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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Are there relevant studies on the effectiveness of advertising?

I remember spotting such study.

I still wonder if advertising is always worth spending on, beacuse google and facebook make a big amount of money with it, but I'm still skeptical when I see the actual amount of people "engaging" in ads, when you see how much it actually costs.

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Every business with a competent marketing department will continuously track and measure the effect of the ads they run, like how many users who click the ads turn into paying users.

My startup has tried a variety of marketing strategies from in-person campaigns on the street, video ads on YouTube, "free" PR through newspapers etc. In order to measure the effect of each approach we only did one at a time.

For us paid marketing on Facebook/Instagram was, unexpectedly, the most efficient form of marketing by far. But I would not assume that applies to all, or even most, businesses. So you should experiment with different strategies for your business.

It's the tracking part here that's hard. How do you know that the FB/IG ad was the first time the converting user heard of your product, or that it was the deciding factor? If you literally have no other way of discovering your product than this works, but it's easy for FB/IG to show your ad to users who were already going to convert and claim the conversion...

I see this so many times. Someone Googles for <product name> and then clicks on the ad for said product instead of their website which is the first organic result. Google claims it’s an ad conversion and gets the money, marketing monkey will happily take this as credit for their work and justification for further ad spend & their own salary, while the truth is that this user already made their decision to use this product (as they’ve searched for it) and didn’t need the ad.

Ad platforms, like Google Search ads, will give you metrics on clicks/conversion on a keyword basis (obviously).

No marketing dept is dumb enough to equate brand-keyword traffic with organic traffic.

I dislike ads in general. Specially Youtube ads. They are hysterical and for some god knows reason advertisers think its a good idea to repeat ad nauseum the same ad multiple times even on the same video. I end up hating the brand more than having some interest in the product.

(Paid) reviews on the other hand like unboxing, configuring and testing a product that I'm interested in are totally another thing. This applies to furnitures, house appliances, computers and so on. A good example is that I did not knew how much I wanted to build a fully silent computer before watching so many build videos of a certain fanless case that looks like a metal cube.

Yes, pretty much every company first data person runs Cost-per-action (CPA) analysis to estimate how many sales can be attributable to ads vs. other ways of raising your brand. It’s an imperfect science (just use the word “attribution” to trigger shivers in any data person) but it’s very clear that targeted platforms offer dramatically cheaper leads for almost every product.

That’s why the hostility to ads feels misplaced: it works, it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you and people like you. It’s just that condescension from _some_ people in Ad platform and a press that insistently favours the worst people mean that people like me who argued for more user-friendly interfaces (ban certain content, prevent repeated ads) were routinely overruled.

> it helps company to whom you want to give money to find you

You mean, the companies who want me to give them money. I'm sure there are a few companies out there whose product I actually want and don't mind paying for, but their number is absolutely dwarfed by the number of companies that seek to induce FOMO/status anxiety/etc in order to get me to buy things I don't need and would not want if not for advertising.

every advertising platform wants to pretend they are delivering useful products that people would otherwise be unaware of, but almost exclusively deliver what you have identified.

Yup. I find it amazing the quoted myth lives on. It doesn't even make sense.

How many problems do most people have that can be solved with an existing product they are unaware of? The numbers can't be very high.

How do you explain well-known brands advertising the same product for decades on end? Surely Coke and Pepsi aren't suddenly enlightening many people to the existence of their drinks.

How about ads that get shown to the known-same individual time and time again after mere minutes? (See Hulu, at least back in the day, not sure what it's like now.)

The whole line about ads being mere consumer education is ridiculous and doesn't even stand up to a cursory thought.

> That’s why the hostility to ads feels misplaced

I have no hostility to ads themselves. I have a huge amount of hostility to the spying that comes with them.

The old saw is that 50% of advertising works, it's just that nobody knows which 50%

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