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Comment by tetsusaiga | Hacker News Reader

I agree that only conversions matter, but you should be able to track whether a customer originated from an ad click vs. SEO, whether they clicked one ad and had 4 sessions since, etc.

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.

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I don’t know how counting sessions or source of click matters. You still don’t know whether the customer would have ultimately found you without the ad.

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.

This is like the paid search results that come up when you search for a specific company name. The company's site is just below those paid results, but often the same site is in the paid results but they are further up so are more likely to be clicked.

> You still don’t know whether the customer would have ultimately found you without the ad.

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.

> [...] Turn off the ads, and the revenue goes away.

This is the experiment from the article. It showed that ads did not affect revenue.

>If someone clicks your ad and buys the product during that session, you know the ad worked

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"?

The idea is because it's happening at scale. If you're getting hundreds or thousands of customers per day, the likelihood of this happening gets lower by some statistical proportion, especially if you don't have the organic exposure.

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.

> I agree that only conversions matter, but you should be able to track whether a customer originated from an ad click vs. SEO, whether they clicked one ad and had 4 sessions since, etc.

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.

While you're not necessarily wrong, the distinction lies in how many people see you organically.

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.

> you should be able to track whether a customer originated from an ad click vs. SEO

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.

My major failure in this thread was not specifying from that start that I'm not so much talking about paid search ads (google ads), as much as I mean FB, YouTube, etc. That's the arena where you've really gotta question if you're competing with yourself.

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.

That's a good point. It's a lot harder to cannibalize organic traffic with non-search ads.

Are you conflating a call to action on a channel you already control with advertising? Because in that case you might try f(A), f(A,B) and also f(B): could be a synergistic effect, or they could just click on anything.

> whether they clicked one ad and had 4 sessions since, etc.

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).

You're right, this is actually a lot harder to recently, with the iOS updates that occurred a year or so ago. It's a space that evolves very quickly.

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.

GDPR doesn't stop me from having ad1.example.com and ad2.example.com landing pages. Aspirationally perhaps, but technically no. I think this is different from fonts.gstatic.com in that it doesn't need to follow people around the internet and it's also not info necessarily going to a third party.

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