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I do not mean this to be offensive, but of course bayonets are still sharp when their edges are not ground by use.

I love the story. There is much to learn; to me, it's about understanding where rather than how much.

But let's not forget it's a story. I'm sure some people are better or worse at butchering sheep, but a genericism does not add anything.

It's like if I say, "when you feel resistance, relax then work through it". It's meaningless. Not un-useful, not un-true, but definitely not "true" by the high standards of repeatable objective science.

"Not true but useful" is a phrase I frequently tell myself to improve my life without losing understanding of the spectrum of "true", and where I draw my line.

no.

I am sorry for your experience with diagnosis in regards to your health, but your last paragraph or two is completely unrelated to anything other than "diagnosis is hard / my physician wasn't able to help".

In other words, it is completely unrelated, and your overcharging on drugs was awful and again, completely unrelated to this core issue.

I am a little late to the party, but want to address one topic that I didn't see mentioned below.

One answer to your question is "volume", with a related cause of personal incentives.

You're getting those clicks for free and buying ads on branded terms is just cannibalizing your organic results. Now, instead of $500 per day, you want to scale your campaign to $5,000 per day.

How do you do that? Your return will be less efficient as you seek volume, but you need to spend the $5,000 as effectively as you can.

You (or the agency) look better / get paid more when they're able to spend with a better return. It's probably not your department, or your KPI, what the organic SEO is like. So if you cannibalize some conversions from organic in the SEM attempt to spend the budget and raise conversions, you're probably happy, because you're hitting KPIs that matter to you.

It would take a wise leader to recognize what is happening. Even then, they might decide that although the efficiency of the overall SEO/SEM spend is lowered, it provides more volume. If your company is focused on growth, they may prefer volume over efficiency.

It's rational, once you try to see the larger context in which these decisions are made w/in a company. (It also has it's drawbacks)

It seems to me that he's saying in order to move data at volume, you have to compute on it.

Computation is tricky. Per-bit, if you can handle the network input, you're probably able to fire packets up to the OS layer.

But when you need to run stats on the incoming data, e.g. an ML classifier of "bad/not bad" or "stop/passthrough", you might be O(n^2) or worse. Moore's can't hang.

Amongst my grandparents and their friends, AOL = Internet.

I currently spend $X,000 per day in advertising on facebook. Their reported clicks barely match up within an order of magnitude.

I've spent 4 days investigating this, so it's worthwhile to share the data.

For every 100 clicks I purchase, at a strong CPC ($0.10 - $2.00 CPC), I have found: - GA tells me i got between 40-60 sessions - piwik tells me ~70 - server logs show that page was requested ~400x (not indexed, a FB-only lander). I have IP and UA recorded, and both are rotated. My guess is that FB preloads the HTML LP when the impressions shows from mobile, so the browser is primed to quickly load assets (w/o sig resources to d/l images/etc -- just request the page that initially loads all that)

My point is attribution for conversions and link clicks is hard.

Any marketer worth their salt avoids the thought of "I paid for 10 clicks but GA only shows 6".

A better marketer thinks, "I paid $660 to acquire 2 customers. Is that acceptable?"

Inputs are not good or bad, they are better or worse.

In the 1300s, feedback to the advertiser took years.

In the 1900s, months.

In the 1960s, you could now measure the effect of blanketing a MMR with ads, and see how sales there compared to nationally.

This century, you have still-imperfect, yet much better than before, attribution.

Good analysis in the 1930s was different than now. Good marketing was the same, but with cruder tools.

I'm confused. you seem very confident that facebooks video marketing is a lie, even while you admit being unable to attribute sales.

I know multi-touch is hard, but doesn't that mean you should be less confident in your statements because the data is fuzzy?