[HN Gopher] What if performance advertising isn't just an analyt...
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What if performance advertising isn't just an analytics scam?
Author : mkmk
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-10-29 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mackgrenfell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mackgrenfell.com)
| dontich wrote:
| On the Airbnb point -- we ran many incrementality experiments
| prior to COVID -- COVID just completely changes things. Also 5%
| of Airbnb's revenue is alot.
| notreallyhere00 wrote:
| Wow. This article is excellent. It's not just the content; he's
| even made nice graphics... And the aesthetic of the post on
| mobile is 10/10.
|
| The issues at hand in this post are real.
|
| 1. Problem 1 - Awareness
|
| Many marketers outside of mega super super high paying startups
| are BARELY aware of these factors.
|
| I'm an amateur at this stuff but people look at me like I'm a
| wizard when I get my - VERY SIMPLE - Spreadsheets out.
|
| That's one thing.
|
| Problem 2 - The tools
|
| these platforms and analytics tools are kind of shit at piecing
| the story together.
|
| I'm the sole marketer at a (very rapidly growing, if I may)
| software startup.
|
| Every so often, as an exercise, I go back and piece together the
| entire journey of our highest value opportunities and prepare a
| nice little report.
|
| The idea is to show the team that the buying process is complex
| and that tracking in our neat little funnels is a rough proxy at
| best.
|
| Problem 3 - untracked interaction
|
| We sell a product that is used by teams. This means that a TON of
| our traffic is going to be from team members coming in to have a
| look after team member A discovers us. But what happens if it's
| team member C that gets in touch? How do you attribute that?
|
| Doing regular deep dives on individual customers is the best way
| to maintain sanity in an organisation and stop the inane
| conversations that non-marketing team members tend to start. The
| deep dives, in my experience, tend to be the thing that most
| generates trust in the marketing activity - because it goes from
| being just an abstract game of big numbers to 'oh hey, that
| actually works, how clever.'
| franczesko wrote:
| In a smaller scale this probably would be very effective,
| however I can't see this being possible with bigger client
| volumes. Also, I noticed in my career some sort of elitism and
| looking at the marketing from above, which is driven by
| ignorance in most of the cases.
| nyxaiur wrote:
| No Performancer Marketer takes it for face value, we all know
| they don't, the problem is they still sell it to their clients as
| if they did.
| jamiequint wrote:
| None of the good agencies do this.
| nyxaiur wrote:
| Well if you can give us a list of "good" agencies we will all
| be better of I guess. Thanks in advance.
| franczesko wrote:
| Wouldn't this apply to any external services out there?
| Agencies, software houses, etc. I'm not defending agencies
| (not glorifying them either), but it's hard to expect from
| the business model which scales costs proportionally to
| people hired and not the output, to be lean.
|
| In the end of the day, they need to keep the lights on and
| it's not their money anyway.
| nyxaiur wrote:
| In the end we all do and we can decide if we do it with
| fraud or not.
| jpdaigle wrote:
| Isn't that basically a "no true Scotsman" fallacy, though?
|
| I can completely believe both sides of this: the original
| Fishkin article, and this rebuttal which claims that
| "actually, marketers are competent and knowledgeable".
|
| One way to look at this, mindful of [Sturgeon's
| Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law) stating
| that ninety percent of everything is crap, is that _good_
| marketing agencies will rise above, but if I own a store
| selling scented candles and Google "online advertising" and
| hire one of the random agencies listed, maybe, just maybe,
| I'll get one of the 90% of bad ones that will try to hoodwink
| me into believing unsupported incremental conversion numbers.
| dontich wrote:
| Personally I have never found a good agency for these type
| of things, and I have worked with a bunch. Some in the
| gaming space were decent enough.
| franczesko wrote:
| The truth is that with performance marketing the know-how
| stays in-house. Agencies can't compete with r&d and
| dedicated analytical and engineering resources big brands
| have. The services offered are "for the rest of us".
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > As impressive as these examples might seem, we have to consider
| the fact that no company would ever publicise their results had
| they observed the opposite. No CMO is going to go on Medium and
| write an article called We dropped our spend by X%, and saw our
| volume drop by X%. Even if they did write such a case study, it's
| unimaginable that it should become part of modern marketing
| folklore in the way that Airbnb and Ebay's experiments have
|
| In other words: Survivorship bias is the driver of these
| anecdotes. Obviously no company is going to brag publicly about
| shooting themselves in the foot by reducing advertising spend, so
| the only possible anecdotes that can exist publicly are positive
| ones.
|
| Also: Most companies aren't established, household brand names
| like AirBnB or Uber or eBay. Those companies have built enough of
| a reputation and have enough word of mouth momentum that
| advertising campaigns aren't going to move the needle much.
|
| I agree with much of this article. The original claims that
| performance advertising is a "scam" is playing to general
| distrust of marketers or a dislike of advertising. Any small
| companies trying to ditch advertising because AirBnB did it
| (after they were established and had saturated the market) are
| making their decisions for the wrong reasons.
| giaour wrote:
| I don't understand the survivorship bias argument. If any
| company tried to follow in AirBnB's footsteps and saw their
| revenue decline as ad spend went down, wouldn't they widely
| publicize this fact? "Hey! AirBnB is wrong, and following their
| advice nearly destroyed my small business" would be a
| compelling read and get a lot of traction.
|
| I find it hard to believe that such a demonstration of the
| value of marketing wouldn't be immediately shouted from the
| rooftops by CMOs everywhere and find its way into marketing
| textbooks.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| If advertising drives sales then you will see a decline
| really quickly if you cut spending. You'll likely see this
| decline within hours. In order to restore sales the first
| thing you'll do is restore spending.
|
| You're not going to wait to collect a bunch of data in order
| to be able to roll it up into meaningful research for a blog
| post because those lost sales are real money that you're
| losing.
|
| The thing is, it's in AirBNBs interest to discredit
| advertising because they have a huge organic advantage over
| their competition. If I want to rent a holiday place
| somewhere, I'm going to search AirBNB first. Only if it
| doesn't work out will I try a broader search, and be exposed
| to AirBNBs competitors.
|
| Competitors won't want to publicise the fact that ad spending
| is important because it gives them an advantage over those
| who believe AirBNBs argument.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| And their post would get 0 views and comments like isn't this
| obvious
| mattnewton wrote:
| Of course people would be hesitant to widely publicize a
| failure of your strategy like that.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| 10 years ago, I worked in mail-based marketing and we saw
| improvements when we did a better job of targeting our mail.
|
| I've never written about it. But now I am.
|
| AirBnB is totally wrong because of my 10 year old anecdote
| naravara wrote:
| > Obviously no company is going to brag publicly about shooting
| themselves in the foot by reducing advertising spend, so the
| only possible anecdotes that can exist publicly are positive
| ones.
|
| Coca-cola did just that, testing the impact of reduced ad spend
| in various media markets. They noticed reduced market share as
| a result and publicized it. Information is valuable. If you're
| doing a test presumably it's worth whatever you're wagering to
| get it.
|
| The supposition that it's "obvious" that nobody would publicize
| this assumes everyone's pathologically fixated on saving face
| and not, like truth or information.
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