justinbaker84

Yeah those are all sales reps that just want to get you to waste your money on junk. When you actually have a problem and you need real customer support you get routed to India so you can listen to a low wage employee ignore the substance of your problem.

You are correct but staying away from Alphabet is a lot easier said then done. They are still the best way for a small to medium business to reach customers. Ever since the iOS changes that crushed Facebook's targeting capability Google has only become more dominant in the advertising space.

To me it seems like avoiding Alphabet basically means avoiding advertising and it is really hard to grow a business without it.

Unfortunately that has been my experience as well.

How do you market around big tech?

The vast majority of time spent consuming media is through tech and traditional media just continues to decline every year.

I hear you, but it isn't going to happen. Somebody needs to create a viable competitor to Google. A lot of people have tried, but it is extremely difficult.

You are very lucky then. Google almost never does that. Doesn't matter how rediculous their suspension reason is.

Source - I have managed google search ads full time for 12 years.

I manage 250K per month on Google Ads and all I get is the same lousy tech support from India that everybody else gets.

You have that right. I am a full time search marketer and here are a few things they do that illustrate their ethical standards:

1. Geo-Targeting - no matter what geographic setting you create they will run your ads all over the world unless you know how to change settings they have intentionally hidden.

2. Keyword Selection - No matter how much effort you put into selecting the best keywords they pretty much run your ads on whatever keywords they want. They make it extremely difficult these days to control what keywords trigger your ads to show up.

3. Campaign Caps - A cap is a limit you can set on how much a campaign will spend each day. Except google will spend up to 2x your cap. So you would think you should just set the cap at half of what you really want but they have complicated algorithms in place to screw up your campaign if you do that.

It is not an ad supported model - it is a subscription model. I just signed up for it.

I just signed up for a trial with them after reading this post.

TLDR: Yes.

Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures. So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression. So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances.

Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow.

So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard.

But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win.

Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.

Marketing pro chiming in here - this is done so the marketing departments of all these companies can claim credit for driving a ton of sales.

The people who are working at these big legacy retailers in 2018 tend to not be very sophisticated about online marketing. I'm being polite with that understatement.

So nobody calls out the marketing departments on this because there is so much political BS going on anyway as everybody is scratching and clawing for their piece of an ever shrinking pie.

I worked in a similar situation and I wanted to stop working with these coupon sites for the obvious reasons you pointed out. I got overruled by higher ups and I later came to learn that my complaints about this practice were a career limiting move.

They just want to be able to take credit for driving a ton of sales even though everybody with half a brain realizes they are not generating new sales. They are simply cannibalizing the business because the vast majority of the time these people would buy at full price anyway if their Google search never turned up a coupon.

Not unless your product or service is specifically for other early stage startups. I brought a booth one time an it was a complete waste of money.

This is not just starting - Google has been testing this since at least 2014.

I worked at a big online advertising agency from 2013-2014 and we had a lot of fortune 500 companies as clients. Google began offering this tracking functionality as a beta in 2014 to a small number of very large companies.

Here's the thing - Google is basically telling advertisers "just trust us to report on our own performance." They are saying buy traffic from us and we will use our secret algorithms to tell you how much revenue we drove and you will have no way to verify the totals.

As you can imagine this is not an attractive proposition.

Amen

Very sad to see this ending.