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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

This is confusing because it goes against everything the marketing folks in previous jobs were always pushing on our front end engineering and SEO efforts. I'm more suspicious of landing page incompetence then you.

Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind.

The DoorDash approach seems very backward. If I saw that landing page I'd be inclined to think "wow, these people don't actually have Saddleback, let me check somewhere else." I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant.

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> Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind.

That's if you're trying to sell them the thing they showed interest in.

Door Dash et al aren't trying to sell you Saddleback Barbecue, they're trying to get you onto their platform so they can sell you to advertisers. What you're interested in is just a way for them to manipulate you onto their platform.

Yes, but per the above post, what tends to work best is if you present people with the shortest path to what they want, and with up sell/retention opportunities either in that path or in follow up after successful conversion.

I guarantee you that a custom landing page for these campaigns would work out better for them.

Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.

Folks are slowly noticing that this concept of "engagement" is a shallow, toxic one that encourages poor behavior that generally harms the end user.

[citation needed]

Maybe tech-savvy folks, or people otherwise paying close attention, but I don't think this describes the vast majority of people by any stretch.

I think the discussion around Facebook and Russia opened a lot of eyes to how ads-based businesses can be exploited, and how the infrastructure they built directly lends to this phenomenon.

And yet, people still continue to use Facebook/Google/etc en masse. These companies are in the news what seems like every week, but the number of people who have left those platforms is negligible.

Because we are not all using the same brain. Many people have many opinions, and some people even sometimes act counter to their preferences based on the context! Wild stuff.

Your original comment implies that folks "slowly noticing" dark patterns is going to make some sort of difference in the grand scheme of things. I am arguing, based on my experience with humans, that it will not—and even if it could, that not enough people are paying attention for it to matter.

> Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.

That's extremely different than the thing described here: "take you to a category page with something else entirely pinned at the top."

A hungry customer is going to get food from a restaurant anyway. For the platform, it doesn't matter from which one.

If you googled "dominos delivery" and clicked a link and got pizza hut, would you order hut or go back and click the next link to get dominos?

Not the best example since Dominos and Pizza Hut are both of equally terrible quality. If I searched for my favorite local pizza place and was sent to Pizza Hut, I would definitely go back. If I was searching for Dominos and got Pizza Hut, I'd probably assume Pizza Hut bought them out. I've had stuff like that happen before.

Of course it does. The most basic reason would be that since they take a percentage, door dash would prefer you purchase from a more expensive restaurant. But there are all kinds of other reasons, such as some restaurants spending more on advertising with the platform.

More friction will lead to dropoff. And, for the platform, it should matter -- they will have different margins depending on the deal, different levels of support, likelihood for the restaurant to churn, ad spend, all kinds of things to balance.

Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience.

One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. Google's blue button test doesn't matter to any product except that exact one. None of us can say, without seeing the results; our previous experience is not relevant.

EG, maybe a 10% conversion to order dropoff is OK if we can direct X% of users to an expensive restaurant. The 10% drop cost is offset by a 50% increase in order cost.

"Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience."

First, a custom landing page can both provide you with the restaurant and an option to search for more restaurants.

Secondly, if the goal was an optimized experience, why wouldn't they want that on their restaurant pages, even the ones that don't come in from search? There's a reason.

> One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable.

YMMV of course, but this one stretches credibility.

I don't think it stretches anything. The opposite -- that different websites, with interfaces that all vary subtly in a billion different ways, with different traffic sources, with different market positions, with different primary outcome goals -- are able to be compared? I would need to see quite a bit of specific evidence to believe that.

I've worked with brilliant conversion optimizers, in a single vertical niche where we had > 30 websites, each doing between 200K-2M visits/month. We would have loved to test + copy, but every time we ran this experiment, we found huge differences.

One subtle nuance is that "generalizable" needs to be more specific than "this change increased conversions". The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.

The Conversion industry tends to similar language as the complementary/alternative medicine space. "I did this thing, it had this outcome. I believe this happened because XYZ. It worked for me, it will work for you!" (People telling stories which may or may not be true.)

That is also why clinical trials for interventions is so important.

Just because there are a billion possibilities with a billion traffic sources, different marketing positions, and you can do clinical trials and doesn't mean that providing someone the answer they expected and the possibility to search for other things beats just searching for things... which was what they were doing on the previous page.

If it was such a brilliant idea, DoorDash & GrubHub should change their sites so that links from their search results only take you back to their search page.

> The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.

FWIW, that's the goal of global optimization, a particual type of optimization, and one that rarely anybody on the market cares about wrt. business. Local optimization, "B beats A", is more frequently used, as usually all the business cares/can afford to care about is to find a C that beats B, if their competitors found the B that beats A.

That makes sense if the consumer is DoorDash's _only_ customer.

If Applebees is paying for some sort of marketing/relevance service, then all bets are off, and it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their opposing customers get screwed.

An alternate phrasing might be "it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their customers they optimize for." Giving preferred treatment to partners that are strategic or have higher margins is not screwing your other customers.

I do have issues with the misuse of the restaurant brands -- seems unethical to send me to Pizza Hut when I click on Dominoes.

> An alternate phrasing might be "it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their customers they optimize for." Giving preferred treatment to partners that are strategic or have higher margins is not screwing your other customers.

You're polishing a turd. Call it whatever you want, but if I'd prefer not to be a customer of a company who prioritizes competing interests over me.

Every business prioritizes competing interests over each other, at varying times. Amazon might be the closest to prioritizing customers uber alles, but that hasn't been a popular result on this board of late. Can you name a few companies you think do a good job of not prioritizing other interests over you?

Almost any local business.

Amazon is a terrible example of prioritizing customers--what part of selling counterfeits, putting sponsored products higher in search results, or retroactively deleting books off your Kindle serves users?

I think it's what you're pinpointing in your last sentence that's the "screwing your other customers" part here. I don't have a problem with the concept of preferred treatment, but to me, that would be "if I search for a given category, put the preferred partners in that category first in the search results," but -- as you say -- a click for a specific restaurant should probably take you to the DoorDash page for that restaurant. At the very least it should take you to a search page that puts that result at the top.

I don't think that's true. Or rather maybe it's in some sense the intent of some of their marketing people, but it's not the way it works in practice.

DoorDash and Grubhub make the overwhelming bulk of their revenue from simple fees on the deliveries made. They surely sell ads (and para-ads like list placement), but the eyeball value of my one visit is vanishingly small relative to the $70 I just spent on takeout. The scales are just totally different.

If they're not showing you the restaurant you followed a link for, it's not because of advertising. It's likely because they don't have a contract with that restaurant and still want to sell you a meal.

Now, that's not ethical. But it's not because of "advertising".

Primary source of income aside...

Doesn’t Google let anyone bid on any word, including brands? [1]

Doesn’t it stand to reason that it’s at least plausible that other search services might do the same?

1. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=google+lets+anyone+bid+on...

In this specific example, the restaurant does have a contract with the delivery service and they're still re-directing customers.

Advertising, or trying to redirect to other restaurants paying higher commissions are the only possible explanation (aside from incompetence of course, but if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you).

They're trying to maximize revenue by double-dipping. They want the $70 food order and another $X because you viewed some ads.

While I don't think DoorDash cares too much about the advertising revenue, per se, I think what's going on here is roughly this:

- You search for a specific BBQ restaurant on Google.

- You see an advertisement for that restaurant! But it's actually DoorDash.

- You click on that ad, and DoorDash initiates a location-based search for BBQ restaurants, putting their preferred partners at the top of the result list.

DoorDash is happy if you order from any restaurant through them, but they're even happier if you order from a restaurant that they get more money from.

> DoorDash is happy if you order from any restaurant through them, but they're even happier if you order from a restaurant that they get more money from.

Is that that what they prioritize over having a functional app for customers, merchants and drivers alike, and proper development deployment that doesn't incur large blackout periods?

Wouldn't selling them Saddleback through their platform accomplish the goal of getting the user onto their platform?

This is either dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy or they did target a specific restaurant name but decided to use a more generic landing page. In my previous life doing more marketing oriented activities in the travel space, we found that even if someone was looking for a very specific hotel, if you dropped them on that page, it converted at a lower rate than dropping them into a search page for hotels in that location and "pinning" that hotel to the top of the page. The reason is that people may be more open to other similar options than you think. So in the case of Doordash, perhaps they have found a similar thing which is that you might have said McDonald's but net net more people will buy if you show them McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack-in-Box, etc.

Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.

So if someone was searching for Hilton would you drop them on a page with Motel 6 pinned at the top if they paid you some money? With Hilton nowhere on the page?

That's what's being claimed in the original comment here.

That's what feels like incompetence (or, more likely, a "targeted landing pages" project that just hasn't been very prioritized).

Yes, it's most likely that the ad that's matching is the generic one for "Lansing, MI BBQ" or something to that effect and therefore it's not pointing to a specific landing page. It may also be that Doordash has found that individual restaurant keywords that point to specific restaurant pages are just not profitable.

With how poor delivery services coverage in my area is, if I look for Saddleback and don't find it soon, I'm probably uninstalling because they won't have anything else I'm looking for. Might install again next year to see if it's better.

  I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant

More to the point, you and I both come away with a negative impression of Applebee's as well (if we didn't have one already).

You had different marketing goals. This is like why shops put milk way in the back.

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