I really wonder how many companies are actually getting anything for their money.
Does anyone know of any data either way?
However, most big ad spenders engage in "brand" advertising, where the goal is building brand recognition to influence decisions at the future point of purchase decision rather than driving a purchase decision at the point of viewing the ad. I don't see what measurement advantage an online ad brings for this type of advertising, and I see many reasons why it would be inferior to, for example, TV, which can more fully capture a viewer's engagement than a side banner ad.
There reason advertising is hard to measure despite lots of data is that the data isn't always accurate and doesn't always tell the whole picture.
When you do advertising for a big brand, things are even harder to measure than direct response advertising. Viewability is a problem, but attribution is an even bigger one because your tracking to the end purchase is missing many key data points.
Hope that helps clarify a bit.
Myself I have an adverse effect when I see an ad for a product. I will actively try to avoid it as I feel if you have to advertise, the competition probably has a superior product.
I think my reaction would have been different of the ad was subtler though. Thoughts?
A lot of brands will try and piece together negatives - if you want to help a marketer, fill out that NPS popup you see ;)
I am sure a company as big as proctor and gamble has at least a team of people who are dedicated to gather the end to end metric. Then where’s the gap?
In my experience as a data scientist working along-side some marketing people, most of the performance measuring, if it was ever done, was total psuedo-science. It was almost universally done either by people aligned with the actual marketing or who actually worked on said marketing effort.
Not only is there the universal mantra of "Don't ever come to a finding which says that your team and effort fails to contribute value to the company", but lets say that you actually are a data scientist and you really are independent and you come to a conclusion that your multi-million dollar marketing campaign is doing sweet f all.
This will generally be despite 6 months of presentations from the marketing team about how great it was, and probably several bonuses/pay reviews.
And now you're not only fighting a civil war in your company, you're doing it against multiple people with millions of dollars in budget, who have been proclaiming their success, and who's entire career has been based upon appealing to peoples guts to give them high paying jobs and big budgets.
Good luck with that fight...
Rule 37 of professional analytics in big companies: be VERY careful before turning your analytical eye inwards into your own companies' hierarchy/practices...
I do not understand why it’s hard to see
at least the end result.
You moved your spending from billboards to print magazines, and 6 months later sales are higher. How do you tell if it was the ads, when there was also a model refresh, your competitor released a poorly reviewed product, and the economy has been kind to your target demographic?
As John Wanamaker supposedly said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"
See where the problem might be?
After realizing that I just need some tops and shorts to sweat in at home, I ended up buying the store brand label, saving myself ~80% in costs.
It's funny how the mind works.
Conducting an on/off test can be a viable approach in some cases assuming you can properly control for the numerous (understatement) variables that often make your data incredible dirty for such a test. That said, often the nature and number of the variables is such that you would not get meaningful results from an on/off test. This is quite often the case with large brands. As such, other forms of testing are often used individually or in conjunction with each other to get a better read on things.
In terms of the end-to-end data, from an online advertising standpoint you often are missing trackable data points around other brand touch points the person might have encountered before purchase, or often, even the end purchase itself. And that's just the start of the data headaches.
However you also have the problem of identity tracking. The simplest way is cookie tracking but this had cross device and IRL problems. You can use services like Facebook or Google top track identity across devices, even in store purchases if you track data well enough.
Problem in both cases is that the data collection and analyses becomes increasingly complex and inefficient. However this data is a lot more sophisticated than what you could achieve in old media. On the other hand it's up to debate whether the ads themselves are efficient in the digital medium.
Personally, I believe far too many advertisers obsess over ROI without having a clue how to do proper attribution modelling. This leads to everyone trying to grab that last interaction dollar, clickbaiting, creating a divisive environment and this is why we can't have nice things.
I've lived my life doing digital advertising work, but if I turned off 3/4s of ours tomorrow, I'd be loathed to pin my cap and predict volume would drop by that.
Interestingly, I've seen a lot more focus on different attribution models recently, I think people are finally asking the questions now it's been ingrained in a lot of teams for a few years.
eg - person A is going to get onto walmarts site and buy 2 things. They do a G search and click the first result and purchase 3 things. You could track that and attribute 3 items sold to a specific ad at a specific time, person, all that.
However that person was going to buy 2 of those things anyways, had no intention of clicking an ad, only thing the ad did was displace an organic result further down the page and waste money.
I've done ads for years (not a big time high tech company) - but enough to see they can work, unfortunately they seem to work for a short while, I'd say about one year - then you end up paying for clicks for your repeat customers who are actually looking for you, not looking for generic "good past near me".
There comes a point where saving the money on your click budget is actually a bigger savings than the 20% spend's effectiveness gain in profits.
For some types of businesses / some campaigns / your results may vary, yada yada.
Sadly much of the ad inventory and display is completely wasted.
How many people see a display ad for something they just bought? We have been preying upon ignorant companies and ignorant consumers who can't really tell what a sponsored search result is and what the heck organic result means, and what is a url bar? More things like this. It's sad really.
Of course your ad campaign seems effective when you're displaying ads to people specifically searching for your company name. At some point, agency cannibalization of their client organic results crosses from inefficiency to straight up fraud.
If someone searches "Walmart near me" or "Walmart sales" or something like that, they're as brand-aware as you can possibly make them. If you're worried that a competitor might distract them somewhere between their deliberate branded search and clicking on your #1 organic search result, you need to de-commodify your frigging product line.
If search = "walamart" and another non-walmart company is placing ad above organic result, then a warning would be prominent in the ad displayed, and when you clicked it - an interstitial warning would tell you that you are going to a different web site than the one you believed to be shopping for most likely.
- several reasons, 1 - the faint color change google says clearly marks ads is a friggin joke, everyone knows it, and adwords laughs all the way to the bank while the tech face says "look at our perfectly calibrated large screen blah blah" (not the average person's cheap laptop) - 2 - malware has been installed how many thousands of times when I tell someone to update they flash, they type flash into google search (not url bar) - first result is trusted - and it's a malware site. Seen it happen dozens of times myself, know it's happened lots more. 3 - fake news - or whatever else, this is basically saying that many other devious things can be done with ads beyond neighborhood markets battling for eyeballs.
If search equals "walmart diapers" - I think it is fine to show competitors as long as they are clearly marked as such. It gets complicated if the results show 5 competitors with pricing like google shoppiung kind of style - and if they are all paid results - and they not be accurate, and what IF walmart would not pay to be listed there, and it was at the top - is this right?
Some people might think the search they did returned no results and instead google was showing results that were more likely to return an actual document. Now this gets serious in my mind, we could joke that people would know better.. but what if it was amazon echo or something else.
Lots could / should be said about these things above.
Also, walmart should be educating web site visitors, just as other businesses should - explicitly show them that the top results from google (and others) are almost always paid results. Show them that these could be conflicts of interest, and that clicking on them costs money.
Being lazy and typing walmart into search box instead of url bar is giving google money, and wasting time, and raising your costs at walmart and other places - completely unnecessarily - and most often without the consumer having any clue.
I've seen it too many times with so many different types of people. They do not know these things, and it's costing us all. We know that google knows / sees this, with the opaque bidding for adwords cost thing - no one knows like google how much this is screwing how many people and millions of dollars.
Yes, I do think walmart should let go any and all ads that have "walmart" in the search parameter, also "wal-mart" and "wallmart" etc. They should not have to pay for those results, and they should educate the consumers about why they will never show up in a sponsored ad box when they are searched by name, and how consumers would be leery of any company / page that does show up there.
It is wasteful, it takes advantage of the ignorant consumers, and the companies that are essentially being held hostage by engines who at one time earned so much trust with the public that they will now search for anything, click the first result, download and install new software without reading more than "google first result".
So many patterns have emerged to encourage this wastefulness, cramming small screens with lots of ads and pushing more and more organic results away - it's greed run rampant at the expense of all of us who don't own stock in the alphabet.
imho
PS: I’m not referring to actionable ads, but mere advertising to boost brand awareness etc
Then again, I’ve spent lots of money on Apple products because there’s something I value associated with that brand.
It's not enough for me to make a difference, considering I don't spend much time in dirt. But if I had children, I'm sure I'd try different brands.
Not consciously. But when you get into a store and want to buy a shampoo or toothpaste, you are more likely to buy a brand you have heard of than something completely unknown.
Note that in the case of consumables, like shampoo or toothpaste, there's almost no risk in getting the cheapest: if it turns out to be crap you'll mentally blacklist it and buy the second cheapest next time if the blacklisted product is still the cheapest. Buying a car is a very different matter.
I watch plenty of maker/electronic/mechanic channels on YouTube and having them recommend a product to me would definitely be more effective than putting an ad on social media or between videos.
Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills?
"Children killed in terror attack" matches "children", ergo diaper ads.
In many places in the U.S., hunters are among the most effective conservationists at the local level.
Because they want to reinforce the notion that wearing Calvin Klein will make you strong and manly and help you attract beautiful women? I'm sure your general point makes sense but I'm really not seeing your example.
The goal in fashion is to make people appear more attractive, not to make them appear unattractive.
Then getting into the amount of money allocated when it comes to "Keeping Up with the Joneses" for companies competing in pharma, healthcare, or any health related field really racks my brain, especially with pharma. In the United States there is no way to purchase pharmaceuticals online. We aren't making any e-Commerce-type products. The target audience is being fed information that looks better suited for scientists, doctors, and lawyers as opposed to who we and our customers imagine / intend. At some point it feels like it's being created to cover asses more than help sell product. I see things like case studies and the like but I imagine that even those are flubbed in order to mask the truth: nobody really knows if the work we do or the end result our customers seek is moving the meter in any direction at all.
That's because they intend for you to go to a pill mill, and demand an 'as seen on TV' prescription.
The entire system needs to be torn out, root and stem.
Well, if marketing in a given field is genuinely a waste of money then eventually a competitor should be able to enter the field and beat the incumbents by spending less on marketing. There are some fields where the cheap generics win out, but there are others where they don't.
If a company is finding digital advertising to be inefficient then they should cut it, but it begs the question - what IS efficient for them? In my experience, the efficiency of digital simply can’t be touched.
As a shopper, I know damned well that brands mean nothing these days. Here's my deal: Make a great product, promote it enough so that I know it exists, is something I really need and will last, and - after I test that with experience - I'll promote your brand for free.
The deal is off once you're bought by some Org only interested in milking the brand dry.
Have to admit, its not 'fully online' but, with their webshop and customer card registration for in shops, its all one datapool if you ask me.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
How that translates into dollars is what matters and I think the hand waving of "any publicity is good publicity" has long been a way for marketing folks to avoid talking about measurable results.
How I wish all the brand dollars that are probably wasted stopped advertising and making our clicks so expensive, ha!