cost per click) | for keywords. For an online gambling keyword it shows me | 14.97EUR (for one click). There are other industries with | cpc's of 80EUR and more. | sam0x17 wrote: | Back in the early 00s clicks on Mesothelioma were | something like $24 a click because anyone who could spell | it probably has it and is looking to sue. | twp wrote: | Yes. As an experiment, I tried running a Google Ads | campaign for my https://chezmoi.io open source project | bidding on "dotfile manager". Twenty clicks cost me $20. | I terminated the experiment quickly. | gumby wrote: | Marvelous! I'll do the same. Watch out, Exxon! | | I mostly click on ads as chaff (mostly I block them but | sometimes unblock them just do do some random clicking in | the hope of confounding some profiles being compiled on me) | btown wrote: | It's less the Google tax than the "advertising is now | efficient" tax. | | Any other medium would theoretically have the same problem: | if Ovaltine doesn't sponsor kids' radio shows in the 1950s | and someone thinks they can deploy capital to grow a | competitor, that someone will buy that slot. People couldn't | do this because there were human processes and relationships | slowing this marketplace down. The thing that Google did was | make it possible to test this at small scale. | ohyeshedid wrote: | They weren't bidding on keywords, though, just airtime. | | That's an entirely different advertising model and market. | thomasahle wrote: | > I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because | publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic | they would have already received had the ad not been there. | | Isn't this just the usual problem with advertising? You have | to do it because the other players are doing it. If nobody | did it, it would still be the same cake to be shared. | | This case is more on the nose, but only because of some | fairness assumption that "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" | _ought_ to be traffic for Williams Sonoma. | mc32 wrote: | When people search Pepsi Cola they expect to get a link to | Pepsi or information about it. They don't expect to see | Coca Cola or RC Cola, etc. now in this case Pepsi makes | sure search isn't polluted by paying Google good money to | always be the top results for that term. | | Now, if you searched on the generic 'cola' or 'soda pop' | then yes you expect to see those who bid higher to be at | the top and at the bottom those who bid nothing unless | organically somehow they ended elsewhere. | thomasahle wrote: | I guess that's more a customer satisfaction problem for | Google, than it is a problem for advertisers. | carlhjerpe wrote: | Advertisers are the customers, or am I missing something? | To be fair, I don't consume any adblockable ads or TV ads | (maybe once a quarter for TV) so I don't know if people | click them, how much does purchasing ads affect the | normal search score? | thomasahle wrote: | Sorry, I should have written "users". | closeparen wrote: | For staples, maybe. Advertising also gets people to buy | things that they would not otherwise buy. | finnh wrote: | > Isn't this just the usual problem with advertising? | | Not quite: OP's point is about searches that specifically | include your brand name. The "usual problem" with | advertising in the zero-sum sense you propose is for | eyeballs in general (billboards etc). The google tax here | is more invidious, being specifically about searches that | include your brand. | mbesto wrote: | Exactly. Big difference between | | "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" | | and | | "Cast Iron Skillet" | majormajor wrote: | I think it's the same problem even if it looks more | suspect. | | I think the important thing here is that companies don't | decide to increase total advertising budget just because | of the existence of a new channel. They have a budget of | X. They have to decide how to break it up. Google, with | brand targeting in search, is making a play for money | that would've otherwise gone to Fox or ClearChannel or | whoever. The brands redirect some budget to this new | channel, as it shows its effectiveness. | | Many of them still spend some on traditional channels, to | get that first appeal and be the "Williams Sonoma" in | "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet." Many of those people | aren't just going to click through to Lodge ads instead. | But less than they did when traditional channels were the | only game in town. | | Same dilemma, though: | | If nobody advertised in Google Search or non-Google | channels, people would just buy whatever skillets they | found in whatever stores they found, or what their | friends told them about. | | If one brand advertised in offline media, more of those | people would buy that brand. | | So all brands advertise in offline media. And then it | comes down to effectiveness of the campaigns + the same | criteria that it would've otherwise - | availability/placement, word of mouth, etc. | | Then, if only one brand advertised in search targeting | other brand names too, more of those people would buy | that brand. | | So all brands advertise on their brand keywords in | search. | | But ultimately it's the same game in both places. With | the same net, Google just captures some spend that what | would've gone to non-Google places previously. | jayd16 wrote: | >pay Google for the traffic they would have already received | had the ad not been there. | | But this line of reasoning begs the question. If this system | wasn't in place, then Google search would not exist as it | does and the search traffic would not necessarily exist in | the same way, no? | tshaddox wrote: | I don't see why the search engine would work differently or | be any less popular if Google used its algorithms to | determine intent (that's Google's whole thing) and then | automatically (or via human moderation) prevent companies | from showing ads when there is clear intent to find another | company's brand. Google would be somewhat less profitable, | perhaps, but the search product would still work fine | (arguably even better) for the people searching. | mbesto wrote: | > Google search would not exist as it does and the search | traffic would not necessarily exist in the same way, no | | yes and no. Google search didn't have as intrusive and | competitive ads as it did before and the search function | was effectively the same. Nowadays, if you search "Williams | Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" you get 5~6 ads and 2-3 scrolls | to get to the real organic results. 6~8 years it was like 1 | ad and you could see the first result. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | At this point I'm actually wondering how much more | discussion will be required about "Williams Sonoma Cast | Iron Skillet" to get HN among the top search results. | | Another reason why ads for "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron | Skillet" exist are not just to combat Williams Sonoma | competitors but also scummy SEO search engine spam, I | mean what if you don't pay to have your stuff in the | first results and some hustle comes along that makes fake | product review sites off of scraped results and engineers | getting their stuff all among the first results, since UX | research shows people not finding a relevant hit in the | first few results do not go to the next page in results | it implies that ads are required to give the correct | research for something obvious like this because | otherwise you have to take a chance with the present day | subpar google results. | z3rgl1ng wrote: | It's pretty shocking. Had similar discussions w/ co's | dominating organic and paying ~~fucking con artists~~ | affiliate marketers. IMO those are faaaaar worse than poorly | allocated search spend.. | worker767424 wrote: | It's not a tax, it's a protection racket. You wouldn't like | it if someone looking for Williams Sonoma saw results for Sur | La Table, would you? Pay up. | vkou wrote: | An ad directing shoppers to your competitors who pay them | is not a protection racket, no more than a travel agency | directing travelers to businesses that they have a | relationship with. | | It's the entire business model of aggregators and | intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half | the world's working population. | bambax wrote: | So in a way, big advertisers that are leaders in their markets | would be favorable to adblockers, because they free them of the | need to do defensive advertising. | | One could argue that no advertising is hard for the | challengers, but in today's situation they are outspent anyway, | so what do they have to lose? | | The conclusion is that both incumbents and challengers would be | better off in a world where no advertising exists. | patmorgan23 wrote: | I always skip the ad links and click the organic one, even if | it's for the correct company/product. Because when I click on | the ad link 9/10 is some weird ad funnel page radther than the | actual product page I wanted to go to. | dublinben wrote: | Defensive spending to protect otherwise organic traffic could | also be called extortion. | pradn wrote: | This should be allowed, because this means smaller | competitors have a shot at the customer base of a more | established competitor. If we ban it, it's just shoring up | established players. | desmosxxx wrote: | +1 this has happened to me before and I've ended up buying | from a competitor before. We should promote competition. | matsemann wrote: | Worst part is that the competitor has nothing to lose, so | they basically will spend the whole margin of a sale on the | ad. Which means that the original company has to do the same. | | Where I worked before, Google could get $4 for ever $1 we | made. And we actually delivered the service, and people | googled our name. Pretty crazy... | earthboundkid wrote: | Forget about the corporate POV for a second, as a user, if | I'm searching for X, I probably want X in my results, no? | | It's the fundamental contradiction in Google's search ads | model. If Google delivers users the thing they want, ads by | definition have to be things users don't want. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | >>> If Google delivers users the thing they want, ads by | definition have to be things users don't want. | | Ben Evans has a tweet something like "half of facebook devs | are working out how to code the algorithm to serve you just | what _you_ want to see, the other half are working out how | to get the algorithm to serve you what _advertisers_ want | you to see. " | | We are doing something wrong | inthewoods wrote: | Natural outcome of all internet advertising based models | imho. | thegrimmest wrote: | Right, but you may also be interested in an ad from a | competitor for a similar product, especially if they were | differentiated by price, no? | inthewoods wrote: | This is the fundamental issue with all advertising-based | models. Eventually, they all run into the problem of having | to continue to grow. The only way to continue to grow is to | display more ads, thus compromising the user experience, | which starts the downfall. AOL was a great example of this. | Google seems to be heading this way. | | Google's original values were the ability to provide better | search (common answer) and be fast (less common answer) - | both of which were a complete contrast to the Alta Vista | and other search engines. I could easily see Google facing | disruption from a new player - but I don't think it will be | another search engine. Probably a paradigm/systemic shift. | fabianhjr wrote: | Advertisements are fundamentally not what search service | users want regardless of searching for a specific brand or | not. (Its what advertisers want others to want) | sokoloff wrote: | If I'm searching for "Williams Sonoma 12 inch skillet", | advertisements for places selling it are a pretty large | subset of what I want. | wormslayer666 wrote: | If a search engine encounters the query "Williams Sonoma | 12 inch skillet", retail outlets selling it should | organically appear in results without the need for ads. | sokoloff wrote: | If it's $39.99 on W-S.com, I _definitely want_ to see the | place that's willing to sell the same pan for $34.99, the | EBay listing for $32.50, and the one selling a competing | similar one for $29.99 even if those sites don't have the | organic search SEO juice to land in the top 10. | | As a Google search user, why wouldn't I value these? If | Google doesn't serve them and another search engine does, | I'd be inclined to switch to the other one. | thegrimmest wrote: | Sure, but what about an ad from a competitor for a | similar pan at a lower cost? Isn't that what advertising | is all about? | pbhjpbhj wrote: | Yes, i was thinking similarly. The GP wants links, not | ads (specifically), but if the trustworthy domains are | saying this particular skillet is low quality then you | want that first, rather than an ad. | computerphage wrote: | My "by definition" detector has fired. It says: that's not | true by definition. Ads could instead _also_ be things that | users want. | | I do actually think you have a good point. | jayd16 wrote: | I guess the argument is that if google could make the | perfect search result, ad spending would, by definition | either be exploitative of the advertiser by providing no | change, or providing value by changing the results from | perfection. | | In reality, Google is not perfect and you can argue that | ads do provide value by promoting relevant content, even | if its gameable by our capitalist system. | IggleSniggle wrote: | I like this pedanticism, but I still think you can even | argue the "by definition" piece of it. I suppose it ends | up being somewhat tautological in the end. | | If you really like Skillet X, and I ask you which skillet | I should buy, and you tell me, "Skillet X," then it is | not an ad. | | If you really like Skillet X, then somebody gives you $5 | to recommend it if anybody asks you what skillet to buy, | and then when I ask, you tell me, "Skillet X...I mean you | should know that somebody gave me $5 to say that to you | but honestly I was going to say that anyway" then _is_ it | an ad? | | It kinda _intuitively feels_ to me like if it doesn 't | alter the result, it's not an ad, it's just somebody | taking advantage of another person's willingness to hand | them money and doing nothing in return. | gingerlime wrote: | Exactly. And it's bad for customers too. My mum (70) just | fell for it, and she's pretty clued about computers and | technology. She searched for a flight with Ryanair, so | entered Ryanair on Google. First result was some scummy | reseller, which sold her the same ticket for a higher price | with some "extras". | | Bidding on a competitor's brand name keyword should be | banned. But Google can't resist double-dipping. | thegrimmest wrote: | I mean.. RTFM? Look at the address bar? The branding of the | site? Pay attention and be careful? This stuff only works | on 70 year olds. It stands to reason it won't be viable in | a few decades. | MrBuddyCasino wrote: | > if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, | Lodge and Food52 etc etc would | | If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I | would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this | specific product. The results of other brands might be | annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results | are still displayed on the first page. | rapind wrote: | Ultimately I think it decreases google's value as a search | engine (to the user searching) by a very small amount, but | nets them a high immediate return. I bet it's hard to | quantify the net effect over time, and it would be a really | hard sell internally to not allow it. | | I've noticed the quality of google search decrease | drastically over the last 15+ years or so. I don't think | that's directly tied to ad buys though. | dabeeeenster wrote: | It's not about the customer, it's about the fact that the | merchants have to pay the Google tax in order to play. | The-Bus wrote: | The competing ads will often say something like "Introducing | [Product Y] which costs 25% less and is 10% less smellier | than [Product X you searched for]" | | If you've never heard of Product Y, you might be intrigued | and click. Maybe you want something less smelly! | jayd16 wrote: | Depends on the brand, right? If I search for Klenex or | Bandaid, or Advil, I might be fine with the cheaper generic. | kposehn wrote: | Your logic about the ads is sound, but your experience as a | customer does not mean all customers exhibit this behavior. | The best course of action is to test this conclusion which | can be reliably done with a Google Ads Experiment. | CraneWorm wrote: | Now, that is what I call organic advertisement. | gotmedium wrote: | I think there is an under-appreciated average search engine | user in the comment: | | People will typically write their intent on the search engine | even when they could simply directly to the website. | | Case in point: The top 10 bing searches are for websites, | including FB, Google, Youtube [1]. This traffic is highly | competitive and should (as in all competitive markets) be bid | among competitors. | | https://ahrefs.com/blog/top-bing-searches/ | lowbloodsugar wrote: | The address bar _is_ the search bar. My wife _never_ types | "facebook.com". She types "facebook", gets the google | search page, and then clicks on facebook from there. It | pisses me off that if I start typing facebook, Chrome | doesn't autocomplete to facebook.com. In contrast, if I'm | in Safari, and type "n" I get "news.ycombinator.com" | autocompleted. | pbhjpbhj wrote: | It must be a setting? | | Small business people in my area of UK have always done | this, type in the box in the middle (usually Google, | occasionally Bing or some other service). But my pretty | tech-literate kids do it too, even when I show them how | they 'should' do it and that is faster, and they don't | need the extra click to get where they're going ... mad! | | On Chrome on Win10 as I use at work though, typing in the | address bar, with my settings, I get auto-fill of | addresses (the history search is noticeably missing vs | Firefox) including the option to use 'tab to search' on a | domain. | codetrotter wrote: | For example if the customer was previously not familiar with | Williams Sonoma but had seen an ad in the paper or on TV or | on the subway etc, that caused them to search for Williams | Sonoma cast iron skillet. | | And beside that a lot of people routinely misclick or click | on ads not understanding that they are ads even when they are | marked as such. | MrBuddyCasino wrote: | So the theory is that if I search for "Williams Sonoma cast | iron skillet", but misclick on some competitor, I'm buying | that instead? I don't know, I don't usually assume the rest | of humanity to be a lot dumber than me. | codetrotter wrote: | People don't need to be dumb to do that. Being | inexperienced with computers or confused about computers | is enough to cause people to do a lot of things like | that. There are a lot of people out there who are | inexperienced with or confused by computers. | | But my main point was that the brand may not be all that | important in the first place even though it was included | as part of the search term. The person making the search | could've seen an ad and been intrigued by the product, | but upon landing on a competitor site they may choose to | buy a similar product from them instead. | | If you are deeply into the kind of thing you are buying, | you will make a lot of research to find the best one. But | there are a lot of things we buy that we don't care as | deeply about, and where we may choose the first one that | fits the bill sufficiently well. | thegrimmest wrote: | > landing on a competitor site they may choose to buy a | similar product from them instead. | | Doesn't that just make for effective advertising? I'm | failing to see the harm here. | thegrimmest wrote: | > Lodge and Food52 etc etc would | | And wouldn't any users who end up buying a Lodge pan have been | legitimately converted by effective lodge advertising? I don't | think anyone who's _only_ interested in Williams Sonoma will | just go ahead and buy a Lodge pan. Unless you 're suggesting | that simply because the user entered "Williams Sonoma" in the | search bar that page somehow "belongs" to them, which seems a | bit absurd. | xlance wrote: | This is pure and utter bullshit. | | Performance marketing = Distribution. Without performance | marketing your competitors take the sale instead. | s17n wrote: | The example given in the article seems very off-base: the author | is vaguely planning to purchase some type of planner, and he gets | an ad for a specific planner from a specific retailer. There has | to be a pretty tiny chance that he would have ended up at that | exact site without the ad, so if the ad does lead to a | conversion, it's incremental revenue. | pbhjpbhj wrote: | It's interesting the OP appears to accept they're in the | uncanny valley of "well FB knew somehow I was going to buy that | one and showed me the ad". | | For me it just made me think, well I'm doing something right | because Facebook mostly offers me shitty white label stuff | that's being sold using fraud (I've made complaints to | Advertising Standards [UK] a few times about Facebook ads) and | that I would never buy. | bagacrap wrote: | Not to mention, "you've just visited some articles recommending | fancy paper notebook products" makes it sound like he viewed | some spammy top 10 list full of paid affiliate links, so he's | probably succumbing to performance advertising regardless of | Facebook's later involvement. | timdellinger wrote: | see also "Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A | Large Scale Field Experiment" (Tom Blake, Chris Nosko & Steven | Tadelis) in which EBay did the same experiment (they stopped | advertising), and also "The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring | the Returns on Advertising (Lewis and Rao) which talks about how | hard it is to measure impact. | steve76 wrote: | Take one product. Make a thousand different businesses who sell | them. In one ad, Britney Spears is holding that frying pan. In | the other, it's the Undertaker. | | Instead of product and customer, think value added. You buy a | server for $0.065 an hour. You buy traffic at $0.01 a click. | That's your raw commodities. How do you make a profit off of | that? Supposedly if you're good enough you can get elected | president. I'm sure there's room in there for you to pay your | bills. | DevKoala wrote: | I learned of a bro through a targeted advertisement and I am | looking at it for my next rental. I don't believe AirBnB's | conclusion can be interpreted as "advertisement is irrelevant." | Ozzie_osman wrote: | (So I do think that performance advertising is partly a racket, | but it can work really well if you know what you're doing). | | One additional thing people don't call out is that a lot of the | budgets spent on these platforms are "learning" budgets. Agencies | play this card really well. They'll tell you, "oh, you need to | increase your budget, and test all these different combinations | of ads/targeting/landing pages/etc so that you can learn what | works (or the AI behind the platform can learn what works)". And | obviously, in "learning" mode, you're ignoring the ROI. | | I've seen people spend substantial amounts of money in "learning | mode", and the platforms are kind of incentivized to make the | learning less efficient so it takes longer and more spend for you | to get to ROI positive (or to learn that you will never get | there). | aerosmile wrote: | There are so many holes in these arguments that you could drive a | truck through it. Which is so infuriating, because a big part of | my professional career consisted of watching all of Rand's SEO | videos and really appreciating them. I really thought he was a | genius. But then over the past few years, he started sharing more | general views on entrepreneurship, and those takeaways just | didn't really make much sense. Basically, his own VC-funded | company turned into a shit show and suddenly he started | advocating against VC in general (as opposed to taking an honest | look at the mistakes that his company made). So in the past few | years, I tried to reconcile in my head: how can a genius make | such imperfect conclusions? My initial takeaway was that he's | blinded by his own mistakes and shifting the blame, which seems | perfectly reasonable and understandable. Frankly, I would | probably feel and act the same way. | | But after reading this article, it finally dawned on me. He makes | imperfect conclusions in everything he touches, it's just that in | some fields those conclusions can be more easily proved to be | wrong than in others. SEO is the perfect field where a polished | presenter can get away with imperfect conclusions for years - | trust me, I know, I made a living for years in this field, and I | am very familiar with the nature of this work. Most of the time, | you have no idea what the black box really does, and instead | you're just trying to guess what might have happened. Most | importantly, there are many ways to skin a cat in SEO, and just | because your approach is net positive doesn't mean that you truly | are delivering the global maximum (or that the net positive gain | was ROI positive). In short, it's impossible to know who's right | and who's wrong, and Rand's videos convinced me that he's right, | but I am no longer sure. I just rewatched one of them, and can | easily see how his conclusions are just... opinions. | | While we may or may never find out if his SEO opinions were the | global maximum, we can quantifiably demonstrate that his opinions | on content marketing are not solid. This whole essay he wrote can | be replaced with "hey performance marketers, don't trust the | platform numbers and instead do your incrementality studies." | Platforms like Facebook will give you those for free if you reach | a certain spend level, and you can also get them from 3rd party | providers like measured.com. In other words, if you're a | performance marketer and you're not conducting incrementality | studies, then you're very early in your career and are not | following the best practices. Simple as that - no need to | extrapolate from there and reach all sorts of additional | conclusions (which is obviously a pattern in Rand's behavior) - | calling into question a perfectly investable marketing channel, | conflating the needs of a public company with everyone else's | needs, using words like scam, etc. | | I am really disappointed to have to write this, but you would | have been better off not reading this article. If Rand is really | advocating that the majority of entrepreneurs should follow his | advice and focus on PR instead of performance marketing, then | perhaps an honest thing to ask would be - how is that working out | for his own company? AFAIK, SparkToro is nowhere close to | replicating the growth of his previous company, which is honestly | disappointing for someone with such a huge reach and name | recognition. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Incrementality studies: https://www.adroll.com/blog/marketing- | analytics/beginners-gu... | | Interesting article | | 1. "industry" is moving away from last touch attribution | (pretty much what Rand complains about) | | 2. "Incrementality strives to identify the causal event of a | conversion," | | The way to identify the causal action seems to be : | | errr ... that's difficult | aerosmile wrote: | You linked to an article that offers no guidance on how to | actually do it, which is more indicative of the article | itself than of the methodology. One of the vendors in this | space has a good amount of content on this topic, which you | can find at the bottom of this page: | https://www.measured.com/. Dislaimer: I have nothing to do | with this vendor or the industry in general (apart from | successfully spending money on performance channels). | lifeisstillgood wrote: | My apologies I should have prefaced it with "for others | confused as to what incrementality is all I could find was | ..." | | It's a surprise to see a vendor have a clear explanation on | their site however - and it's worth quoting i think | | >>> Incrementality testing creates an experiment that | systematically withholds media channel exposure to a | representative subset of users (the control group) while | maintaining normal media channel exposure to the broader | user set (the test group). If the control group is both | sizable enough to be statistically significant and selected | at random such that they are broadly representative of the | user base, then the media channel's incremental | contribution can be determined by the difference in | business outcome (conversion, revenue, profitability, etc.) | between the test and control groups. | [deleted] | ChuckMcM wrote: | Can I politely suggest that you share with us the holes you see | in the arguments and how you see them? Whether or not Rand is | any good at what he does or says will be clear by your expert | disassembly of his arguments. | engineeringwoke wrote: | People on this board love the idea that anyone who isn't an | engineer is an idiot and everything that everyone else does | that isn't writing code is somehow worthless. In broad | strokes, they think that all people who do people-facing work | are charlatans that are constantly trying to hide how | worthless they are because talking to people, etc. can't | possibly provide value. Then, they (like so), ask you to | break down your arguments so they can pin the tail on the | donkey that is the logical fallacy that they will use to | discount your (almost certainly correct and informed) | opinion. | | Unsurprisingly, those people are wrong and marketing works. | photochemsyn wrote: | It's also fair to say that if you let the marketers drive | business decisions it's a recipe for disaster. Pushing low- | quality product out the door just to hit some quarterly | sales goal, that's what marketers will push. Epic failures | with disastrous long-term consequences are the typical | result (Boeing MAX for example). | bliteben wrote: | you don't even have to be polite can't believe I read that | whole comment | aerosmile wrote: | Rereading the post, I agree it came across as more personal | than it should have been. I wish I was able to frame it | more as a response to all the people advocating for | alternative marketing ideas which frankly never work out. | Instead, I brought in his own company into the narrative, | which was below the belt. I know first hand how hard it is | to get something to work, and how unlikely it is to happen | time after time. I wish I could edit the comment, but HN | won't let me at this point. | poetaster wrote: | Hmmm. Marketing works!? Well having been a sucessfull .com | era ad co. founder, I suceeded in raking in the cash of the | uniniated (automobile, etc, so no tears) only to see | companies literally obliterated by marketing. TV was then | still 20 times the spend. Still, marketing had 0 clue. Fun to | drink with at the theatre, sure. I was CTO, so, shrug? No, I | was incensed and tried to talk other managers client side out | of giving ME money. I know some clever people in marketing, | but when they smell budget, it's a movie shoot in the sahara | time. | | I do think things are better in some sense today. But it is a | hungry beast, marketing. Oh, and lies and statistics. | aerosmile wrote: | - Brian's comments about Airbnb's approach to performance | marketing are used to imply that Airbnb's lessons apply to | other businesses. Very few businesses - especially those that | start from small numbers and need to grow them - have 90% of | their traffic mix come from repeat customers. Using Brian's | comments helps fuel the narrative that brand marketing is a | better investment than performance marketing, which is | correct in some cases (Nike, Airbnb), and not in others (most | startups). Also, as another member pointed out, Airbnb's | performance marketing budget is still well over $200M/year, | which no responsible/public company would spend if it wasn't | returning a great ROAS. Finally, Airbnb is known for all | sorts of marketing shenanigans in their early days, and they | certainly can't take the credit for a pure brand play. | | - Calling performance marketing platforms a scam (repeatedly, | both in the title and in the narrative) doesn't explain how | those same performance marketing platforms are carrying the | majority of traffic acquisition in most of the B2C companies | that went public this year (and practically all of the DTC | ones). Calling into question the accuracy of measurement is | one thing. Calling it a scam is wrong and designed to rank on | HN rather than to be reflective of the true value of those | platforms. | | - As I pointed out in my original post, all you have to do is | use incrementality studies and 98% of the criticism instantly | goes away. Rand implies that you have to do your own studies | (by eg, following Avinash Kaushik's methodology) which is | 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you if you reach a | certain spend limit, or 3rd parties will as well with no | spend limits. Also, from experience, this really becomes an | issue once you spend meaningful amounts on two platforms at | the same time. His rant on this subject has an iota of truth | and a whole lot of sensationalism mixed together, and overall | leads to wrong conslusions. | | - He conflates "paid search" with "all performance marketing | platforms", including "paid social." It would have been | helpful to point out that the challenges with branded terms | are entirely isolated to paid search and have nothing to do | with paid social. | | - My favorite sensationalist tactic: frame a strong | accusation as a question. This way you get the clicks, but | you can still cover your ass by linking to resources that | with enough research would allow the reader to answer the | question with a "No." But in lieu of that research, the | implication is that the answer is a "Yes." You'll see this | tactic used by less reputative media sources, and I was | disappointed to see Rand do the same. | | I could go on but hopefully this will suffice. | lostinquebec wrote: | Your first point is very hopeful, but not what I've | experienced. The bigger the company, the more slack for bad | decisions. | | Your other points I think relate to scale. No advice can be | universal, and if you read the article as absolutist, your | take makes sense. If you read it as "hey, your mix is | likely wrong", a lot of the criticism fades. | | I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing. The | Lego movie example is a really good one. I think it is | probably good this happened, as a lot of creativity was | performative (how do I win an ad award/impress my peers) | and not about increasing sales, but we've perhaps shifted | the balance too far, and there is likely some areas with | good ROS that are now better bets. | aerosmile wrote: | Scale brings both, headwinds and tailwinds. The outcome | often hinges on how the balance of those two forces plays | out. | | Ecommerce example: every year the CPMs go up and your | paid margin goes down. But every year you have a larger | email list, so the balance of paid to unpaid shifts. | | General example: every year you get more of the late- | stage employees who care less and less about your | company. But every year you can afford to pay for more | layers of management, which will keep an eye on the | underperformers. | | This list goes on and on... The headwinds are driven by | external forces, whereas the tailwinds end up working out | based on your specific execution of the opportunities | that present themselves to you. This is where an | experienced operational team can make a huge difference. | | > I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing. | | You absolutely cannot rely on performance marketing | forever. It's a shot in the arm until you have reached | enough [fill in whatever you wnat] so that you can | leverage that momentum to reach the escape velocity. So | it's not good forever, but it's a great catalyst. | dsizzle wrote: | To your point that AirBnB's and other global brands don't | extend to most businesses, Facebook's recent outage | provided such an experiment and indeed a lot of small | businesses saw massive effects | https://mashable.com/article/facebook-outage-small- | business-... | aerosmile wrote: | Thank you for sharing this. Facebook received a lot of | criticism for how they lobbied publicly against iOS14. | Their reputation is ruined, and anything they say will | always be taking with a cynical afterthought. But as much | as it pains me to say it, they are 100% right in saying | that iOS14 is indirectly going to create a lot of damage | for SMBs and companies trying to disrupt the status quo. | There's more nuance to it, but think of it this way: if | your marketing budget plans on reaching 100m Americans | each year, then the negative impact on micro targeting is | not quite as bad since you're going for the mainstream | customer anyway. But if you're trying to reach only 1m | people, then losing micro targeting is a matter of life | or death. | NumberCruncher wrote: | > Rand implies that you have to do your own studies [...] | which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you | | So FB, who earns on my spending, offers me to measure for | me whether my spending makes sense for me. Why would FB | ever tell me to spend less? Don't they like money? | stoicking wrote: | The causal incrementality of ad spend is rarely negative. | You expect to see decreasing returns with additional ad | spend. For each dollar in ad spend, one advertiser might | want to see $3 in revenue, another $5. Incrementality | studies then allow advertisers to tune spend to their | operating points. | | Facebook does like money. Do you think lying to the | biggest advertisers in the world is the best long-term | strategy, or do you think instead it might be better to | report out the most accurate results possible? | aerosmile wrote: | It's fair to question credibility, but you have to | realize that their results can be compared against 3rd | parties, and it would lead to a lot of reputational | damage (and also legal risk) to systematically defraud | your advertisers. All it takes is one smart team to out | the entire enterprise. | [deleted] | inthewoods wrote: | "Also, as another member pointed out, Airbnb's performance | marketing budget is still well over $200M/year, which no | responsible/public company would spend if it wasn't | returning a great ROAS. Finally, Airbnb is known for all | sorts of marketing shenanigans in their early days, and | they certainly can't take the credit for a pure brand | play." | | My experience is exactly the opposite. The larger the | budget, the less real hard analysis is done. This is | especially true with the rise of attribution modeling which | allows marketers to essentially motion blur the data. | beervirus wrote: | That was an awful lot of words. Too bad none of them had | anything to do with what you think this article gets wrong. | aerosmile wrote: | It would have made the post even longer. But I corrected that | in the child post. Hopefully that clarifies it. | [deleted] | citizenpaul wrote: | I've been beating this drum for a decade. | | I once even had a marketing department shut down with analytical | proof. I got tired of the marketing department with probably 50x | the IT department budget constantly jumping down our throats | about how "IF ONLY IT HAD DELIVERED X BY X we could have had | 100,000,000,000x /s sales this month" | | I made a dynamic report dashboard in my first react project to | analyze market spending and prove that even if you wanted to move | around metrics to be comically generous the marketing was doing | basically nothing to drive sales. MGMT got rid of them and | literally nothing changed except everyone had better budgets. | murillians wrote: | And that React project's name? Albert Einstein. | bogwog wrote: | The entire management department stood up and started | clapping. | vasco wrote: | More in "things that definitely happened" at 7. | cblconfederate wrote: | How is it a scam? They sell dashboards that s the business. | stephc_int13 wrote: | When advertising is a monopoly or quasi monopoly, it transforms | basically into a tax on all transactions. | | I think this is overall a waste of resources and I'd like to see | a more virtuous system, but I fail to imagine one. | fungiblecog wrote: | All I can say is "No shit, Sherlock". | | I'm constantly bombarded by ads for stuff I've already decided to | buy (or more usually that I already bought last week). This stuff | has zero value. The point of advertising has always (until now) | been about taking your product to people who didn't know it was | there. Targeted advertising would be a funny joke if so many | people didn't take it seriously. | chmsky00 wrote: | Advertising as we know it emerged as a melding of government | propaganda research and behavioral economics during world wars, | so of course it's often scammy. | | It sounds "deep state" but it's actually plainly documented in | government files and written about by reliable sources. | | Remember we're still emerging from an era of whispering the same | old story of morality and obligation to each other. | | I am not at all interested in helping someone build a fertilizer | empire or pillow brand. Politically my hands are tied to doing so | if I want a life. | | Poor people effectively live a life of quota and state sanctioned | limits on their access to material support by cutting social | programs with public support. | | Advertising America as anything but a sanctimonious police state | is a scam. | cwkoss wrote: | The "Century of the Self" documentary series about Bernays and | the rise of propaganda/marketing is really great. Recommend it | for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. | kposehn wrote: | I'm going to repost my original comment (thread here: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468505) about this which | is still applicable: | | > Reliably someone comes along every few months to question | [performance marketing]. I always come back to analyses of | incrementality as the real proof. | | > Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to | your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow | and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that | know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge | the real effect of their ad dollars. Facebook, Google and others | make these tests possible in their platforms, while other | software suites such as Impact Altitude and VisualIQ allow you to | do this kind of analysis and testing as well. | | > In the end, most of it proves out to be incremental. There are | notable exceptions of course, but when are there not? | gingerlime wrote: | > Facebook, Google and others make these tests possible in | their platforms | | Any specific tips/links on how to do this with Google/Youtube | retargeting? | ssharp wrote: | I was at one company several years ago and made two big changes | to digital advertising: | | #1 - Eliminated all paid search other than some limited branded | search terms and shifted all the money to affiliates who were way | better at making profits on the keywords we were competing on | | #2 - Eliminated all display advertising after running numerous | experiments showing it provided almost not incremental | conversions, even though the platforms happily took credit for | them. | | Those two things drove our blended CAC down substantially and by | building better affiliate relationships, sales actually | increased. | | The lesson here is that you need to try a lot of things out and | you should be continuously questioning what you're doing and | running specific experiments to gut check effectiveness of any ad | platform that is slapping cookies on wide groups of users and | claiming conversions. | | My suspicion is that this is near impossible at any large | organization, even one as new as Airbnb. I can just imagine | someone walking into a team of 20+ performance marketers and | suggesting they need to experiment to determine if any of it is | remotely effective. COVID forced them into this but it's | something that they should have already been doing. | | I also suspect that the top line focus/obsession of most VC- | backed companies make this type of exercise seem almost | counterintuitive. Don't mess with or question the momentum. | partiallypro wrote: | #2 is basically an industry standard for ad firms (at least | good ones), you'll usually only get people buying those ads to | fill budgets or to do branded advertising that's only purpose | is to raise brand awareness. I don't really agree with your #1 | point, but that really depends on your vertical. You couldn't | really do that well in service industries or financial/legal | services, etc. | ameister14 wrote: | Oddly enough, display ads crush it for restaurant catering | zippergz wrote: | Maybe your situation or industry is an exception, but my view | is that affiliate marketing is one of the most corrosive | influences on today's internet. It drives a truly mind boggling | amount of spam of all types, from affiliates who add literally | no value other than inserting their affiliate code into the | transaction. The proportion of content on the web that provides | no true new information, but exists solely to drive affiliate | traffic, is surely massive. | | So, it's great for your business that this worked, but I | personally don't see any strategy that leans on affiliates to | be worth celebrating. | ssharp wrote: | A lot of things can fall under the "affiliate" umbrella but | what we did was doing 1-on-1 deals with content providers who | were acquiring a lot of relevant traffic. It was not promo | code spamming. | PoignardAzur wrote: | Wait, so what was the monetization channel for the | influencer? | projektfu wrote: | I forgot to do something and basically ended my Google | Advertising spend. I haven't missed it in the least. I don't know | if I would have done better without it, but an increasing number | of people still find my website and phone number even though they | are no longer clicking on the ad that Google provided when they | searched my exact company name, costing me the majority of my ad | spend. | dorgo wrote: | As I understand it ad spend is good if you want attention right | now. In the long term organic traffic is cheaper and more | desirable. In addition ads can be good for exploration. | | So it's only natural that after some time organic traffic | exceeds paid traffic. | toinbis wrote: | In performance marketing(=KPIS are a)sales volume and b) Cost per | action - CPA) it's very simple - you can't scam how much you've | spent on ads. Also you can't scam how much you charged the | traffic you've bought. Both figures are reported by your finance | department with pretty much 100% precision. | | Yes, you do have a challanging problem of attribution. But the | spend and revenue figures are what matters at the end of the day. | And neither of them has any area for scamming (let's ignore edge | cases). | | Disclosure: only skimmed through the article and my arguments | above are just directed towards the headline. However credible | and opinion leader the author - Rand Fishkin - is, the article | itself at the first glance did not inspired me personally as a | worthy my attentive reading time. | jameshart wrote: | You should read the article. You might learn something about | the dubious value of attributed traffic. | ulises314 wrote: | So they compromise everyone's privacy for nothing? | [deleted] | CaveTech wrote: | I take issue with the conflation of Performance Advertising with | Awareness Advertising. | | The whole point of _performance_ advertising is that it's effect | is _measurable_. If AirBnB spent $500m+ on performance | advertising, they should be able to trace that back to an exact | amount of revenue. If you are a brand in this scenario, you can | conduct split tests by sampling the conversion rate of users from | advertising vs non-advertising. Again, it should be simple to see | if the conversion rate for users targeted via advertising has | increased or is unchanged. | | In the branded search examples, again, as an advertiser, you can | see what searches are associated with your leads. While you do | have to compete for attention on your own branded search (to | compete against competitors taking the slot), you should also be | able to recognize unbranded terms which drive conversions for | you. Again, assuming this is actually _performance_ marketing, | you would be able to look at the cost of these placements and the | ROI, and the impact would be measurable. | | The rest of the article is largely composed of straw-man | arguments that imply the results are not measurable, when in fact | they are (if done right). | | disclaimer: I'm the CTO of a performance marketing platform. The | vast majority of conversions on our platform happen same-session. | There's a very easy way to measure this effect -> pause your | campaigns and immediately see conversions fall. | judofyr wrote: | Reminder that Uber turned off $100M of their ad spend and saw | basically no change in conversions: | https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1345774768746852353. I'm | pretty sure they thought they were working initially (through | conversion tracking). | | As you mentioned: The most important test (that you should be | doing every now and then) is to _actually_ pause the ad and see | if revenue falls. Anything else is just an approximation and | should be treated as such. | missedthecue wrote: | I think performance advertising is a great idea if you don't rank | very high in search results for your category. | | "Rental stays in XYZ city" will bring up an airbnb result all | day, probably in the top five results. Therefore, paying $3 a | click to be placed above your own search result is probably | silly. | | I happen to have a small side project and advertise it with a | very low budget on facebook, google, and bing. It works. I don't | rank very high because my SEO skills are poor, but google ads | absolutely drive real and interested people to my site. | dhimes wrote: | Do people coming from Google make a purchase? I've found that | Google is for research-- people are usually looking for free | information. | missedthecue wrote: | My side project isn't for sale or behind a paywall, so I'm | not sure if they have their wallets out. But I know for | certain that they're real and seem to be interested in my | offering enough to click around and sometimes drop a message. | morelandjs wrote: | One of the strengths that Amazon has in this space, is that they | are both advertiser and seller, so they can A/B test their ads in | a way Google cannot, because they have perfect transaction data | tracking. | avalys wrote: | AirBnB has such good brand awareness that it's not surprising | they don't need to advertise very much anymore". On the other | hand, advertising might be a pretty good investment for their | competitors, like VRBO. | netcan wrote: | People have a tendency to view advertising as ineffective on | them. " _I never click ads._ " Mostly this is true. Most ads | people see don't make them do anything. People see a lot of ads | though. | | Meanwhile, it's a marketing cliche that _" half the budget is | wasted, but we don't know which."_ It's also true that google or | FB provided analytics, using default settings often grossly | overestimate ad effectiveness. All true. A journalist somewhere | is writing a version of this article at any given time. | | But... From the merchant's perspective, the existence-proofs for | advertising's effectiveness are undeniable. Launch a site. No | visitors. Advertise. Now there are visitors. People subscribed to | something or bought something. The ROI may or may not work, but | the principle isn't in question. | | For a blank slate, newly launched business performance marketing | is easy to measure precisely and you can have a reliable ROI. For | BMW, GoPro or geico insurance... the world is more complex, ROIs | are more theoretical and " _half the budget is wasted, give or | take 50%_ " applies. | | The same was true for TV. A mattress store run ads with a crazy | guy screaming "Sale!" and the next day a lot of mattresses get | sold. The fact that ads made people come buy mattresses is | trivially true, from the merchant's POV. | mkmk wrote: | It's weird that Rand Fishkin has been in the marketing space for | so long, but somehow hasn't encountered a single effective | performance marketing team that measures their spend well and | complements the efforts of SEO and social media marketers (like | Rand). | | Hard not to see this as a clumsy sales pitch for his company, | especially when it starts with such a disingenuous example/quote | (of _course_ AirBnb didn 't have to spend on performance | marketing during a global pandemic where everybody was suddenly | looking for a getaway...) | tweetle_beetle wrote: | > It's weird that Rand Fishkin has been in the marketing space | for so long, but somehow hasn't encountered a single effective | performance marketing team that measures their spend well and | complements the efforts of SEO and social media marketers (like | Rand). | | I mean I guess he would know from personal experience? He | hadn't been the CEO for a year or two at the time, but he was | still very much the public face of Moz when they "asked 28% of | Mozzers to leave"[1], who worked on products complementing SEO. | They used various euphemisms, but ultimately it's because they | made no money[2]. | | [1] https://moz.com/blog/moz-is-doubling-down-on-search [2] | https://twitter.com/randfish/status/765973082611781633 | rfwhyte wrote: | This article should be taken with a huge grain of salt, as it's | coming from a company that sells a service that is essentially is | a competitor to the performance media channels it lambasts. | | Any article that says "Don't buy X buy Y" loses a lot of | credibility when it's written buy a guy who sells Y. | [deleted] | ChuckMcM wrote: | My take on this is that its sort of like the prisoner's dilemma | in that if everybody said "We'll not spend anything on ads[1], | let the organic results speak for themselves" then you might get | one result, but anyone who has been de-indexed from Google knows | that having no results on the front page means a huge drop in | traffic for you. And if your business depends on web conversions | well that is a pretty measurable loss of revenue. | | [1] or black hat SEO for that matter. | bob229 wrote: | Entirely plausible but not a shred of evidence | fourseventy wrote: | It's well known that the self reported performance numbers from | Google Ads and Facebook Ads are inflated, however those ad | channels still do drive real value. I run an ecommerce marketing | attribution company (ThoughtMetric) so I have first hand | knowledge and data about this subject. | | The most common source of inflation in Google/FB self reported | performance numbers is multiple ad channels taking credit for the | same order. If a customer clicks a Google ad then clicks a | Facebook Ad then makes a purchase, each ad channel will claim | credit for that purchase. In reality each ad platform only has | claim to ~50% of the purchase (depending on what attribution | algorithm you want to use). | | In terms of knowing that real value is produced from these ad | channels, I see it every day in many of our customers data. | Clients will increase or decrease ad spend and there will be a | correlated increase/decrease in sales. | | tldr; Google/Facebook ads over report their numbers but do | ultimately drive sales according to the data I have first hand | access to. | ssharp wrote: | I always used to just capture the old UTMZ cookie data (or | rebuilt it when the actual UTMZ cookie went away) and stored | that with the order data. It's not the most sophisticated | attribution method but it at least gets around these sorts of | double counting issues with orders. | prox wrote: | One of the most vexing problems for me is how to calculate how | much to spend. We had a year of double ad budget, but we didn't | see a corresponding rise in sells. Only 10%. We assumed we | reached market saturation, but it still a lot of guesswork, | even when meticulously diving into GA data. | fourseventy wrote: | What industry are you in? | prox wrote: | Medical supplies mostly (think beds, chairs etc.) | franczesko wrote: | As much as possible, as long you're earning money, I guess. | andrewyates2020 wrote: | Hi, I started a company, Promoted.ai (YC W21) that solves this. | My background is from Facebook ads eng and Pinterest ads eng. | Large advertisers are already aware of this, and so is Facebook | and Google. At Facebook, I led a research team to help big | accounts to drive more incremental conversions. At Facebook at | least, there is a lot of energy to try and generate the most true | performance lift and measure it as correctly as possible. | | However, every advertising platform will take your money if you | give it to them, so buyer beware. | | True incrementally is a challenging measurement issue and | therefore even more challenging to predict for delivery via ML. | It's real, though, just hard. | | Buyer beware. When buying ads, think the stock market. If you | hear stories about 20x ROI from random people, do what you when | you hear 20x ROI on stock picks: nothing. | trentonstrong wrote: | Would like to hear more about these 20x ROI stock picks. | redelbee wrote: | What if this article is missing the forest for the trees a bit? | In my experience performance advertising is almost always paired | with awareness advertising. The latter makes you aware of the | brand/product/whatever then the former nudges you to | act/buy/whatever. | | So if you're buying or even just evaluating performance ads | without considering the bigger picture you might come to | erroneous conclusions. | | Take the Lego Movie example from the article. The $65 million | movie is no doubt an awareness play. Could you make the case that | you should also increase your performance budget to help capture | more of the demand you just generated with the movie? Or should | you just hope that people go from the movie theater to buy Lego | unprompted? Is it worth it for Lego to advertise to people who | walk out of the theater and search for "Lego Batman set" or | whatever? I think so, even though evaluating such branded search | campaigns individually might make them seem inefficient. | | It seems very easy to dismiss the performance advertising as a | scam when you evaluate it in a vacuum. As noted in the article | it's important (and very difficult) to understand the incremental | outcome of any channel or campaign. That incrementality includes | awareness campaigns. | | After more than a decade in advertising and marketing I am now | more than ever unwilling to accept simple or definitive answers | to highly complicated questions. At best I hope that we can | unwind some of the overall complexity so we can have a chance to | trust some of those definitive answers. | Closi wrote: | The problem is it's not what's sold on the tin - the promise of | pay per click advertisement is often that you can track the | results of your spend more easily, and also that it can get | buyers at the time they are searching for a sale. The article | seems to contradict those two points at least. | rvnx wrote: | No, advertising is not a scam. It's only a scam if you pay for | the visitors that would have come anyway (buying your own | keywords, and also retargeting/remarketing in most situation). | s17n wrote: | This is what the article discusses. | franczesko wrote: | Ok, read it. The article falsely assumes that performance | marketing relies purely on the vendor conversion data. I | don't know any business out there, which would do that. | franczesko wrote: | Exactly. It's not about the total sales digital marketing | generates, but the incremental ones it brings. It can be quite | efficiently evaluated, so definitely it's NOT a scam. | rexreed wrote: | So much of what we rely on today for Internet applications and | infrastructure has at its core a fallacious advertising revenue | model. As companies who spend money on advertising realize the | low returns they are getting, they will turn off that ad spend, | which will turn those platforms into increasingly needy and | demanding in your face advertisers, being more intrusive with | your data. Since the average "user" is the product and not the | customer, users will continue to see fewer and fewer features | that don't help with advertising revenue and the quality of the | overall service to the user (not the customer, the advertiser) | will decline. | | We're already seeing that. The quality of Google products | continue to decay. Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly both | becoming shallower advertising hustles (LinkedIn just this week | turned off post notification for events to force people to buy | LinkedIn ads). As other apps and websites get snapped up by these | FAANGs, we'll start to pine for the Internet that was 2008. The | decay is already well under way. | | What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of | our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing | society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social | networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing | products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong | things. How have we gone so astray? | yupper32 wrote: | > What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing | minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not | advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted | to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web | streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing | for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray? | | I think this sounds deeper than it actually is. | | What you're describing is just capitalism. A consequence of | capitalism is that sometimes people figure out how to make | addicting products and then capitalize on it (cigarettes, | drugs, social media). Eventually we figure out the harm and | work hard to stop the damage as much as we can. Cigarette usage | is down to historic lows in the US, for example. Sometimes it | takes a while and takes a lot of fighting. | | Another consequence is massive incentives to advance society. | You can't deny that the vast majority of technology advances | over the last 20 (or 40 or 60 or 80) years have been incredibly | beneficial to society. And the advances wouldn't have happened | if we didn't also risk the occasional bad actor coming up. | | We're still figuring it all out as a society. We've weathered | worse and will come out of it stronger. | malwarebytess wrote: | Considering technology, capitalism, are causing a mass | extinction on our planet and pushing us to collapse I'm not | sure that I can't deny our technological advances have been | beneficial. | | When something is killing you and all life on the planet, it | doesn't matter if it's killing you softly. | arbuge wrote: | The example given in the article of the planner ads isn't a good | one. The author is trying to make the argument that performance | marketing mostly unfairly takes credit for sales that would have | happened away, but this particular sale, even if it had happened, | would have been unlikely to have gone to the specific brand that | was advertising. If they hadn't placed that ad, they wouldn't | have made that revenue. Some other planner company would have. | | (If you have a near-monopoly on planners, of course, such an ad | would indeed have been a waste. The author would have come to you | by default once he decided to get a planner. ) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-13 23:00 UTC)