And yet, advertisers still have no meaningful ROI, because it's never in the platform's interest to overachieve on this count.
And, users are still very much annoyed by distracting, irrelevant, or overly-targeted ads.
And, users are still very much annoyed by distracting, irrelevant, or overly-targeted ads.
Agree that we need to improve the quality of ads across the board.
Edit: When you say you know lots of "marketers and advertisers" that are making money from ads, are you referring to resellers and providers of ad inventory and/or analytics, or are you referring to people who actually sell goods and services other than marketing and advertising inventory?
net present average customer lifetime value acquired per unit of advertising cost
If it's over unity, you're making money with advertising, if it's not, you're wasting money on advertising or need to increase your CLTV or decrease your discount rate.
You put a cookie on their machine when they hit your website, tracking where they came from, and exactly how much you paid for that visit (because FB will give you which cohort they came from).
Then you track that to a sale, and you can determine how much you made from them.
If it is a single sale, then that's basically it (obviously you track return visitors and amortize the cost of them against that too).
If it is a SAAS, then customer value calculation is a little more complicated (you record how long people stay with you etc).
Most ecommerce platforms or marketing platforms have this setup with a click of a button. Here's a link to KissMetric's page on this: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/customer-acquisition-cost/
A16Z included this on their metrics post: https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/
What difference does it make? If it’s profitable, it’s profitable.
> And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
Through the variety of existing measurement solutions, or a custom solution.
Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-measurement-an...
Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi...
Google: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en
I don’t understand why you seem to think that companies are throwing tens of billions of dollars a year at Facebook (and Google, and Twitter) with not only no returns but also no ability to measure that lack of returns. It’s just such a ridiculous viewpoint to hold.
For some extremely simplistic e-commerce conversions, such as for referrals to SaaS, it is easy to measure. For entire swathes of consumer products, the game is brand recognition and other soft metrics that drive huge ad spends. You can pretend it’s a science, but the incentives are all upside down for a true end-to-end ROI determination.
The other half of the promise is that you can target exactly the 'right' people. And this seems sketchier to me, as the article kinda gets at: as targeting complexity increases, it's harder to tell whether problems are arising due to market fit or issues in the targeting algorithms. In the old world, you bought ads on content, and now you buy ads on eyeballs: my guess is that there's an unexplored happy medium between the two.
It's trivial easy to add a tracking id to this (in-fact I think it is on by default)
And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
I think people are a little confused about if you are trolling or you genuinely don't know.
Anyway, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi... (and plenty of other methods)
It's really, really easy. And that is why Facebook and Google are printing money - vendors know it works and can measure exactly how well, so they throw money at them.
There's hard, direct evidence involved in every step of the way.
So they're really pairing the ads with people who are least likely to complain. That kind of shifts how I view the incentives.
How would you know, if only users who are actually annoyed are vocal about this?
I, for once, mostly see ads from the companies which I am already a happy and enthusiast customer of, for new versions of products that I enjoy. I even follow the industry news to know about new versions of these products and their reviews - and when I can't buy them, I genuinly enjoy watching youtube reviews about these products.
Do you honestly think that a person like me would be annoyed by these advertisements?
Don't you think that a _lot_ of people can say the same about their own product category that they're enthusiastic about? In my case, it's music software and hardware, but it could be cars, power tools, clothing or some other hobby that people enjoy spending their money on.
Sorry for the rant - I'm just tired of seeing the notion about how bad and annoying the ads are, when I see zero confirmation of this in my reality.