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Comment by nutanc | Hacker News Reader

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition.

Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

In our early days we used to be scared and bid for it.Lost a lot of money doing that. Then we talked about it and stopped. Again, no change in customer acquisition. Turns out, customers scroll down the ads and still click on our website.

Are our competitors getting some of our traffic?

Of course.

But my business is not built on the assumption that people will not find my competitors. Its built on the fact that people will explore options and try to find the best fit for them. So its ok.

View on HN

If anything, FB ads were worse than useless for my business, all they attracted was 90% fraud.

Looking at what business Ozonetel is in (i.e. sales are directed towards business owners), I'm not suprised FB ads were also worthless for you. I get the sense FB ads are really only good for things a consumer might impulse buy (e.g. clothing, games, small gifts, etc.) but anything where the user is probably going to do some more in-depth thinking about the purchase, they're beyond useless. Which pretty much makes sense - even if you've drilled down your targeting well for business decision makers who may sign up for Ozonetel, it's highly unlikely that decision maker is going to really want to know more about Ozonetel while they're looking at cat vids and fighting with crazy uncles about politics.

Facebook ads are the worst from a users perspective. I bought a floor mat through them once and for the next week all the ads were for floor mats. I just bought one I’m not interested in buying another. I bought a PC chair recently with my credit card, now I see a bunch of ads for PC chairs, again, I don’t need another one.

Same thing with kitchen appliances, but not limited to Facebook. I'm not going to buy another refrigerator for at least 10 years, but still I'm treated as Mr Fridge.

Honestly this might be a good thing, it seems to show that ad networks don't have or at least don't provide your actual purchase history to the ad space buyers because given that info they probably wouldn't be spamming someone who just bought a $thing with ads for $thing_but_from_us. As annoying as it is it's probably better than the alternative of ubiquitous access to your purchase history.

Yup, this is the problem. There is no centralised log of what people bought, which is what you'd need to actually fix this problem.

A good argument, but it happens on Amazon when the search, research, and purchase were all on Amazon.

ML is pretty shitty at causal inference

Yup, I get "buy it again" prompts on nearly all of my recent purchases, even when they are all durable goods that don't expire or require restocking, like say a tablet case.

Hmmm, that's really weird. It's probably an edge case that would be complicated to change in that case (never underestimate the power of inertia, especially in ML systems).

I feel like it might be almost trivially solved with a “buyer only needs one [for X months/years?]” property on the items.

It would likely have to be added by a human, but still: there are a relatively small number of items that people only need one of.

Well we know these places buy your credit card history, so it’s more proof that their ad system is shitty and their customers should make a fuss.

Amazon enjoy that kind of thing too. Look at a product page, Amazon ads become for that product or similar ones. Buy it, and... they still want me to buy another one. And they wonder why people use ad blockers...

I've seen the theory floated that people return so much stuff that shortly after buying a thing you are indeed most likely to buy another, slightly different one of the same kind, and that explains the weird categories where it happens. (and for lots of things Amazon sells recommending similar items does make some sense, although I would expect a bigger spacing in time sometimes.

Also that brand satisfaction is related to how it performs relative to other offerings. If you just dropped $44k on a new vehicle, they want to make sure that you're seeing fancy cars, thinking about how nice and luxurious they are, etc.

And the emails! I keep getting suggestions I just brought a copy of a book why on earth might I want to buy another copy the next week.

One way to avoid/reduce this is to always place orders from a private browsing/incognito window, and to never log in using your normal browsing sessions.

Well no one has a plausible explanation on it yet but with some of the highest A/B testing ratio and best Data Scientist Amazon too seems to think this works.

And yes I agree it sucks.

Hah. I remember shopping for a wireless router and seeing things like “shoppers who bought this item also bought...”. Yes, we all buy three slightly different models of routers. Good job Amazon.

Actually there is. There is a certain chance that you're unhappy with your fridge and you'll return it. So the assumption is that you are more likely to buy a different fridge than any other item. That's why they show you other fridges.

I have an established personal opinion on this, and the opinion is that I'm glad that things are this way. It means that ads are pretty dumb and relatively harmless so far and I can easily ignore them. Floor mats? Tough luck bud, I just bought one.

Now, when the ads begin predicting what I would want the next day—that's when I start worrying.

Don't use facebook but surprised how my spouse finds instagram ads super relevant and interesting enough to check them out almost 100% of the time. They are mostly fashion/travel related that she is interested in checking out,if not buying.

Reading this thread I really start to feel people don't understand what fraud is. You shouldn't be calling it fraud when in the next paragraph you say that FB does work for impulse buys and not "ozonetel"

Just because your ads didn't convert, or 90% of the traffic you buy didn't convert, doesn't make it fraud. Fraud is malice, with the intention to defraud someone and not deliver what you promise, with intent. This is completely different to you setting a target demographic on FB and Google and it not converting.

I imagine most people calling fraud in this thread aren't actually talking about fraud, just non converting traffic. There could be a million reasons for this. You haven't set up conversion tracking, your targeting could be off, or your product or landing page is just crap. Calling it fraud is not helpful.

Here are the California jury instructions for fraud and deceit: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1900/

There are definitely multiple categories this would fall under.

> You shouldn't be calling it fraud when in the next paragraph you say that FB does work for impulse buys and not "ozonetel"

I don’t believe they were saying the adds themselves were fraud, merely that they had a higher than average propensity to attract fraudulent customers.

I think you misunderstood what he wrote.

My business also sell only to other business, and Google kept calling us nagging us to do some "experiments".

One of them involved enabling "display network" ads on mobile.

Like the guy side... it "attracts" fraud.

So, what kind of fraud?

I am not talking about no conversion or no click, I am talking about all our clicks, or almost all to the point it was impossible to tell the difference, were fraudulent, for example most our ad spending was going into a musical keyboard app for kids, that has nothing to do with my business, despite me blocking the category multiple times, the app in question just kept being reuploaded in different categories to avoid bans.

When I went to check out the app Google Play page, it was rated 1 star, and lots of complaints similar to this:

"App is just a fraud, it keeps opening ads in the middle of the song while my toddler is playing to force my toddler to click the ads, then it automatically closes the page that opened and keep running, using all my battery and making my toddler see weird stuff."

So yeah, it is fraud, it is not "failed conversion", it is an app conning toddlers into clicking my ads that are selling stuff that shouldn't be anywhere near a toddler, both the parents and my business were being scammed.

You've misunderstood what I wrote. When I'm saying that "90% of what we got what was fraud", I mean that 90% of the traffic that did convert from FB ads were users that were trying to scam us (it was a financial services app), I mean literally steal money from us with things like stolen credit cards.

The general user quality you get from Facebook Ads is atrocious.

I work for a retail app and can usually tell when we have or haven't been spending on FB ads when I check our usage numbers for the week.

They do work but like anything it's about choosing the right tool (platform) for the job. We wouldn't run ads on LinkedIn and B2B SAAS companies shouldn't advertise on FB/Instagram.

Prefacing this with an acceptance both that HN culturally has US management principles and that I've got no idea how to run a business...

Why is it an initial assumption that customer acquisition and ad spend are linked short or even medium term? That doesn't seem right.

When I see an ad for washing machines it doesn't make me run out and buy a washing machine. It gets me familiar with Samsung the brand so in 6-12 months when I buy a washing machine I am familiar with Samsung and buy their brand. Or it means that if my washing machine starts to sputter I'm more confident knowing where to go to buy a new one.

It doesn't seem enough to stop advertising for 6 months and claim no damage is being done. It seems well understood that repeated exposure to a brand has a powerful effect on humans.

Don't know how much of that is true as I am not a practitioner but when I was studying marketing we were taught this (continuous brand awareness reinforcement) only works for FMCG.

So this is arguing against GP's point since a washing machine should last for several years and is not fast-moving, right?

Yes, that's correct

Uber is about as fast-moving a consumer good as it gets. Up to the local speed limit.

In online marketing/merchandising online advertising is very alluring for two reasons: immediate feedback and the few key players are well known. Essentially online advertising makes a marketing team’s life much easier even though it could be a net negative for the business revenue.

When I was doing some work in this space for Travelocity many years ago the biggest problem was cannibalism of data and traffic. Yes, the traffic coming in from ads was shitty and generally costs more than it returned, but even still cannibalism was the bigger problem. We would have been better off taking all the ads off the site and spending money in other offline venues. It was so apparent that ad spend was a drug addiction. I still don’t understand how this was a mystery to anybody in management considering the strength of the brand and the success of their television ads.

Eventually the business imploded and the partner/affiliate segment became more valuable than the core business partially because it was absent online ad spend.

You're correct on that. Large scale ad spend is divided into "branding" (creating awareness about the company and products) and "performance" (leading directly to a sale). The performance category has many factors including the path to the actual conversion/sale and how many steps are in the way and how long it takes. It can be instant (clicking a buy button in the ad itself) or many months.

Optimization is part of the process to ensure wasteful spending is reduced as analytics and sales data is generated but unfortunately the biggest issue is the people who actually run these campaigns. Lots of politics, perverse incentives, lack of skills, and general apathy.

That's fine - that's awareness marketing and if you want to do it with online ads that's up to you. But then you should consider it compared to your other awareness marketing channel.

But the promise of performance marketing is exactly this immediate connection between ad spend and performance (i.e. sales).

Well then it becomes a question of attribution. How do you with a finite amount of dollars to spend on advertising know if you are getting your money's worth when you cannot connect a dollar spent on ad with incoming revenue?

Sure in broad strokes you are probably right that brand awareness has ROI positive in the long term. But then why would you buy targeted advertising vs a giant billboard on the main road?

This quote is over 100 years old, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

To more specifically answer your question; I imagine they have some sort of strategy with advertising. A billboard campaign might work. I always see Barracuda ads in airports, but nowhere else. Soap operas are named because soap and consumer products advertised to homemakers during the day. Even when using a broad brush you look for the best use of your money and target your audience.

> Well then it becomes a question of attribution. How do you with a finite amount of dollars to spend on advertising know if you are getting your money's worth when you cannot connect a dollar spent on ad with incoming revenue?

The problem with attribution is that it's entirely flawed. Just compare what Google Analytics reports for a campaign vs what Facebook is reporting for the same thing. They'll give you different results and in most cases you probably shouldn't trust either.

BUT, what they do is provide an easily accessible number that you can show your boss to show you had results. This is massively flawed but most marketers don't understand the mechanics of advertising or tracking well enough to understand why they're reporting garbage data.

Great initiative. Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads.

They randomly change distribution models, ignore the bot traffic, and present eye candy line graphs to show "tremendous" impact from ads. And this keeps on running until cash graph goes below the threshold and CEO goes into the "introspection" mode.

One place where I worked spend a lot on ads, but they also hired some marketing people and a leads conversion person who seemed to be able to quantify how much return on investment they were getting from ads.

Thing is, everybody involved has an interest in making the numbers look good. And it's really easy to make them look good even without faking anything. Just omit the fact that you're counting post view leads, stretch the lookback window, etc

I think he did a bit more of an objective job than that. He compared platforms where we were advertising and I remember that Pinterest generally gave a far better return on investment (than Facebook, which was the main platform we used).

> Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads.

How the hell do I structure my empire so that it out-lasts my reign as obsessive good emperor? I am the one guy who can finally say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good person and a great VP of marketing, but you’ve done such a great job that you’re now just marketing yourself really and you’re fired.”

> For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone.

> When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves.

Isn't above an example of a criminal intent of deliberate fraud?

Yes, and? How on earth are you going to even explain it to the police, let alone find which jurisdiction to use?

You are buying it from some vendor, their company is invoicing you. You can use either your or their jurisdiction, whatever fits better and you can also sue them directly.

You explain it like:

>For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone.

>When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves."

You don't have to be a genius software engineer to understand that.

Usually you will have to choose the jurisdiction of the party you want to take to court. This is part of the reason some regulated industries require you to have presence locally.

Ah right, usually you can sue on your home turf only if there's a treaty for it (e.g. when both parties are based in EU).

Ad fraud is HUGE online.

In display, at least. It's not massively common with either Google or Facebook (assuming you avoid their networks), which is part of the reason that both of them make so much money.

I don't think that's true, just that fraud is different on those platforms. I suspect it depends on how you define fraud but certainly if a platform tells me I'm bidding to show adverts to customers who match criteria X, then I expect them to match that criteria.

Unfortunately, that's frequently not the case.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...

Your reference talks about a different set of entities, the information from most data brokers is inconsistent and often wrong (much like display).

Because they have first-party information, neither Google nor Facebook suffer as much from this problem (although the most common school attended on Facebook is Hogwarts, so obviously they're not perfect).

> Because they have first-party information, neither Google nor Facebook suffer as much from this problem

Maybe not from the problem outlined in the study, but fraudsters certainly create fake high value "profiles" that they use to commit fraud on those networks.

I spoke with an ad fraud researcher recently for a marketing podcast I started and he spoke in detail about this fraud is carried out. IIRC he referred to it as retargeting fraud.

Sure, but both Google and Facebook have whole teams devoted to stopping these kinds of fraud.

Like, they are definitely not perfect, but they are so much better than the rest of the industry.

I am aware of a bunch of advertisers who refuse to use open-web/app advertising because of the high levels of fraud, and this is a reasonable decision given the state of the industry.

I think it's worth countering this with the fact that FB ads work very well for us at Thread, because in the HN echo chamber it's very easy to lose sight of this.

This is going to depend entirely on the product and the market. We're B2C, and a very "personal" service rather than a service for one's professional life, so that probably helps. Plus our target market isn't defined by being tech-savvy.

As with all channels, optimising for customer acquisition (not just clicks), and lifetime value (not just easy sales) is critical for the long term health of the channel.

We're probably not in your target market but most people here probably know anything marked with "ad" is very likely to contain malware and probably won't click it even if they think it goes where they want.

This isn't true. Google search ads are rarely malicious - Google does a pretty good screening them.

I disagree. When searching for crypto related terms, more often than not I see phishing sites as ads than legitimate ads.

What are some examples?

The whole cryptocurrency field is scamming. Phishing is just a little bit more obvious about it.

That is inevitable since 99% of crypto sites are scams...

I have recently been getting straight up spam (“you won 1 million dollars!” type) as ads in Gmail. No idea how these managed to show up when these would have been easily marked as spam if it was an email.

So would 99.9% of ads. In fact, that’s what spam is—an ad.

The difference is that Google got paid for one and not the other. Pay them the protection money, and they’ll let you through.

Google ads are just links to sites, there’s absolutely no malware.

While Google does admittedly do a much better job preventing malware-ridden sites from running ads (for very long) than most platforms, to say there's "absolutely no malware" is a bit disingenuous when there do exist some sites with exploits and/or malware that manage to get ads in search results. The ad itself might not have malware, but the site it links to sometimes does.

Yeah that's what I meant, clicking the ads will always be just as safe as visiting the sites themselves, you can't really ask for more than that.

EDIT: I suppose you could ask for more, you could do as you hint at and not even link to sites with malware I suppose.

Why you think that website are unable to control malware or other harmful payloads?

In form of directly executing code or something encouraging to download and run programs containing it.

> searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

Tried it. One ad. From ozontel.com

Same

I saw Dialpad

It appeared 2 ads for me, the first one very big with 3 clickable links

One ad from dialpad for my try.

I've got two ads: salesforce and weeloy.

ozontel.com doesn't exist. Is that a typo or did a competitor really buy ads to a nonexistent domain?

ozonetel.com

good eye. That’s a typo on my part

Hah, I saw Ozonetel Alternative - Dialpad® Official Site...

So Dialpad.

Pretty sneaky Dialpad lol

It's not sneaky to compete in a marketplace.

I'd argue it is sneaky to put the competitor's name first, as most people will click quickly to move on to the website.

Disagree in this specific situation (generally yes) - "XYZ alternative" is about as clear language as you can get. Nothing sneaky about it.

People click through search results really fast. "XYZ alternative" would be much more acceptable if it came after the real name, but putting "XYZ" as the very first word is guaranteed to cause confusion.

The result can be split two ways. Either the advertiser wasted money on a click because the consumer will seek out the true XYZ. Or the consumer will be satisfied with what they've clicked and choose to buy it.

Hopefully the metrics show that the latter is mostly happening.

It's only fraud if the advertiser counterfeits XYZ's brand on their website.

I'm worried about trademark law, not fraud per se, and consumer confusion is the gold standard.

The ad can violate trademarks even if the site behind the ad is squeaky-clean.

Trademark law does not stop you saying "my product is better than X". It only stops you saying "my product is X".

Generally, yes. But if a large fraction of people are getting confused in a specific context, then you can say "don't word it that way", even if the wording is true when you consider it in a vacuum.

If putting the other brand name first causes consumer confusion in certain places, that's a problem, even if they're not lying or even doing it on purpose.

If ozonetel is trademarked it's generally against Google Ads TOS for competitors to use the term in ad copy. File a complaint.

We recently launched in the US. Nice that Dialpad has noticed us. All the best to them :)

You still see ads on Google?

Ok you guys made me curious, so I tried to. I got Ozonetel at the top, zero ads! I win! :)

All results related to Ozonetel and zero ads

https://imgur.com/a/q70nShf

But we all tried it. So that was either a mistake or pretty good advertisement from the op.

Strangely enough my ad blocker had been disabled and I didn't get any ads for Ozonetel. Perhaps it's because I'm searching from Philippines.

Luckily bidding on your competitors name is illegal in Germany. We did get our competitors to not do that with some letters from lawyers.

I always thought that it was clear cut decided by Interflora case in EU court, and that such bidding is only prohibited if impersonation happens.

IANAL

In Germany there is a law against dishonest competition, called "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb".

In my experience, the loss of conversion to competitors was not the problem with google ads on your brand.

The problem was phishing attacks on our customers.

From my limited experience, resources are better spent to SEO to boost ranking. Also, you can request review on google ads keywords to prevent competitors from using your name, especially if you have a trademark.

You can keep them from using your brand name in their ad text, but you can't keep them from bidding on and showing up on searches for your brand.

Twitter has been by far the worst ad spend i've ever seen. When I complained that the clicks i got weren't real people, they blamed the landing page. I was advertising to 3 keywords "free astrophotography data" and the landing page was 0 ads, 0 popups and a link to free data to download.

They charged me for the ads, I complained to credit card company and did a charge back and they never followed through...

in fact, they offered me more credit to try advertising more.

For the life of me, I'm not sure how you can pay for 1,000 clicks to a very specific keyword and not have a single person download anything. The download was also valid for any user type. If you were on a mobile device, it showcased data that you could see on your mobile phone vs requiring a tool to download XISF or FITS data - it allowed you to download the high res image(s) in native iOS/Android formats.

Beyond the improbability of landing page being junk, Google analytics didn't fire for the majority of the traffic and twitters response was "the landing page may be too slow"

the landing page was < 1 second load times even within the twitter iframe nonsense.

anywhoo... the same ads on facebook, bing and google all had 75% click through and downloads but there were still a ton of clicks that had no analytics, no web time, didn't load anything in web analytics that we got charged for too...

the whole thing seems like a scam

That's at least something related being offered :)

When I searched for a very specific pillow type (and added country name to the search to get local results) I get this as first result on Google https://i.imgur.com/Fxx9b80.png. It's a mattress/pillow start-up/brand in India. The ad shows the exact thing I am looking for.

But when I click, and I am redirected to the actual product page https://i.imgur.com/eI6sNtJ.png that has none of these features and the product description is completely different from what it shows on Google Search result page.

I had reported this to Google sometimes back and nothing changed in their SEO gymnastics the last time I had checked a couple of weeks later.

I think what they are doing is fraud (wrong? unethical?). But what really annoyed me is it wasted a lot of my time as I thought I was doing something wrong and probably they actually had the product I am looking for.

SEO isn't Paid its a different channel

Honestly, the way that ad companies treat brand specific search terms has a whiff of fraud to me. Surely Google is well aware that by the time an end user is searching for a brand, they have no interest in anything else; they just forgot the specific URL. If I ever found docs encouraging such behavior, I'd upgrade it from "whiff" to "pants on fire".

Tip: URL suggestions are rarely advertising, and pop up faster than the results page does. Check the suggestions before searching.

Too much to hope for: a Chromium fork to have the search hint dropdown provide suggestions + Duck Duck Go results. And maybe block the enter key unless a resolvable address had been entered to prevent inadvertent Google searches.

I had a hunch and looked at MDN's list of web extension APIs.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

It seems like you could implement your described behavior as a cross-browser extension, for everything except Safari (and Android Firefox -_-). Easier than forking Chrome! :)

Thanks. It does seem tantalizingly there. Now that I've pondered it a bit more I think what I want is a one-way direction from Google's suggestions into an ad-free browsing space. The omnibox is a bit of a misdirection.

What's the point of listing Edge or Opera? Is the same damn browser as Chrome after they forgo their engines.

Search me. Perhaps there are other factors influencing compatibility; perhaps these lists were created before the forgoing of the engines.

FYI, Ozonetel bid successfully for the top line ad in my google search [ozonetel], dialpad taking second. You don't get there if you don't bid.

Serendipitous but of anecdata... was curious where you were located (ah, CA), so googled :) aaaand my keyboard decided I wanted, uhhh, "ozometel" (???).

Did you mean: ozonetel?

Nice.

(Gboard bit me again while typing it out here too lol)

> Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

DHH (of RoR and Basecamp fame) has been beating the drum about this for a while now.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

    why do they not go directly to your site but
    instead search for it on a general search engine?

Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in?

My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone.

"If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?"

It's because now mostly people(including me) search for a brand we know and click on the site. Mainly we type in the address bar(without .com) and press enter. The default search engine brings up the list and we click.

>The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that.

Sure, and I want to watch a show and then have all of the commercials run at then end after I turn off the TV.

>More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

So what would your answer to this be?

"if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?"

Apple is a common noun in the English language. So I would assume the first result to be Wikipedia or some site which gives the best details about apples. The second result could be Apple.com or whoever has applied for the keyword.

Thank you for answering. But that is inconsistent with what you said about your brand appearing first before any ads. In Apple’s case, are competitors allowed to bid on this keyword, since it is a common noun in English? Why or why not? I assume your brand is not a common word in the English language but what if it is in another language? As you can see, I can continue muddying the waters until it’s not so trivial to make a decision on these things — especially automatically.

Now you’re comparing apples and Ozonetels. Ozonetel is not a common noun.

I'm behind a Pihole and the top result for Ozonetel is ozonetel.com. On mobile, there is a "People also search for" bar that takes me to Google searches for their competitors, but it's mostly the Ozonetel home page, LinkedIn, Twitter, Crunchbase etc.

Normal users don't type domains, they type where they want to go into the address bar. my aunt will type "google" into chromes url bae to bring up the classic google search page she knows, and then will continue to type something like "jcpenney" into that box.

If the site is in her browser history she'll get an autocomplete suggestion for jcpenney.com .

One justification might be that it creates an environment where everyone but the ad provider loses.

If, hypothetically, Google was more pervasive than it already is, and made their ads more intrusive until consumers overwhelmongly clicked the highest priced ad for a given keyword, and Exotel bought the Ozonetel keyword, Ozonetel would have no choice but to buy ads for its own name. They could also buy ads for the Exotel keyword. The two could get stuck in a bidding war, wastefully sending money to Google when the optimal thing would be to just send users to the site they're trying to reach.

We're long past the point where you should expect users to try to guess domain names and to pretend that Google is just another general-purpose search engine. That universe could be nice but we don't live in it.

This is exactly what happened and a bidding war started(long time back).

And then we decided to step back from the bidding war. One reason to do so was because we did not have VC funded money. If we had VC money, maybe we would have continued the bidding war. But glad that we could make the right choice.

As a practical matter, search is how 99% of everyone gets to everything. Even if the browser fills in http:// for me so I can just type a name to get a complete URL why would I risk misspelling or mis-domaining a URL and possibly getting a fake or time wasting similarly named site? It doesn’t really matter whether the apple wiki or apple.com comes first because there is no chance I will confuse the two (unlike, say competing online furniture companies).

If you trust Google more than your browser and your own self, surely they deserve to make money off the hard work they put in to earn your trust.

1) Not if that goes to a place that isn't the best answer for it, as expected by a normal person not paid by Google or purchasing Google advertisements. Might this threaten the ability of Google to screw with smaller companies for money? Darn, that's a shame. They'll have to make only a transcendental amount of money instead of all of the money.

2) Related to the above: Google has decided they want to be a critical cog in the body politic. We as citizens get to have a say in how critical cogs in the body politic function. If Google doesn't like that, Google should not put themselves in that spot. We can help them with that if needed.

> If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?

Plenty of people use the search engine as their homepage or reflexively open it when making a new tab, and searching for the name of the service (you don’t have to remember the TLD) becomes a habit.

When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

> When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

One of the things I would like the antitrust investigations to dig into is Google's decision to make ads look more like search results, after a long-held principled stance of clear differentiation between the two.

IIRC, Google never did comment publicly on that particular design change.

I'm sure any internal discussions on the topic will be fascinating reading.

I'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.

I first ran my such Google Ad in 2005. And yeah our competitor at the time was pissed.

Google makes money with these so they allow it as long as the ad text does contain the trademark.

You need to have a thick skin in business. What matters are whether consumers are happy.

There's nothing illegal about referencing somebody else's trademark as long as you're using it to talk about their product.

Having a trademark doesn't forbid your competitors from talking about you.

What I think should be made illegal is that Google (and others) is essentially collecting another toll even when users enter in the brand name of the target business in the first place. That is:

1. User types CompanyFoo (whose real URL is www.companyfoo.com) into their address bar, which lands them on Google (because Google owns Chrome and pays billions for the privilege on other browsers).

2. Since Google will sell this keywords to others, many businesses always bid on their own brand name to ensure it comes up first.

3. Thus, an ad for CompanyFoo shows up first, even though www.companyfoo.com is the first search result, so when user clicks on the CompanyFoo ad Google takes its cut. Again, this is also because Google has done as much as possible to make ads as visually similar to SEO results as possible - just the teeny 'ad' banner, compare to the big yellow box of early Google.

I don't have as much objection for other companies buying branded keywords, but the way Google has set up things up they are taking their cut from everyone even when they are giving very little value.

You are under no obligation to use Google's browser or search engine if you believe it doesn't provide you with a valuable search experience.

You have no control over the browser or search engine your potential customers use.

What do you expect should happen? The browser should automatically load the first google search result? Google should prevent companies bidding on their own name? Or that they should make bidding on their own name free?

How about they clearly separate search results from ads and don't put the ads first.

There was a search engine that got really popular doing that. I think they were called Google..?

Well, I think there are two options.

Either Google should take a note from the old days when they were not rent-seeking jerks but did no evil and actually distinguished search results and ads by placing the ads to the side bar.

Or their practical search monopoly and all the profitablity from there should be regulated to oblivion.

That's just what I think should happen. The sensible me understands that obviously neither is going to happen.

I'm pretty sure that if I typed foo in my browser back in the early 2000s I'd go to foo.com or www.foo.com. Now I type foo in Chrome, see the logo for foo, but end up at a Google search page. This is very clearly a step back in terms of user experience.

In modern Safari this pattern will often take you directly to the website (or some other, non-Google website when it guesses wrong). When it works it's very nice.

I wonder how it works, if its powered by google or if its their own search engine in use.

This Google squeez also happens when a company spends on offline ad campaigns as often the first action in response to an ad is to type the company name into the browser. The searcher then arrives at the Google gate where friction is applied to divert a percentage of those to click on competitor online ads. Google is also taxing global offline ad spend.

The problem is that a lot of times they act like they are the trademarked brand in the ad to trick the user. This is unethical and should be illegal.

That not only should be illegal, it is. Using somebody else's trademark in a way that could decieve a customer into thinking your product is theirs is like the definition of infringement.

But from what I've seen, the vast majority of ads that incorporate a competitors trademark are not doing that, and making it very clear they are advertising an alternative to the trademark being referenced.

This seems like a positive thing imo. A lot of adverts are formatted as "Tired of x? Check out Y!". I see no way this is infringement and its a net benefit to the world since it shows people new things without tricking them.

Yeah, there's lots of places where IP law is pretty dumb, but this is one of those spots where they struck a pretty good balance and things are mostly working well.

> Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

Fact checking you: On Google, I see at most a single ad (on most refreshes for Ozonetel, on one occasion for something called dialpad, on some cases, no ad is shown) and then your website, whatever it may be. It would seem that you are trying to piggyback on this article's discussion to increase awareness of your brand, which is not cool.

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