I worked in a heavily regulated industry with some of the Top 10 most expensive keywords and we spent about $150 million a year on advertising with a solid 1/4 of it going to digital (almost exclusively Google) and it was worth it. Digital spend got customer acquisition costs way way down and we spent significant effort into trying to _reduce_ our call center operations (mostly via automation).
It's important to invest in people to crunch the numbers and get your targeting right.
TV was still king though.
We ran Facebook ads when I was there and they just didn't convert at all. It was pissing money away. We got better engagement from posting on Twitter for free.
Their targeting is so good that I almost don't mind seeing the ads.
Wouldn’t that make you more apprehensive of their ads? As it’d be more likely to lead to you parting ways with your money.
If you accumulate a lot of money it means you have created lots of value but you haven't been able to use this intermediary to realise other types of value in exchange for the value that you created.
You can't inflate conversions. View numbers are not that important if you're getting real sales results. Facebook is much better bang for buck in general. We run the same ads on both platforms all the time and it's not even close.
By that I mean people don't directly search for products like they do on search engines and say amazon.
Source: https://tvsquared.com/
When people cold call me to sell me investment advice I hang up.
When I get a betterment / personal capital / fidelity advert in my feed talking about their new whatever, I'm at least mildly interested and sometimes click through.
Do people really fall for the boiler room stuff still - it's VERY hard to believe that beats google / facebook / instagram (for product sales) etc
So the customer acquisition cost can be super high -> lots of commercials even with small market compared to other products/services.
Account-based selling has a few reps focused on a few key decision makers within an organization. It works exceptionally well for mid-market and enterprise software.
I and others I know have had cold-callers using scummy tactics, such as claiming to know the decision maker from way back, claiming they lost their number etc - but these are so old nobody I know falls for them anymore.
Like calling an existing business partner and offering them an additional service. At least that's what I hope he means, rather than telemarketing.
B2B telemarketing will almost always be better because the purchase decision makers are few, well known, and easier to get a hold of. Non-branded keywords for B2B products are also saturated by the competition, meaning you'd need to be on top of your game to the search ads on them to work.
I presume the profit (LTV compared to your $100k) dropped below some expected return for your fixed investments?
Was that due to competition, or some other factor?
I am guessing that it isn't actually due to Google, but due to the advertising marketplace?