I stopped advertising and nothing happened
theantistartup.com
theantistartup.com
As someone who's worked in the industry a while, I agree that it's a sad state of affairs generally but when people extrapolate that this means all advertising is bs it's just not true. Fundamentally business orders should track results from their ads the same way they look at impact anywhere else in their business.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is.
This feels like a no true scotsman. I have doubts that the vast majority of digital advertising platforms do anything other than clutter websites, waste bandwidth, annoy people, and pay a small slice of tech employees. I'm open to seeing research on the topic (and I am pretty sure there is some), but what I've read is that most advertising has insufficient statistical power, thus confidence of advertising outcomes being anything but random flukes is low.
The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start, and would have known much earlier whether they were getting a return on their investment.
If your only way of measuring advertising results is to "turn it off", you're just flying blind, and one can't expect success with a (lack of) strategy like that.
That said, you are not wrong that a meaningful percentage of advertising is being run with similarly insufficient statistical power, and to that I would say those businesses are also incorrect, for the most part. I delineate because at some point, say when you're Apple or Microsoft, you are so big that "brand awareness" advertising takes over performance advertising. For the most part though, I'd say those aren't the types of businesses we are discussing in a context like this one.
Part of the problem is your brand keywords will typically show up as being one of your best converting keywords.
Sometimes it requires a bit of a leap of imagination in order to resolve these things.
You could pool all ads together, but since each advertising company is independent you get into all kinds of weird path dependencies.
While I wouldn't claim to be an adtech practitioner, I did at one point help a few F500 work through conceptual models of multitouch attribution and other statistical issues. These are very nontrivial issues -- proving advertising effectiveness is very difficult!
Statistical power for example assumes independence which can be very difficult. Great you spend X million to convince people to buy an AC in March, did you actually benefit or would those same customers want an AC as soon as the first heat wave hit? Spreading demand can be useful, but it’s also really easy to to draw false conclusions from statistics if you don’t understand the domain.
And that’s just one of the many pitfalls involved.
Pre/post analysis may be temporally correlated but this isn't proof because you haven't captured a baseline comparison.
A/B and MAB testing are helpful but not magic bullets.
Shapley values (marginal impact) is a nice mathematical outcome to have for multitouch attribution but as usually implemented is only a single statistic and can be a fluke without additional testing.
It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?
Maybe it's that getting your product in front of the right people at the right time has immense value. And many platforms have opened up spaces for you to attempt to do that if you pay them for the space. Maybe paying for the wrong space at the wrong time is a waste of money.
Maybe determining the right place and time to get in front of people is a skill as well as an entire profession. Maybe that entire profession can't be reduced to an absolute binary of does it work or doesn't it.
Just some thoughts.
Though, I suppose it often matters what you think of as marketing. Is it marketing for Coke to license their image to shirts and other products?
Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?
Those companies paying for clicks to 404 pages or 'this item is out of stock', etc?
Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying?
I get your point but I wouldn't assume big companies always know what the are doing when it comes to advertising. Sometimes they employ lots of people and some of those people don't actually have a clue what they are doing.
> Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?
I get that this can be annoying but plenty of companies do A/B tests and find that it works for them. I suppose it could mean they're just following some fad and don't know what's going on, but it doesn't have to mean that. This is especially true for companies that have long sales cycles or are in categories where lots of comparison shopping is common. Getting someone into your email funnel can be more important than anything else.
> Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying?
Where else in the funnel would you have them apply their coupon? Maybe my perspective is different because we do a lot of offline advertising, but if someone comes into the site off of a print coupon they're going to expect to be able to put it in somewhere and get their discount. If we don't put it in the order flow they're either going to not purchase or we're going to get a lot of customer service calls from people trying to redeem their coupons.
One big mistake businesses make is seeing another business doing something and assuming it must be working. Which is one of the points the OP was making.
I've seen this type of thing improve conversion immensely at a startup I worked at, and it sets up the starts of a drip marketing campaign.
Many of these are the natural results of A/B testing and experimentation, which is why many companies arrive at the same result.
I have worked on the data side of a pretty wide range of roles across the marketing/adtech spectrum for over a decade and think their is a lot of good reason to be skeptical of the claims of the advertising world.
Tim Hwang is also an insider in this industry and wrote an entire book (The Subprime Attention Crisis) on the issues with the current state of advertising. I work in a very different area from Tim (he's legal) but I can tell you that book almost bored me with how obvious all of his complaints where.
> It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?
I've seen the data that many of these companies don't. As many others have said, simply dismissing advertising as a "scam" is too extreme, however there are a lot of really big issues in the industry and extreme skepticism of the advertising industry is well warranted.
The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen. This same logic could be falsely applied to the pre-2008 financial crisis "if these ratings are so wrong then why are so many experts putting so much money in them?"
Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.
> The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen.
The financial crisis was about companies making money, which they love to do. Advertising ad spend is about companies spending money, which they hate to do. Unless someone can explain why everyone wants to subsidize advertising agencies and ad platforms.
> Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.
Skeptical of what, exactly? If you use 3rd party impression and click tracking tools, attribution modeling software, and statistically significant testing, I am genuinely confused as to what there is to be skeptical of.
I think the people who say they know "how the sausage is made" and still hold skepticism of "the whole system" are maybe not as knowledgeable as they may think.
In good faith, I am definitely skeptical of a few things. Whether ad platforms are really trying to prevent spam. How 3rd party DSP audiences are built and why they think people are ok with using them having no idea how they are made. Whether or not apps and devices really are spying on people. Whether people are aware of what "privacy" means from an advertising perspective.
But I'm not skeptical about the users that come to my site or which marketing efforts are working or not working.
Advertising is certainly in the interest of the ad agencies, and the employees of companies whose job is to either manage outside advertising or develop/execute advertising in-house. It's possible there could be a company with a lean team of advertisers, doing just the type of work that makes sense. But within any organization, leaders want to have larger teams because it is seen as a marker of respect. It also allows a leader to command a higher salary.
I don't know if these forces are sufficient to have spun the entire advertising industry out of nothing. But I do know that there are significant forces looking to build up advertising both inside and outside of companies.
It's not though.
Appealing to effeciency is not an appeal to purity, which is what a no-true scotsman is.
A no true scotsman in this regard would be more along the lines of redefining advertising to not include any activities that OP described, i.e. OP wasn't doing true advertising. GP is not doing that here, because GP is acknowledging that OP is doing advertising, but doing it poorly.
These are hallmarks of a no-true scotsman.
This comes across as an arrogant view point. Would you know how to take off the heads of the engine in your car and rebuild it? No? Wow! I'm amazed that you'd have no idea how to do something that isn't your direct line of work.
People running small businesses that are so wanting for ad buys to work for them don't spend years honing their performance advertising skills. They don't even spend time looking it up to know it's a thing (first time I've heard this phrase myself). They see all of the advertisng they are subjected to about why buying ads is important, and so they start where they can.
Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services?
Condescension for the sake of patting yourself on the back is just gross.
That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it.
Advertising works when its targeted but most businesses see advertising as just trying to shout as loud as possible. They take this theory and shout at every one they meet hoping this will convert them to a customer and are amazed when shouting at people has the effect of driving them away rather than pulling them in.
They come to the conclusion that advertising doesn't work not that its there technique, they shouted so loud and at every one how could anyone possibly shout louder or at more people? and when they stopped shouting sales went up! obviously advertising doesn't work.
All that sounds like to me is that the company providing OP's posited "non-insulting services" would just need to make sure they're marketing their product correctly and demonstrating value properly.
That goes against the entire concept of the advertising agency though. If advertising is so important, why staff it out to a 3rd party when you could do it in house? If this in house thing was the way to go, why is Maddison Ave so powerful?
>Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services?
You're right. We all know the value of the person who makes complaints without offering solutions.
If anyone reads this and would like some honest help in this area, send and email to the address in the 'about' on my profile, and I'll try to point you in the right direction (It only looks sketchy because it's a forwarding address, I'm sure you understand.)
When tobacco ads were banned, tobacco companies started making more profit, because they had to spend less on advertising. Turned out their advertising was mostly to steal customers from each other, and didn't really lure in new users. So the ban actually helped them.
That's one hypothesis. Another is that we've known for ages that tobacco smoke causes disease[0] since[1]
> Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year
and the world finally woke up to that.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects... [1] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
Yikes, that's incredibly unfair and arrogant.
It's amazing to you that, because most people don't have to actually employ performance advertising, they don't know what it is? That someone whose passion is cooking, and decides to open a restaurant, might not have that advertising knowledge? That someone - in the case of the OP - whose focus is writing software that helps research an automotive vehicle's life history, might not know everything you do about advertising?
C'mon now.
Allow me to rephrase from a more compassionate perspective:
I don't expect any of these people to devote the type of effort that I have into this knowledge.
But I do wish they knew this stuff, because with even a little bit of this knowledge, they could have the power to make their own restaurant/software shop/insert_small_business more successful than it otherwise could have been... which may even be the difference between them successfully running said business vs. having to take a job they don't like.
Ultimately, it's a be the change you wish to see situation, I suppose.
The OP's point 1 fails to recognise the filter bubble though, I think some SEO companies capitalise on this, but it simply works like this, if you keep googling your website, Google will eventually make it one of the top links in the result for YOU, not anyone else and for some website owners/companies, thats enough for them, and it doesnt bring in any more sales or revenue.
The difficulty is that to get there you have to carefully steward your own little flock of PPC campaigns in the same way that someone might pick stocks or a professional gambler picks a horse.
Marketing isn’t all bad. But if your answer to spreading the word about you product comes down to spending money on banner ads, pop ups, or anything else that would annoy you away from looking at your own product…
If you are talking shoes then people will buy to be associated with that player.
In my experience a lot of older people (40+) increasingly rely on advice/influencers to drive their product decisions.
Influencing is nothing new though the medium change has allowed for a preponderance of people to become influencers to smaller and smaller networks, we've always relied on proxy information if only on where to start research.
It applied to the clothes we choose, the movies of which we might consume the trailers and then reject, the research we do. The universe of awesomeness and crap which we create as a species is multitudes larger than any person could just navigate via pure first order research.
We all need signposts. While I abhor marketing and think hard about how to avoid or reduce its impact on me, its just not fully avoidable.
...so you're "influenced" by whatever sources you research, which means, having reached any conclusion at all, you trust at least some of them.
If I see a product I've never heard of before advertised to me by someone I trust to some degree, I'll check it out. I almost never buy because I have years of shields built up to stop myself from buying crap at the drop if a hat, but there are occasions where I will buy if I like the product enough after researching it. Those times are rare, though.
I don't watch videos from most people who could be described as "influencers", though. Mostly small creators who have an interesting take on something and are passionate about it.
And you get an idea of their tastes & whether or not you share the same tastes. Back in the day, if Siskel & Ebert gave a film two thumbs up, I would probably go see it. Not because they were on the TV, not because of some credentials they may or may not have had, but because over time, I've found out that I generally liked the films they gave two thumbs up, and life is too short to "do my own research" on all the movies playing this weekend.
Of course, this doesn't mean I would go out and buy a car if they were in the commercial for it, but I might have thought about getting a movie related product they hawked (microwavable popcorn? Special edition VHS/DVD? I dunno...).
I do agree with influences. These guys can sway people and make people to purchase ersatz product and has ability to do shenanigans.I think people should be cognizant while watching "influencers".
I guarantee people have influence over you, just not the hipster influencers you are thinking of.
I know a pharmacist on Instagram that quit being a pharmacist and started hawking health supplements in between semi useful posts, mixing bullshit with truth and trashing the credibility of their qualifications.
The only way you can (legally) pay for the former as a business is indirectly, via investing money into making a decent product rather than advertising.
Pop ups, however, have made me NOT buy products I would have otherwise be interested in, lol. But I'm a spiteful person.
EDIT: I take some of that back, maybe. I do look at car experts on YouTube, and listen to their opinion. I guess they might be considered "Influencers". I was wrong.
Actual products reviews, even when they are not all positiv, on the other side I find extremely effective. Same for behind-the-scenes video that show you how a product is made and tested. As what an ad should ideally do is really just show me that the product exist and what it can do. That's all I care about and that's what most regular ads completely fail at.
Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.
Trust is important, but you don't just gain that by having popular influencer read your lies, you gain that by not lying in the first place. Few companies seem to realize that.
That said, I am a sample size of one and other people will make purchase decisions differently.
This! It's all about the basics!
There is! https://sponsor.ajay.app/
A small but significant proportion do click on any of it.
Anything that involves clicks (display, search, social) are typically not the most effective advertising tactics when your buying decision makers number so few, but that doesn't rule out other advertising activities.
Ads are a distraction. It's the seemingly easy way out but there's no way out of selling early stage.
End of the day, the salesman and his relationships closed it. The marketing consultant made a lot of cash though.
That said, ABM is increasingly popular for businesses where it makes sense. Why waste time and money filling the marketing funnel when you can identify preferred customers and invest in building a relationship with them.
The best ad could theoretically achieve with person like me is that I would go to ie skyscanner and check current situation.
Also, even clicking it and then returning later works for the advertisers.
I'm not sure how accurate are these figures (it is an obvious "SEO" booster PR post acting like a blog post), but they are way higher than I expected. Even if it was even 25%, I would be shocked. It seems pretty sophisticated for the average user to install an ad blocker. I wonder how they distinguish men and women.
When I watch average people "swipe" on the metro, I am always shocked by the amount of adverts on their screen. How can they see or do anything? And some of the apps like Instagram (with doom-scrolling auto-enabled) continuously interrupt users to show them video ads that cannot be skipped. (I see the same for "free" games.) Ugh. Who are these people/zombies!?
To be honest, any of the advertising schemes being dreamed up here in the comments section of HN are already a thing.
No lie, Insta knows what I want to buy before I know, and it’s very scary. I’m not an impulse buyer by any stretch of the imagination, but their advertising is some of the best I’ve ever seen anywhere on the internet.
They are the modern version of home shopping network. They make a fortune out of lonely people buying random shit.
If they have enough data on a person, data brokers can easily classify people by mental illness and deliver their information to those looking to target people with specific conditions like dementia. Not nearly enough oversight or regulation on this stuff.
The best marketing comes from strong value props in an area people are open to hearing them. The magic of Facebook (and Google although now less so) is the ads are extremely relevant, to people who are open to hearing them.
The backlash against ads is because they work, when done properly.
It's to the point now that I sometime miss content that I skipped over because I thought it was an ad. The worst case of this is opening a news article about something that happened on video and all I want to do is watch the video. Is it the top video? Rarely, I scroll right past that and look for something in the body. More than half the time it's a video that's in a tweet (thankfully easy enough to pick out) but sometimes I have to look closer at what I dismissed as an ad to find out if it's what I'm looking for. What's infuriating is when I go back to the top video, hit play, sit through an ad, then I get some generic news or computer-generated-type reading/text of the article in video form.
I was so disappointed when apps added ads on the iPhone to ger money! Such a scam.
I recall precisely one ad that caught my eye. I did not buy the product, but I liked it. It was for a men's watch after discussing with my spouse how I might need a watch at some point (Facebook is creepy that way, almost certainly monitoring microphone at the time, if not continually).
- John Wanamaker
We are still in the infancy of the internet and its one dominant usage, the www. It is possible people are overspending on, e.g., www and "in app" advertising because no one is sure what methods or amounts of spending are truly necessary, as "e-commerce" accelerates.
It is a similarly sad state of affairs when people extrapolate the success of some companies engaging in www advertising as a business to mean that current trends towards purchasing www advertising are all backed by objective, empirical evidence and will persist indefinitely. Looking at what has been revealed through litigation against Google and Facebook,1 it appears there is a substantial amount of opaqueness (non-transparency) required for these internet advertising companies to remain successful.
1 Not to mention what will be disclosed in the future.
I don't want to be a sucker for ads. I don't want to support businesses that support our ad-polluted world. With my limited capacity to donate directly to creative work (which I'd incidentally rather do as part of a coordinated general public than just unilaterally), I favor donating to those who forgo ads rather than reward or support anything that accepts ads.
Now, I've hated ads for a long time. But I was still surprised how much I no longer feel fine considering KiwiCo. Now that I heard their ad, I feel like I don't want to be one of those people who is seen as following ads, and I don't want to support them. I imagine there's other products that don't budget as much for ads that I should go out of my way to seek out instead.
So for anyone like me, if you do paid ads, you just harmed your credibility with me.
I do think advertising works, it works because there are unaware people who do impulse buy expensive things and buy whatever they see. Lots of people probably aren’t going to research what olive oil or smart TV is the best, they just want to get their shopping done. And, kind of like how IAPs work because some people will spend thousands of dollars on them, some people spend thousands of dollars on impulse buys.
A long time ago now, but when I left my parents house to go to another city to study, when I bought laundry detergent for the very first time in my life I ended up with the brand stuff - and I only noticed what I had done at the cash register. I had skipped the cheaper no-name products even though that would have been much more appropriate for my financial situation. Instead, I picked the brand I subconsciously remembered as brand, the one that always had the most annoying TV ads. The one where as a teenager I had wondered, why is anyone so stupid to make such annoying ads? Anyone seeing them would avoid that product! Turned out those annoying housewife ads did work as intended on me.
I get the subconscious thing, sure. I subconsciously find brands REPELLENT if I think they are familiar options likely because they are popular with ad-susceptible people.
What happens in practice for me is that I don't buy a lot of stuff besides core needs in general. But when I do, I'm super resistant, I have a defensive posture as a consumer. And the one time I let my guard down a bit is when I have the impression of some product just being good quality stuff that is advertised only in organic ways.
I mean, put another way: I don't have bias against searching for a class of products, finding a website of product X, and reading from the company about the virtues of it. I'm not as open to that as if a trusted friend recommends it, but I'm not opposed to it. But if I find out that the company paid for Facebook ads or whatever, it pushes it into a subconscious category in my head which is something like "this product is out to trick me into buying it", and I have a gut-level mistrust from that point on.
Even if I use an ad blocker, all the results are dominated by SEO spam. You can go and search Reddit to try and find honest recommendations, but companies are starting to spam that as well.
Searching directly on Amazon is pointless because they prioritise their margins above all else and show you the crappiest products that make them the most money.
For electronics I use a https://geizhals.at -- it's theoretically a price comparison site, but it has a great parametric search which is the best for finding electronics.
But for general purpose stuff I'm really struggling.
Something like that maybe… just guessing
That's not a claim of immunity.
The amount something advertised is inversely correlated with value.
The problem is that even if ads don't affect you personally, they affect people around you, and the people who "organically" tell you about stuff just tell you about things they saw in ads.
• Randomly: I don’t care what toothpaste or soap etc. I get, I just grab the closest/cheapest thing off the shelf.
• While manually searching for specific traits, ingredients or features.
• Habit/Lack of choice: Coke and Pepsi are the only colas of their type available in most places.
• Via word-of-mouth by people who found them the same ways. This includes asking for recommendations on online forums etc.
If I know that product X exists, and someone tells me they like it, it's a wary slight-increase in trust. Unless the person is someone I can identify as being into corporate advertised crap.
If I know that product X exists, and I then see an ad for it, it reduces my inclination to consider buying it.
If I can find out that the "organic" recommendation was a paid influencer situation, that's the worst.
To be clear, the ad concern doesn't apply to companies advertising their own products. I don't feel awful about going to a restaurant and at the restaurant they are advertising a new dish.
'Delgo' was released to theaters on over 2000 screens with an all-star cast in December of 2008 and virtually no marketing budget. It averaged roughly two paying customers per showing. More people saw Conan O'Brien making jokes about it on his show than saw it in the theaters. Though critically panned as derivative and several years out of date with its CGI, movies with far worse reviews have done much better. The real difference seems to be that no one knew that it existed.
That said, a new Star Wars movie with no advertising likely would still end up with plenty of ticket buyers. Existing brands can much more easily get away with taking their foot off the media buying accelerator but how long could they do it before a slow-down occurred? Seems like Marvel and DC still purchase lots of advertising for their well-known and currently popular franchises. What would happen if they stopped? Not sure if we'll ever know since they're unlikely to take that risk.
Looking at wikipedia for this movie (which I'd never heard of), the all-star cast was: Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Anne Bancroft, Chris Kattan, Louis Gossett Jr., Val Kilmer, and Malcolm McDowell.
Apparently development started in 1999 (so the cast makes sense), and animation started in 2001... 2001 -> 2008 is pretty bad timing I think, both in terms of just raw number of years, and also in terms of... I mean those were pretty busy years in terms of CG, right?
I bet whoever owned MGM in 2008 found it in their stack of stinkers and figured "why not shovel it out the door?" Movies seem like a bad example for this sort of thing as a result -- big investment, want to recoup some of it, but sometimes a failure is pretty obvious, so why invest further in a big (and one-off) ad campaign?
Probably less valuable for industries with less competition. Like do I really need to see an Apple ad? Is not seeing one gonna make me go Android?
It was pulled after one week, hardly enough time to build word of mouth. And more than half of the all star cast were people who won awards over half a century prior. Other than Freddie Prince Jr or Jennifer Love Hewitt, would modern audiences know any of those people (not that I think name brand actors are important.)
Without interesting story, graphics or actors people are excited to see, I'm not sure why you think it would do well regardless of the advertising budget?
Movies effectively get "free advertising" from reviews, actor interviews, and things like your example of Conan making fun of it. I'd assume vastly more people heard of the film than saw it, they just heard it was terrible.
Why is it a false narrative? The basic premise is simple: company X spends money on ads, then turns those ads off and finds that the revenue does not change. Then the conclusion is made that ads don't work. On the surface, it seems like sound logic, and that's why articles like that do find their way into reputable publishers.
But allow me to make an analogy that will hopefully highlight how absurdly oversimplified that takeaway is:
Company X decides to switch from PHP to Go, and in the process ends up with all sorts of bugs due to how the new garbage collector works. This costs the company a lot of money, and the conclusion is made that Go is a shitty programming language.
What both of these cases have in common is that neither takes into the account the proficiency level of the operator. It's somehow intuitively obvious that as you trade programming abstractions for performance, you will require a higher level of developer proficiency to extract that performance. But nobody makes that connection in the marketing world. The often quoted examples of marketing calamities, Ebay and Uber, have marketing budgets in the 100s of millions, which can be only deployed using multi-channel strategies. In other words, you might give 10% of that to Pinterest, and might be delighted to see that Pinterest reports a 300% ROAS. But it turns out that Pinterest will also report on a much longer lookback window than other platforms, and will use a different attribution model than, say, Facebook or Google. If you turn off your Pinterest spend and discover that the reported 300% ROAS was not accurate, it doesn't mean that ads don't work - it means that Pinterest had bad incrementality, and that it was some other platform that deserves all the credit. In short, in the days, weeks and sometimes months that it takes for a customer to convert, Pinterest had some impact, but much less than its in-platform figures indicated. You can measure incrementality using 3rd party vendors like Measured.com. The fact that Ebay's and Uber's marketing teams were apparently not doing that is inexcusable.
In some cases, the lack of ad performance is not just channel-specific, but true across most channels and sometimes even across the board. For example, some purchases are triggered by emergencies, and that's where search channels outperform TV and social. And in other cases, your customers just cannot be reached by ads at all - eg: military contracts. I am sure we can come up with many more examples that seem to show that ads don't work. But what those examples really show is that there's a certain amount of minimum qualification to make ads work, and a lot of people simply lack those qualifications.
That's alright, a lot of people also lack experience in Golang, but at least they think twice before making all sorts of assertions about the viability of that programming language. Not so much when it comes to marketing topics - somehow there's this belief that if a certain ad channel didn't work for you with your specific value prop and your specific expertise in this field, this is somehow relevant to everyone else. I can see how newbies can make that mistake. But for Rand Fishkin or the CMOs of Ebay and Uber to fall into that trap... blows my mind.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi... [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/something-is-rotten-in-online-adv...
It is sound logic.
OP repeatedly clarifies that not all ad spend is bad, that it's just for his specific case.
I am no fan of digital advertising, but there is a lot of variation on ad platform, targeting, ad content, ad space etc that will make a massive difference in effectiveness of the dollars spent.
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/untold-story-patek-philipp...
Did you get to the second sentence of my two sentence post? Because it is literally exactly what you're saying.
Ad effectiveness for specific brands may be complete bunk. But advertising effectiveness for a product space may do well to raise awareness.
And that's the rub, isn't it? Advertising absolutely can work, but the numbers can be very deceiving, to the point that I'd bet most companies cannot say with any degree of certainty that their advertisements drives new sales, much less provide hard numbers on how effective their ad spend is.
Overall I agree with what you wrote but I just to highlight that you can absolutely target military contracts with ads. If you visit Washington, DC you will see ads for fighter jets, missiles and random obscure military systems by Raytheon and other contracts at bus stops. Guess what - military planners and decision makers live in DC and use public transport. While conversion rate is minuscule, you need only one multi-billion military contract to pay for a lot of ads.
Digitally you can target by geo location (Pentagon/military bases/installations) or even for example microtarget places where key senators live. Lots of options.
Did you even read the article?
They said this in point 1 (!), the one of their first points of their conclusions was that advertisement is adviced for start-up companies.
They explicitly said their conclusion wasn't that ads didn't work. I find it hard to believe you read the article and somehow not read that part.
Please don't do that. It goes directly against the HN guidelines[1] and makes the site less pleasant for everybody.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
But someone pointed it out, if they aren't paying for that ad spot, then RealVNC, or LogMeIn, whoever else is competing will. Seems ridiculous.
It's a pretty common marketing practice to arbitrage referral benefits so that you might sign up for a product that offers cash referral bonuses of (let's say) $5 per signup. An affiliate marketer may take some petty cash and run some experiments, determine that ~5% of the people will sign up to an ad with highly effective copy, so then now they can run ads, potentially pay higher rates per click than TeamViewer does, and make a little passive income on the side.
I'd imagine if google didn't have such well financed lobbyists and lawyers, there would have been legal concessions years ago to eliminate this practice.
This is not what I said.
My thought process is that I personally would like to see more products with a higher focus on being good for a smaller group of people, rather than cheaper and /or worse but aimed at a huge audience. [0]
Focusing on delivering a good product to a smaller audience allows you to have tighter feedback loops and create more useful iterations because of that. You can also usually charge more. Personally, there are a lot of product spaces that I currently prefer or would prefer spending more for higher quality. But I don't always get that option due to the obsession with casting a wide net, as it were.
Do I expect this to happen organically? No, market forces seem to heavily incentivize races to the bottom.
[0]: NB my use of relative statements and not absolutes. Going from one extreme to the other likely won't produce a net positive.
I generally use advertising as a proxy for inverse utility. It would definitely be better to have more products that targeted being good, as opposed to ones that target influencing people to buy them.
You mean like iPhones? Because Apple certainly advertises.
I'm not sure your statement applies broadly to automobile advertising either.
I see this as a feature, not a bug.
If they are, they're doing it wrong. Ads are far more targeted than that.
Granted, I bought one and have put another in the shopping cart multiple times, so they probably have good reason to advertise to me. They know I'm a paying customer who's flirting with paying more.
You hear about them in the media all the time, though. I'd be shocked if they didn't have a solid in-house PR team.
This could be because they know that their demographic is precisely the type to avoid traditional advertising, be it because they run ad-blockers, or don't consume media with built in advertising like television, etc. Or maybe it's because they know that those smaller channels have significant viewer overlap with their target demographic, so why bother with trying to find these customers yourself when someone else already has them (for lack of a better term) captive?
I've personally seen Ras Pi's mentioned in "niche" magazines a few times, usually when a new generation of the device comes out. That's 100% advertising, although I prefer it to a generic "buy our thing" ad, because at least they go into detail showing me what exactly it can do for me.
What?
If this person genuinely thinks that there is no way to measure an ad's performance while it is running, they are either too ignorant to be in business, or they hired someone who lied to them.
You can get great CTR and conversion rate running ads against your brand name. But if your SEO is sound you’re pretty much just canibalizing your organic traffic.
I’m not aware of a way to determine whether an ad just claimed credit for a customer it didn’t earn. I’m interested to learn though.
While it's not a perfect system, you should know with a reasonable degree of accuracy how many dollars you get back for every dollar you put in to ad spend.
As far as the SEO traffic issue, this can also be accounted for once you have scaled your ads beyond the levels of what SEO could yield. At low budgets this can be more of an issue, at high budgets much less so.
That's not trivial to do, both from a technical point of view (browsers - rightfully - fight these kinds of tracking attempts) but also legal (GDPR mandates that the customer opts into this kind of tracking but they have no incentive to do so).
But this is a good place to point out that, yes - there is nuance to all of this - and I didn't really mean to turn it into a thesis on online advertising (lol) so much as to say:
It's still easy to be more accurate than "Turn it off and see what happens".
Even a semi-sophisticated media buyer is going in with a plan, and some method of measurement.
Put another way, the only way to tell if a customer will still find you without the ad is to not run the ad.
If you have sufficient traffic you might be able to measure this by turning your ad spend down rather than off and measure the bottom line impact. But other than gross spend changes there’s no way of telling for sure that the ads do anything.
Sure, maybe 100 customers would eventually find you. But if you buy the traffic, you can make them all find you on the same day.
> But other than gross spend changes there’s no way of telling for sure that the ads do anything.
I'll use the most fundamental example:
If someone clicks your ad and buys the product during that session, you know the ad worked. If you keep increasing your ad budget every day, and you are consistently returning $2 for every $1 you spend, you know it's working. Turn off the ads, and the revenue goes away. You'd be surprised how many people make their living doing this.
This is the experiment from the article. It showed that ads did not affect revenue.
This is not as clear as you make it seem. Let's say there's a hypothetical product that a consumer only buys once every 5 years. If someone clicks your ad and then immediately buys the product... what if they would have bought it anyway, tomorrow, or 5 minutes from now, without the ad? How can you test that counterfactual?
If I buy cat litter online once a month every month for 5 years by going to example.org/catlitter -- but then they decide to start advertising on facebook, so now I click the facebook ad once a month to buy cat litter from the same site, are the ads "working"?
Also, definition of working: You make more than you spend, and if you stop the ads, you stop making as much.
That said, I'm not arguing for 100% accuracy either. It's certainly not. Simply that it's possible to be more accurate than not, which leads to profitability.
One more also- a comment above about how I failed to mention I'm not talking about paid search ads so much as other types like FB, YouTube, banners, etc.
That's easy to track, but answers the wrong question. It answers whether the person clicked on the ad or the organic link. What we actually want to know is whether this person would convert even without seeing an ad. The only way to answer whether a person would still convert without seeing an ad is to make sure that they don't see an ad.
On the flip side of that, most of HN seems to think purely in terms of paid search ads, when there are many other types of online advertising that exist, and that don't have this issue baked into them.
Such is the nature of internet dialogue, I guess lol.
An ad-click could have been an organic click if the ad wasn't there though, which is where the complexity is.
The ad might have great conversion, but if the customer would have clicked an organic link that navigated to your site anyway then the ad is taking credit for an organic sale.
If I get 100 organic impressions/day, and then spend $N to get 500/day, I'm speeding the process up, and nearly guaranteeing to get in front of people who would never see me organically.
*Note: I'm largely not talking about paid search ads. Those are definitely an area where you can end up competing with yourself. Sorry to anyone who I replied to earlier, and wasn't clear enough on this with.
If you can't answer that question, then you're not running a proper advertising campaign. You're just throwing money around blindly. Plenty of people do have good answers to that question, though. Unfortunately, plenty of people don't.
What is this proper advertising campaign? Does it include turning off ads for terms that rank organically high anyway?
Well, for our business, proper advertising campaigns have opened new channels for growth, allowing us to reach new people, and build our email list significantly, with a predictable ROI. It's pretty easy to tell if an ad is working when you turn it on, and your email list growth rate instantly doubles -- and all the traffic is coming from a new traffic source. (Obviously, if we were to run Google ads on search traffic, we would check whether our organic search traffic dropped when we turned the ads on, but that's a different point.)
Maybe for a real tight definition of instantly, but generally this is not true. Imagine the following scenario:
1. You run an ad for ComapnyName.
2. An enthusiastic customer promotes your business in a local bar.
3. The bar attendees search for CompanyName and click on the first result.
Because you ran an ad for CompanyName, the first result is going to be your ad. You will see very nice ROI on that ad. What you won't see in any stats, is that these people would have probably found the organic link anyway, because they were already motivated and searching for CompanyName in particular.
> Obviously, if we were to run Google ads on search traffic, we would check whether our organic search traffic dropped when we turned the ads on, but that's a different point
That wouldn't help either in this imaginary scenario, because these bar attendees are a spike in traffic. Plus if the ad has been running for a longer period, then you won't have accurate organic search traffic stats anymore either, because it's already cannibalized.
"Imagination" is the core of the problem here. Plenty of people are imagining various scenarios, whereas people with successful advertising campaigns are just raking in the money -- no need for imagination.
I've turned off plenty of ads when they stopped working. I didn't need to turn them off to discover they stopped working.
Sure, you can imagine a dozen scenarios where an ad campaign doesn't work. Fortunately, I've managed to learn how to focus on the reality of the situation -- and have reaped the rewards in the process.
> you won't have accurate organic search traffic stats anymore either, because it's already cannibalized.
That' not true for us -- as I said before, a successful campaign for us brings in new sources of traffic from new marketing channels. One of the early lessons I learned was to not cannibalize what's already working. For example, we grew our Facebook Page (and email list) from scratch, when we had no Facebook traffic, by using Facebook advertising.
Operating under different brands -- even just for testing purposes, is a one another of the way we deal with this. Of course you can continue to imagine scenarios where we might be making mistakes. I do that as well -- it's called planning. Though, none of that really matters until money is spent (and made or lost).
What I'm talking about in specific is search ads where the ad is for a term that ranks organically high anyway.
It's not just imaginary either, I've done a lot of over-the-shoulder customer observing. Just recently I saw a friend search for "dropbox" and then click on the first result in Google, which is a paid ad by dropbox for dropbox. They rank #1 anyway!
Now in dropbox's case it might be worth it, because they have enough competitors who would like to steal that ad spot. However for most businesses that's not the case for their top terms.
The word for this in the business is "incrementality", and there are several ways of measuring it. The simplest conceptually, is that you run two ads to two random groups of users: one for the product and one for something irrelevant like a charity. Then you compare conversions between the two groups.
(There are fancier ways to do it that don't require you to spend half your budget on an irrelevant ad, but that's the basic idea.)
+1 to everything you've said.
This is would be another experiment that does not test what you need to in order to demonstrate some sort of causality.
Much better is to run your control group and experiment group in parallel, like I described above.
Is your objection that showing ads for something irrelevant could affect whether the user converts?
So the experimental setup is: you create an ad for your product, you create an ad for your charity, then you compare the populations of people who click on your ad for your product with the population of people who click on your ad for the charity and see if there is any difference in conversion rates between the two populations.
How do you ensure that the people who see/click on your product ad aren't already a population more likely to convert to your product than the population of people who see/click on your charity ad? Sure, you can target the same groups of people - but that only goes so far, the ML algorithms backing the ad selection process will still preferentially show your charity ad to people likely to click on charity ads and show your product ad to people likely to click on your product ad.
I am unfamiliar with how these experiments work on the advertiser side. Incrementality is easy to measure on the platform side if advertisers report conversion metrics to you.
<script>
var treatment = readTreatmentFromCookie();
if (!treatment) {
treatment = Math.random() < 0.5 ? CONTROL : EXPERIMENT;
writeTreatmentToCookie(treatment);
}
if (treatment === EXPERIMENT) {
showAd(PRODUCT);
} else {
showAd(CHARITY);
}
</script>
Many networks offer the ability to run a fully supported incrementality study, where they effectively use one company's ads as a control for another's, but this is a version of an experiment that you can run even if you don't trust the ad network at all.
If you have offline channels directing you to a website as well, like television or print, it can get messy unless architected properly.
Those are extremely different, how does that prove anything?
If you show a neutral ad, you know exactly how much seeing your brand in ad drives revenue compared to seeing an irrelevant ad.
So in the real world I bet this is what you're talking about: "but there are clickmonkeys out there" or words to that effect.
[edit:] But to be honest, I'm not sure it directly answers the question about entanglements between ad and no ad.
The protocol for doing so would involve studying what happens when the ad is present versus when it is not. The goal is conversion, scrupulously defined as people who click one or the other and subsequently purchase. Total conversion could go up, down, or stay the same. The only way the ad "wins" is total conversion increases, and even then maybe. If organic conversions went up when the ad was present you'd have a research problem! (The effect could be time-based, i.e. "awareness", or it could be a confounding externality.)
The protocol you suggest would seem to be removing the organic placement when the ad is present, that is: one or the other. On its face this sounds more "researchy" to me. Putting feasibility aside, it would plausibly be attractive to an advertising professional, but I would espect the customer to ask "why?" and I don't see the answer to that question. What's the motivation for this approach? I can see that it makes the advertising professional's contribution crystal clear, but why should the customer pay for it?
But hey I don't have 30 years of advertising experience, nor do I consider myself a statistician or machine learning expert. I do however have over 30 years of experience as an internet plumber and (more importantly here) data sous chef, so I've tasted a lot of ingredients in a lotta stews and have a solid grasp of experiment design and causality.
You work for the customer: consider that some avuncular advice.
That is what you're talking about, how slicing up your signal before transmission impacts your ability to receive it. Here's a Jupyter Notebook which will maybe make your head explode... I mean if you like math.
If you are doing advertising right you build a funnel from awareness through to conversion and track every part of it so you then a/b test your adverts and channels.
Getting advert channel fit is the key to success and can only be done by testing and measuring your adverts. The fact that op couldn't measure the effectiveness of their adverts shows they weren't doing this and their bad outcome should be 100% expected.
If you are just buying adverts in the hope you get more conversions then you are putting those adverts out to die. Burn your money you will probably get more eyes for doing that than untested adverts.
The most striking example is probably the experiment Tadelis convinced eBay to run on their brand-name ads, though the subtlety applies to less obvious cases of questionable ad spend too — https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/Tadelis.pdf
The idea to simply turn off ads and see the effect is born of a healthy distrust of ad analytics industry bluster.
This is a great counter-point when someone mentions "use conversion tracking!" Conversion tracking is great, but not if they store a cookie for 7/15/30 days and "award" the conversion to the ad, when the customer took a different and varying path to purchase. Sure the ad contributed "some" to the conversion, but not 100%.
A story to illustrate: there was once a pizza store that had two guys go out into the city to distribute promotional coupons. The coupons had codes on them so the business could attribute sales to each coupon distributor. John went out into the city and tried his best to drum up new business. Chad stood next to the door of the pizza place and handed a coupon to anyone who was walking in. After a month, 98% of the coupons used were from Chad. Chad got a big bonus and John was let go.
This is the case in many situations. The time between initial visit to site to conversion can be weeks, months, or years. Meanwhile, customers will visit site from various platforms. There is no way of attributing value to a single click, it needs to be approximated as an aggregate.
There is no easy way to determine whether this is the case without just comparing when the ads are on and off and somehow dealing with the confounding variables, which isn't easy.
The Dunning Kruger effect is strong in marketing. The more you learn about marketing the more reason you have to be unsure.
Does this ad improve conversion compared to not having the ad at all?
Doing a blackout month is a legitimate technique.
I've deeply studied ad performance metrics and they are NOT as conclusive as people might think. If they were, you could just keep increasing the amount of $ spent and the conversions would go up. Ok, not exactly, there is usually a diminishing returns aspect, but you get the point.
A great example of why this requires more analysis is branded vs non-branded search terms on AdWords. Let's say you spend $10k/month on the brand "Mattel" (aka branded) and $10k/month on "toys" (aka non-branded). Mattel likely gets you like a 20x ROAS because people are probably searching for a specific Mattel toy. It's also potentially likely that if you completely turned off branded search you would net the same results.
Ad attribution is NOTORIOUSLY difficult: https://www.optimizesmart.com/what-is-attribution-problem-in... so to pretend like "this guy is an idiot, he doesn't know what he's doing" is disingenuous.
Exciting stuff. This is why you hire an electrician rather than doing your own electrical work. They actually know what they’re doing.
1. Seasonality. It sounds like they’re comparing a few months on to a few months off, which likely is affected more by the time of year than anything else. Year over year data would be a better comparison.
2. Attribution windows. If I serve you an ad, then “turn off my advertising”, then you convert, depending on how you look at the data my ad either did drive the conversion or did not. Likely he’s just looking at google analytics with default settings, so he’s missing post-view data and assists.
3. It’s not that difficult to run an actual test, and most advertising platforms give you tools and documentation on how to do so.
4. The author doesn’t understand advertising from a technical perspective and most likely is not doing the analysis correctly. The big red flag is when talking about buying a display ad and it only driving 2 conversions. It sounds like a prospecting ad, which is top of funnel and is not supposed to drive post click conversions. I highly doubt they had an impression tracker on the ad and looked at post view data with different attribution models. Or even multichannel funnel reports in ga. Those would show the actual impact of the banner, not just 2 post click conversions.
I don’t mean to bash the guy but this post is rehashed all the time here and I end up reposting the same stuff.
Perhaps you could share how you would have set up the tests instead, and how the OP could improve his?
Why would parent be able to share test methods?
But the issue is that this article doesn't differentiate between branded and non-branded search terms. Did he run campaigns on non-branded searches like "Registration checker UK" to get build awareness of his service for new customers doing broad searches? Did he compare his organic non-branded search engine presence with his results when running paid ads?
Also, his service doesn't seem like a great match for the advertising channel either. It's hard to turn a profit when your service costs £8. The product - channel fit [0] doesn't seem right. So all in all, not such a great experiment.
https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-grow...
I was paying for in-search adverts across multiple search engines, I was commissioning custom made adverts to place in online used car market places. I was spending time optimising the 'bid' in automated advertising system, trying to get the best bang for buck
* custom made for whom?
* How did they select them?
* When did they show up?
* How were those terms selected?
* What terms did they select and which performed better?
* Did they track visits using different ones to see which had the best conversions?
* Optimizing can be most impressions or for quality. Basically show to as many people as possible vs fewer but better conversion. We don't know here, but I see most people doing most impressions.
Although sometimes the latter happens.
Rubber-soled shoes, one hand in back pocket at all times, non-conducting tools, and a helper with a wooden broom handle who knows mouth-to-mouth resuscitation ... these are all good recommendations. :)
Wooden broom handle is a non-conducting lever that a helper can use to separate you from the energized equipment. The current can cause your hand muscles to spasm in a "gripped" position, so the broom handle might need to be applied with some force. This is a last-resort catastrophic situation response.
Or, to put another way, you'll still see current at the heart even if it only flows through two fingers on the same hand. And even if it's a really small portion of the current, it doesn't take much to stop a heart.
Plus, there are a virtually unlimited number of proven tools for seeing if the circuit is live (even if there's no current flowing) to rely on such dodgy methods.
However it is not correct that the path of the current is not important.
Current will not flow between two points of equal electrical potential. There are some complications in the modelling (skin is a better insulator than internal bits, bags of salty moist flesh and bones are not resistively consistent, etc), but you're still in a much better situation to reduce potential difference across your heart, if the external potential difference occurs between two fingers on the same hand, vs two fingers on opposite hands.
OSHA says:
> The currents that pass through the heart or nervous system are the most dangerous. ... If a hand comes in contact with an electrical component with current (and at the same time the other side of your body makes a path to the ground), this will make the current pass through your chest and possibly produce injuries to the heart and lungs.
https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/2019-04/Basic_Elect...
I never claimed this. I claimed that even with the "safest" path through your body, the chance of your heart stopping is still there.
My point is that it's never "safe" to do, and as a homeowner (and even for a vast majority of non-lineman electricians) you never have to do it.
You absolutely did. You said it doesn't matter. It matters.
And I never said anyone would have to work on live wires. And I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
Nevertheless, it does sometimes happen, and being a bit smart about it is a good idea.
> Is "one hand in back pocket at all times" to avoid a circuit across your heart?
To which I responded:
> it doesn't matter if the circuit appears to "crosses your heart", because some portion of it will still flow through your heart regardless.
Which, as we have by now agreed, is the case.
The dispute is about whether that 'portion' is enough to kill you, which I avoided making concrete statements on. I didn't take a stance because the answer is "it depends". The variables that make up the answer are vast, and many folks have survived lightning strikes and died to static discharges thanks to those variables.
> being a bit smart about it
I will still contend that working on live wires with bare skin at all is the opposite of "being a bit smart about it".
If your really being smart about it, and can't avoid it, use tools and protective gear created explicitly for working with live electricity. Or call someone with that gear.
Yes. Use those. But this discussion is about when you are working on live wires, and you know you are working on live wires.
I have however had jobs where I really did have to work on energized equipment. Sometimes 480VAC 3-phase, but more commonly single-phase 230/240 VAC 50/60Hz or 120VAC 60Hz. I was appropriately trained for this work.
Some homeowners are too stubborn to do the proper thing when handling electrical equipment. You're not going to change their minds!
The precautions I mentioned previously were some of the more convenient and generally applicable rules that are taught to people who have to work with equipment that is less safe. If followed by stubborn homeowners, they will also be safer. That was my whole point.
At worst, I'm acknowledging reality. Some people sometimes end up working on live wires. If you can't be talked out of this decision (or if it's legitimately not possible to avoid), a dose of caution is important.
Asking an untrained non-adult to be ready with a broom is a fantastically bad idea though. In the worst case, the kid lives with the memory of uselessly smacking their parent's corpse with a broom while the air fills with the smell of ozone and burnt flesh.
Anyway, home wiring is not hard, and many people do it for a living with a ridiculously low amount of qualification (and competence). If you are not touching the public wires, the safety rules are very simple and the odds are good that you can give them more care than somebody that has been doing the work every day for a decade.
(But well, if you don't know how to do it safely, or if you won't be bothered to follow them, you shouldn't be doing it.)
I then hired a reputable certified adwords company. Again, nothing. Literally almost zero conversions over a good period of time. I really wanted it to work, but had to stop the losses after many months of trying.
It could just be my industry though, I know some people do make it work for their business. So I guess try it, but watch for results and don't fool yourself for too long if nothing is working.
When I was running my hyper-local startup, my best conversion rate was through reddit ads on the city subreddits.
Super targeted Facebook ads also worked.
I didn't even try adwords, wrong ad product for the job.
IIRC email sign ups were costing me like ~20-25 cents each. Reddit ads were obscenely effective.
He's worked for many years to become the number one in his field — let's say he's a performer of sorts. He's a _very_ hard worker and it's all paid off for him, he's the top hit for when you search for what he does. So naturally, he's frustrated at paying what he says is about 10% of his income to advertising.
I said he could probably get rid of the ads now, if he's already at the top, but then we began to wonder. I wouldn't put it past Google to start pushing his results down, just to get him to spend again.
I'm well aware all the negative terrible things Google has been doing in the last years has likely just left me a little paranoid, but what do you guys think?
Whilst most of HN is employed by advertising companies and their offshoots ...
Facebook and Twitter will adjust who you see content from to increase your likelihood of interacting with advertisement. As more and more social interaction happens online, this can influence who your friends are if you're not careful.
I see no reason to deride someone trying to wrest back some control.
But the author's point is that once you reach that critical mass, advertising may begin to cannibalize your organic search results because users click on your ad instead of clicking on your site in the search results.
I own a copy of "Ogilvy on Advertising" I bought in the 1980s. In it, David Ogilvy basically says, "test, test, test." That's the message here. Test. The advertising you're doing could be useless.
I'm not sure I agree that when you reach a certain point, ALL advertising is useless. Maybe when you reach the point where most of your advertising has no ROI and is cannibalizing your organic SEO, you need to change your spend and try to find ways to get your ads onto search results that don't feature your site.
If you find that works, you can then adjust your SEO and see if you can make that advertising go to zero ROI too. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If a man knowingly supports a cause that is against his financial interest, thats worth paying attention to
No doubt, but this is as far away from scientific as it can get.
"I stopped advertising. My sales rose at the same time. Advertising doesn't work" is basically the thesis, but his only "evidence" is an unreasoned assumption that the two things are casually linked instead of just correlated by the timing.
If you do your SEO right and use advertising to build up some brand recognition, you reach the point where your web site appears on the first page of search results alongside your paid ad for your web site.
However, Google has designed their search results to encourage clicking on the ads, so many users who actually find you with search will click the ad you are paying for instead of the search result for your site.
The author presents empirical evidence that not paying for ads doesn't reduce traffic, because users will click the site in the search results, instead of clicking the ad.
That is very much a point, and one that can save people a lot of money if they test it and find their site adn advertising have the same dynamics.
Or do you literally mean your competitors buying ads that deceive the public into thinking they're clicking on your ad which will lead to your site, but it actually goes to their site?
Those are two very different scenarios.
First one is more common. Second one depends on your industry and who your competitor is (sleaziness)
I suspect it's not actually as bad as people may think (if someone searches "Dominos" are they looking for any pizza place, or that particular one), but it does happen.
I was spending time optimising the 'bid' in automated advertising system, trying to get the best bang for buck.
Why was I doing it? Everyone else seemed to be doing it.
This was a terrible reason to do it.
One point though, this business seems well established. At that point, turning off advertising may not be so damaging. What would be interesting to know is, would he reach his current profitability if he didn't start with advertising, and depending on the organic search from the get go?
You don't even need search, as some businesses to which search and ads are essentially useless haven proven. Think of closed/invite-only community platforms: they will have little value to anyone who just gets there via an ad or search, since they have no entryway to any community.
Because this would have potentially shown from the get go if advertising in this case was unnecessary or if it supported the business until SEO had cached up.
This isn't really valuable without more and better information. The post is almost totally devoid of data.
For all I, and maybe he, knows, sales might have increased more if he kept advertising.
Here he assumed that, given there was no new fact on the short period he analyzed, he could expect short term trend to stay the same if he did nothing. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption.
However after 2 days, 0% of the facebook signups stayed on the site vs 50% of the Google Ads signups. Even if your metrics look good for the ad, make sure you add additional tracking.
Companies do this all the time. Even for something like App Store submissions. People use their competitor name as a keyword to increase their top of funnel.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/advertising...
https://www.isba.org.uk/knowledge/executive-summary-programm...
Every other human on this planet is fucking annoyed by ads, or has evolved a blind spot for them and ignores them.
When was the last time anyone in your social circle said, “I saw an ad for it, let’s buy that!”?
The ads racket employs some of the worst of societal ills: Manipulation, deception, greed, vandalism of public spaces, wasting people’s time without their consent, all to advocate a cycle of endless consumption… not to mention how some ads systems are just a front for spying.
If an individual displayed these behaviors, he or she would be considered extremely creepy and disgustingly clingy (SIT HERE and PAY ATTENTION to me for 30 seconds!) but the ads industry literally selects for and rewards these traits on a massive scale.
Please, stop this guessing game of violating people’s privacy trying to figure out what they want to see and when it should be forced upon them, and just develop better search/filter/discovery/consensual recommendation systems: Let us TELL YOU what we want, dammit.
But of course that would only benefit the product creators and service providers and consumers, not the ads people whose livelihood depends on flattering the naked emperor for his non-existent clothes, so here we must suffer.
Other channels are probably much less impactful. I care about checking a car when I want to check a car, and at that time I will search for that service. I don't care about checking a car when ad guys want me to care about checking a car. I'm not going to subliminally remember to use TotalCarCheck when I buy a car because I saw an ad weeks ago. I'm going to Google it and I'm going to go to the top result.
And yet the ad people in these comments are getting all their hackles up that anyone would dare question the value of advertising in each and every and all possible situations. Obviously if it's not working for you, you just aren't doing it right and you need to pay top dollar for some Ad Professionals to get in there and fix it for you.
Seems a little insecure to me. Is it so hard to admit that some businesses just don't benefit that much from certain kinds of advertising?
Or maybe because the ad industry is a Paperclip Maximizer, and admitting something like that might fail to maximize the paperclips, it cannot be admitted?
New/incremental sales (think brand agnostic, high funnel terms with intent like boston electrician or cleveland mortgages) are out there, but their costs typically approach the lead's intrisnic value. If you are paying $10/click and converting 10% of clicks to leads, you're at $100 for a lead. Of those leads, if you close 25%, you're at $400 acquisition cost. Maybe great for a SaaS or insurance company with a high LTV, but awful for a plumber with an average call of $250. At this point, paid ads are basically a game of trying to out-optimize your click to lead and lead to sale funnels relative to your competitors unless you want to give all of your margin to an ad network.
In Russian this usually named Captain Obviousness.
- Ineffective ads are extremely typical thing on established highly concurrent markets, even if we assume, effectiveness where measured with extremely high accuracy.
I believe, author will create another post, with much more details, on how he become to his conclusions.
I mean, how measured ad effectiveness, how made a-b testing and/or marketing researches; how many tests where made with changing ad details (color, shape, time to run ad, targeting, etc), to make most effective ads.
While the article sounds promising the lack of data really makes it useless.
Sure, but you wouldn't want your competitor to effectively rank #1 for your brand. I've always viewed this like an extortion racket.
In the replies Google says: "we don’t restrict trademarked terms as keywords. We do restrict trademarked terms in ad text if the trademark owner files a complaint"
It's a gamble on the strength of your brand to not buy that ad. I think it makes sense that eBay can do away with it, because people typing "eBay" in Google will scroll down for eBay, they won't click on "Company X - Best eBay alternative." Most brands aren't that strong...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
Medicine in this country has been characterized as a "confuseopoly" where the consumer is "enabled" to choose, but not on price or quality. Banks are much the same. Does this have some bearing on the abdication of basic services and constant churn of add-ons?
This is how he should have started. It’s called incrementality. You have a control group with no ads and you compare against a group shown ads. Then you can measure lift.
This is Marketing 101.
I'd then go spend say $200 to attend a game convention, with my own private little display booth, and... it resulted in >$200 in revenue from game sales. (forget numbers exactly but it was far better return than buying Google search ads ever was.)
granted it might have been because my Google ad placement/messaging was not tuned ideally -- who knows. But I always value concrete results over theory or might-have-beens. and so its effected my views on advertising ever since
I ran online advertising myself with no knowledge or experience and it did not go well.
How surprising!
For context, for over a decade across thousands, maybe tens of thousands of campaigns, a 30% increase in sales and leads has been a low benchmark that is easily achieved within 60 days of acquiring a client with few exceptions. As the space has become more congested, it has not become more congested with capable people, actively identifying lower competition mid to end funnel terms has remained a very stable and reliable method. You'll also find that so few digital advertisers are actively modifying and testing landing pages and expanding that inventory of landing pages based on what their conversions teach about their audience.
The language of the article makes it clear he never should have added a credit card to an ad account.
For some unknown reason he seems to be surprised by that.
makes me wonder how many of these same VC's also own large positions in said advertising companies?