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"Facebook on the other hand, has a better control of who is actually seeing its ads, and will benefit from the turmoil by gaining market share." Did they pay y

"Facebook on the other hand, has a better control of who is actually seeing its ads, and will benefit from the turmoil by gaining market share." Did they pay you to write this? Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish". This is also about the millionth post I've read which assumes that companies simply throw money at advertising and don't run any statistics of their own. Simply, if you spend a lot on an ad campaign for a product and your sales don't go up, you notice that and rethink your next campaign. CPM and all that are at best proxy metrics for the thing you really care about, "are our profits/sales up".

chii 11y ago
so you're saying facebook couldn't scan the pictures people post up, see that a user's finger is not painted properly, and thus start displaying the appropriate ads?
- have_faith 11y ago
  Not only do I not think they could do that currently. I worry about the effect this future form of advertising will have on young people. Your insecurities analysed and used against you in real time.
  - chii 11y ago
    > Your insecurities analysed and used against you in real time. if there's a way to make money off someone's insecurities legally, you can bet that it's gonna happen. I do worry, but i think worrying isn't going to stop it from becoming true.
- red_admiral 11y ago
  If I walk into a store, the assistant asks "Can I help you?" and I reply "I'm looking for a crimson-coloured nail varnish" and then she says "Sure! We have a new line in this week, can I show you?" then I'm more than happy to let her show me. That's what google search ads feel like. If I'm sitting in a restaurant having a conversation with a friend and a person from the next table leans over and interrupts to say "I notice your nails aren't painted properly, can I interest you in our new line of nail varnish?" then my first thought will be something like wouldn't it be cool if something horrible and painful happened to this person. Even if I was considering trying a new line of nail varnish. That's what targeted facebook ads feel like.
  - Sir_Substance 11y ago
    >If I walk into a store, the assistant asks "Can I help you?" and I reply "I'm looking for a crimson-coloured nail varnish" and then she says "Sure! We have a new line in this week, can I show you?" then I'm more than happy to let her show me. That's what google search ads feel like. Is it though? Because I always thought it felt more like a used car salesman crossed with clippy. "I see you're trying to paint your nails, would you like to buy some nailpolish for that?"
    - NhanH 11y ago
      That's arguably an implementation issue rather than a more fundamental issue. I.e. it can be fixed, and we all know that Google is not going anywhere anytime soon.
    - taneq 11y ago
      A used car salesman who you spoke to once at a party and who knows a couple of facts about you which they refer to in every damn sentence. "Hey so last time I saw you you talked about nail polish, I've got a friend selling some... Did you want cheap tickets to a nail-painting seminar? There's a nail & manicure kit on Amazon!" Only it wasn't even you at the party, it was your friend that did one Google search for nail polish months ago and now you're forever The Nail Polish Guy.
      - coredog64 11y ago
        At least with Amazon, when I search for a gag gift, I can tell them later to ignore my page view for recommendations. I would love ability for same with Google.
        red_admiral 11y ago
        If you know in advance that you're about to search for a gag gift, open a new private browsing window.
        11y ago
- wmboy 11y ago
  That user isn't trying to find nail polish to buy at that particular moment, a Google search indicates in-the-moment buying intent.
onion2k 11y ago
Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish". Google and Facebook both have the problem that their business model is predicated on having thousands of small advertisers bidding on ads. That's what they leverage to generate profit. In any market that's dominated by a single entity that smaller companies won't compete with for ad space, both Google and Facebook lose the ability to make money. When the majority of people who want to buy nail varnish bypass search entirely and go straight to Amazon, Google and Facebook have a huge problem. The same is true if developers go straight to Stack Overflow, people looking for rooms go straight to AirBNB, people moving around cities go straight to Uber, etc, then Google and Facebook will have no one to sell ad space to any more. I'm not about to suggest Google and Facebook are doomed; they both have talent enough to think of ways to meet these challenges. I would however suggest that they are not too big to fail.
- malka 11y ago
  > I would however suggest that they are not too big to fail. Nothing is. Ultimately, everything fails.
- Rzah 11y ago
  Of all the things that might happen, users going directly to websites rather than through google/facebook is by far the least likely. Whats more likely to happen is that someone will come along with better search with less advertising (just like Google did), or someone might build a better social network with less advertising (just like facebook did). There's as much precidence for these things reoccurring as there is for users increasingly searching rather than using the url bar.
  - jonatanheyman 11y ago
    Rather than using the URL bar, I think it's more likely that people will just open their Uber app, flight booking app, shopping app, etc. I don't think that is an unlikely development.
    - 11y ago
Udik 11y ago
> Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish" Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics. I'm a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend money on gadgets, for example; but I'm surprised nonetheless that with all this talk of "big data", they can't do a better job at figuring out the things I'm really interested in and instead keep bombarding me with ads related to any random search I've made. That's silly and a big waste of money.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  They can absolutely figure it out, just not for less than it costs to throw the ads at you, which is very little.
  - Udik 11y ago
    They're not wasting money in showing me that ad, its cost is negligible. They're wasting the money they could have made by showing me a relevant ad. For example, there's tons of books I might be interested in buying, and they might be able to extract that information from my browsing habits. It would be an advantage for me as well, to get suggestions about things I might be interested in. Showing me nail varnish ads when I already told google that I want to buy some is not even advertising, it's just paid search.
    - levesque 11y ago
      It's hard to infer you want to buy books from a search about nail polish, mixed with whatever else is in your history. There is also the question of who's willing to pay for ads, and for much are they willing to pay. They have to pick from what's available. I see a lot more ads about stuff that is costly and profitable, i.e. photography gear, car rental, insurance.
      - 11y ago
mathattack 11y ago
CPM can be useful to approximate broader brand advertising. Companies like Coca-cola, Budweiser and GM want people to see their ads a certain number of times, in order to develop lifetime habits. It's not about specific clicks, or even immediate purchases. CPM is the best way to approximate this. Of course the end goal is what you mention: sales leading to profits.
jsonne 11y ago
Facebook has this capability. Write a status or on a friends wall about topic X? In messenger? Just as good if not better than a Google search in intent land. That + demographics is even more powerful imho.
Alex3917 11y ago
> If you spend a lot on an ad campaign for a product and your sales don't go up, you notice that and rethink your next campaign. Most people who spend money on ads just want to be seen as the kind of people who spend money on ads, or else they just want to make their boss happy in the short term by telling them that they bought ads on Facebook or whatever. The chain of accountability is very diffuse, and most results don't really get tracked.
- tomblomfield 11y ago
  Citation needed. I know a dozen companies who spend significant ($1m+) a year on Google or Facebook ads and performance is tracked obsessively.
  - Alex3917 11y ago
    There are different kinds of ads though, e.g. check out Seth's post on this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/11/direct-marketing-and-the-other-kind.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/11/direct-marke... I think it was the CEO at BMW who said that if he only showed you BMW advertising the day before you bought a car, they'd go out of business because no one would ever buy a BMW. The brand only works because they start showing you the ads when you're three years old, in hopes that you'll buy one when you're 35. And when they sponsor TED or whatever it's not because they think anyone there is going to go out and buy the car, it's to prove that they're a luxury brand by showing that they can afford to spend a lot of money on advertising that everyone knows isn't going to work. If you look at brand vs direct response, you can see that it's roughly split among digital advertising.[1][2] But as Seth mentions a lot of people use direct marketing to try to do branding and so don't bother carefully measuring their funnel, and most non-digital advertising skews toward brand advertising because it's obviously harder (or impossible) to measure. And digital is less than a third of total advertising. Also look at companies of the Uber/Handy sort, who spend huge on direct marketing purposely at a loss in hopes of later creating some sort of lock in through network effects. In that case it's part measuring and part gambling in a way that's not straightforward to classify. [1] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Much-Industries-Spending-on-Direct-Response-vs-Branding/1010500 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Much-Industries-Spendin... [2] https://www.comscore.com/lat/Insights/Blog/On-Branding-Versus-Direct-Response-Advertising https://www.comscore.com/lat/Insights/Blog/On-Branding-Versu...
fish44 11y ago
I think he is naively talking about the display part of googles business - author forgot about adwords, adsense: which makes most of google's cash...
andrewstuart2 11y ago
More importantly, in my opinion, is that Google can serve ads to people who are simply researching something, which is quite often significantly prior to the time at which they're ready to share with the world, if it's even something worth sharing. Nearly everything is affected by a search for information. Not everything is appropriate or desirable to share with your friends/family. Facebook may make up for this slightly by having the ability to process private messages (whatsapp, facebook messenger, private groups) but I would conjecture that Google has them, perhaps fundamentally, beaten on the advertising front.
novaleaf 11y ago
This article may be hype, but the Google Adwords monopoly is very real and I wish it died. I run a SaaS startup (PhantomJsCloud) and tried adwords. No advertising competition, and targeted very specific actionable search queries. Google charges upward of $5.00/click. I can understand they want to cut spammers saturating every random search query, but how am I going to get a positive RoI on that kind of cost?
- fireworks10 11y ago
  AdWords determines your ad's AdRank by its Quality Score (expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience) in addition to your cpc bid. Perhaps you had a low quality score (below 8), so Google requested a higher CPC to compensate?
  - novaleaf 11y ago
    thanks for the input, yeah I think I need to do more "inbound marketing" before attempting adwords (display). I have a 4 to 6 quality score, and nothing is displayed unless the CPC is astronomical.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sixtypoundhound 11y ago
  Honestly, if the competition for those keywords is that weak, I'd go for an SEO blitz. I pulled a SEMRUSH profile on your site (other tools exist, I just like that one) https://www.semrush.com/info/phantomjscloud.com https://www.semrush.com/info/phantomjscloud.com - Identify keywords you want to target, with decent search volume and not too many strong competitors. Use those words in your headlines and article text - Start a blog and bulk up your articles; knock out 4 - 5 1500+ word articles on the problems you are solving and which audiences would benefit from them - Share those articles on social media - Your site could benefit from additional back-links (you've only got 14); look at your major competitors and see if they are getting links from highly reputable sources. Reach out to those sources and offer them a reason to link to you. Avoid links from spammy sites and low-end blogs (do NOT do the $5 link building package on elance or wherever)... [There's a ton more, but that will give you a running start on respectable SEO]
karambahh 11y ago
I can tell from first hand experience interacting with most of the top 100 e-commerce european players show that statistical knowledge is sparse at best. Many players only pilot their activity through basic indicators such as CPM, "our sales are up". Many marketing teams still operate their business with "gut feelings" rather cold, hard facts & statistics that "us" tech types tend to use...
atourgates 11y ago
> This is also about the millionth post I've read which assumes that companies simply throw money at advertising and don't run any statistics of their own. Well, anecdotally, they do. We just took over PPC advertising for a chain of regional businesses. When we got access to their existing PPC accounts, I found that they'd spent about $75,000 over the last year on PPC, and nearly all of it was wasted. The only conversion path on their site was phone calls, and they didn't have any sort of conversion tracking in place. Initially, I expect they got some real clicks and calls. But then over time, without any focus on conversions, they just kept optimizing for the cost per click. That meant leaving the search network for the display network, and focusing in on poorer and poorer sources of clicks. Until over the past several months, nearly 100% of their clicks have come from what look like very shady websites and mobile apps. They cut their CPC by about 75%, but in the process, I expect nearly eliminated any ROI. $75,000 down the drain. To be fair, I do think Google's AdWords Express tool is a good antidote to this behavior. Someone with very little PPC experience could setup an account, and run a successful campaign. And once you're spending enough, you typically get a call from a Google employee offering you tips on your campaign, and I've found Google's reps to be generally helpful. But people who don't take understand the AdWords platform, or can't be bothered to learn, can throw away tons of money on spammy or outright scammy clicks in AdWords.
Xyik 11y ago
Facebook Ads are much more targeted than Adwords. When it comes to targeting, Adwords is actually really bad bad. Outside of Search they can't compete, and even for Search ads you can't do proper gender and age targeting with your ads. Don't even get me started on Mobile.
slantaclaus 11y ago
The writer probably (ok, definitely) has never managed an adwords campaign

chii 11y ago

so you're saying facebook couldn't scan the pictures people post up, see that a user's finger is not painted properly, and thus start displaying the appropriate ads?

have_faith 11y ago
Not only do I not think they could do that currently. I worry about the effect this future form of advertising will have on young people. Your insecurities analysed and used against you in real time.
- chii 11y ago
  > Your insecurities analysed and used against you in real time. if there's a way to make money off someone's insecurities legally, you can bet that it's gonna happen. I do worry, but i think worrying isn't going to stop it from becoming true.
red_admiral 11y ago
If I walk into a store, the assistant asks "Can I help you?" and I reply "I'm looking for a crimson-coloured nail varnish" and then she says "Sure! We have a new line in this week, can I show you?" then I'm more than happy to let her show me. That's what google search ads feel like. If I'm sitting in a restaurant having a conversation with a friend and a person from the next table leans over and interrupts to say "I notice your nails aren't painted properly, can I interest you in our new line of nail varnish?" then my first thought will be something like wouldn't it be cool if something horrible and painful happened to this person. Even if I was considering trying a new line of nail varnish. That's what targeted facebook ads feel like.
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  >If I walk into a store, the assistant asks "Can I help you?" and I reply "I'm looking for a crimson-coloured nail varnish" and then she says "Sure! We have a new line in this week, can I show you?" then I'm more than happy to let her show me. That's what google search ads feel like. Is it though? Because I always thought it felt more like a used car salesman crossed with clippy. "I see you're trying to paint your nails, would you like to buy some nailpolish for that?"
  - NhanH 11y ago
    That's arguably an implementation issue rather than a more fundamental issue. I.e. it can be fixed, and we all know that Google is not going anywhere anytime soon.
  - taneq 11y ago
    A used car salesman who you spoke to once at a party and who knows a couple of facts about you which they refer to in every damn sentence. "Hey so last time I saw you you talked about nail polish, I've got a friend selling some... Did you want cheap tickets to a nail-painting seminar? There's a nail & manicure kit on Amazon!" Only it wasn't even you at the party, it was your friend that did one Google search for nail polish months ago and now you're forever The Nail Polish Guy.
    - coredog64 11y ago
      At least with Amazon, when I search for a gag gift, I can tell them later to ignore my page view for recommendations. I would love ability for same with Google.
      - red_admiral 11y ago
        If you know in advance that you're about to search for a gag gift, open a new private browsing window.
        11y ago
wmboy 11y ago
That user isn't trying to find nail polish to buy at that particular moment, a Google search indicates in-the-moment buying intent.

onion2k 11y ago

Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish". Google and Facebook both have the problem that their business model is predicated on having thousands of small advertisers bidding on ads. That's what they leverage to generate profit. In any market that's dominated by a single entity that smaller companies won't compete with for ad space, both Google and Facebook lose the ability to make money. When the majority of people who want to buy nail varnish bypass search entirely and go straight to Amazon, Google and Facebook have a huge problem. The same is true if developers go straight to Stack Overflow, people looking for rooms go straight to AirBNB, people moving around cities go straight to Uber, etc, then Google and Facebook will have no one to sell ad space to any more. I'm not about to suggest Google and Facebook are doomed; they both have talent enough to think of ways to meet these challenges. I would however suggest that they are not too big to fail.

malka 11y ago
> I would however suggest that they are not too big to fail. Nothing is. Ultimately, everything fails.
Rzah 11y ago
Of all the things that might happen, users going directly to websites rather than through google/facebook is by far the least likely. Whats more likely to happen is that someone will come along with better search with less advertising (just like Google did), or someone might build a better social network with less advertising (just like facebook did). There's as much precidence for these things reoccurring as there is for users increasingly searching rather than using the url bar.
- jonatanheyman 11y ago
  Rather than using the URL bar, I think it's more likely that people will just open their Uber app, flight booking app, shopping app, etc. I don't think that is an unlikely development.
  - 11y ago

Udik 11y ago

> Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for "buy nail varnish" Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics. I'm a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend money on gadgets, for example; but I'm surprised nonetheless that with all this talk of "big data", they can't do a better job at figuring out the things I'm really interested in and instead keep bombarding me with ads related to any random search I've made. That's silly and a big waste of money.

jjoonathan 11y ago
They can absolutely figure it out, just not for less than it costs to throw the ads at you, which is very little.
- Udik 11y ago
  They're not wasting money in showing me that ad, its cost is negligible. They're wasting the money they could have made by showing me a relevant ad. For example, there's tons of books I might be interested in buying, and they might be able to extract that information from my browsing habits. It would be an advantage for me as well, to get suggestions about things I might be interested in. Showing me nail varnish ads when I already told google that I want to buy some is not even advertising, it's just paid search.
  - levesque 11y ago
    It's hard to infer you want to buy books from a search about nail polish, mixed with whatever else is in your history. There is also the question of who's willing to pay for ads, and for much are they willing to pay. They have to pick from what's available. I see a lot more ads about stuff that is costly and profitable, i.e. photography gear, car rental, insurance.
    - 11y ago

mathattack 11y ago

CPM can be useful to approximate broader brand advertising. Companies like Coca-cola, Budweiser and GM want people to see their ads a certain number of times, in order to develop lifetime habits. It's not about specific clicks, or even immediate purchases. CPM is the best way to approximate this. Of course the end goal is what you mention: sales leading to profits.

jsonne 11y ago

Facebook has this capability. Write a status or on a friends wall about topic X? In messenger? Just as good if not better than a Google search in intent land. That + demographics is even more powerful imho.

Alex3917 11y ago

> If you spend a lot on an ad campaign for a product and your sales don't go up, you notice that and rethink your next campaign. Most people who spend money on ads just want to be seen as the kind of people who spend money on ads, or else they just want to make their boss happy in the short term by telling them that they bought ads on Facebook or whatever. The chain of accountability is very diffuse, and most results don't really get tracked.

tomblomfield 11y ago
Citation needed. I know a dozen companies who spend significant ($1m+) a year on Google or Facebook ads and performance is tracked obsessively.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  There are different kinds of ads though, e.g. check out Seth's post on this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/11/direct-marketing-and-the-other-kind.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/11/direct-marke... I think it was the CEO at BMW who said that if he only showed you BMW advertising the day before you bought a car, they'd go out of business because no one would ever buy a BMW. The brand only works because they start showing you the ads when you're three years old, in hopes that you'll buy one when you're 35. And when they sponsor TED or whatever it's not because they think anyone there is going to go out and buy the car, it's to prove that they're a luxury brand by showing that they can afford to spend a lot of money on advertising that everyone knows isn't going to work. If you look at brand vs direct response, you can see that it's roughly split among digital advertising.[1][2] But as Seth mentions a lot of people use direct marketing to try to do branding and so don't bother carefully measuring their funnel, and most non-digital advertising skews toward brand advertising because it's obviously harder (or impossible) to measure. And digital is less than a third of total advertising. Also look at companies of the Uber/Handy sort, who spend huge on direct marketing purposely at a loss in hopes of later creating some sort of lock in through network effects. In that case it's part measuring and part gambling in a way that's not straightforward to classify. [1] http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Much-Industries-Spending-on-Direct-Response-vs-Branding/1010500 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Much-Industries-Spendin... [2] https://www.comscore.com/lat/Insights/Blog/On-Branding-Versus-Direct-Response-Advertising https://www.comscore.com/lat/Insights/Blog/On-Branding-Versu...

fish44 11y ago

I think he is naively talking about the display part of googles business - author forgot about adwords, adsense: which makes most of google's cash...

andrewstuart2 11y ago

More importantly, in my opinion, is that Google can serve ads to people who are simply researching something, which is quite often significantly prior to the time at which they're ready to share with the world, if it's even something worth sharing. Nearly everything is affected by a search for information. Not everything is appropriate or desirable to share with your friends/family. Facebook may make up for this slightly by having the ability to process private messages (whatsapp, facebook messenger, private groups) but I would conjecture that Google has them, perhaps fundamentally, beaten on the advertising front.

novaleaf 11y ago

This article may be hype, but the Google Adwords monopoly is very real and I wish it died. I run a SaaS startup (PhantomJsCloud) and tried adwords. No advertising competition, and targeted very specific actionable search queries. Google charges upward of $5.00/click. I can understand they want to cut spammers saturating every random search query, but how am I going to get a positive RoI on that kind of cost?

fireworks10 11y ago
AdWords determines your ad's AdRank by its Quality Score (expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience) in addition to your cpc bid. Perhaps you had a low quality score (below 8), so Google requested a higher CPC to compensate?
- novaleaf 11y ago
  thanks for the input, yeah I think I need to do more "inbound marketing" before attempting adwords (display). I have a 4 to 6 quality score, and nothing is displayed unless the CPC is astronomical.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sixtypoundhound 11y ago
Honestly, if the competition for those keywords is that weak, I'd go for an SEO blitz. I pulled a SEMRUSH profile on your site (other tools exist, I just like that one) https://www.semrush.com/info/phantomjscloud.com https://www.semrush.com/info/phantomjscloud.com - Identify keywords you want to target, with decent search volume and not too many strong competitors. Use those words in your headlines and article text - Start a blog and bulk up your articles; knock out 4 - 5 1500+ word articles on the problems you are solving and which audiences would benefit from them - Share those articles on social media - Your site could benefit from additional back-links (you've only got 14); look at your major competitors and see if they are getting links from highly reputable sources. Reach out to those sources and offer them a reason to link to you. Avoid links from spammy sites and low-end blogs (do NOT do the $5 link building package on elance or wherever)... [There's a ton more, but that will give you a running start on respectable SEO]

karambahh 11y ago

I can tell from first hand experience interacting with most of the top 100 e-commerce european players show that statistical knowledge is sparse at best. Many players only pilot their activity through basic indicators such as CPM, "our sales are up". Many marketing teams still operate their business with "gut feelings" rather cold, hard facts & statistics that "us" tech types tend to use...

atourgates 11y ago

> This is also about the millionth post I've read which assumes that companies simply throw money at advertising and don't run any statistics of their own. Well, anecdotally, they do. We just took over PPC advertising for a chain of regional businesses. When we got access to their existing PPC accounts, I found that they'd spent about $75,000 over the last year on PPC, and nearly all of it was wasted. The only conversion path on their site was phone calls, and they didn't have any sort of conversion tracking in place. Initially, I expect they got some real clicks and calls. But then over time, without any focus on conversions, they just kept optimizing for the cost per click. That meant leaving the search network for the display network, and focusing in on poorer and poorer sources of clicks. Until over the past several months, nearly 100% of their clicks have come from what look like very shady websites and mobile apps. They cut their CPC by about 75%, but in the process, I expect nearly eliminated any ROI. $75,000 down the drain. To be fair, I do think Google's AdWords Express tool is a good antidote to this behavior. Someone with very little PPC experience could setup an account, and run a successful campaign. And once you're spending enough, you typically get a call from a Google employee offering you tips on your campaign, and I've found Google's reps to be generally helpful. But people who don't take understand the AdWords platform, or can't be bothered to learn, can throw away tons of money on spammy or outright scammy clicks in AdWords.

Xyik 11y ago

Facebook Ads are much more targeted than Adwords. When it comes to targeting, Adwords is actually really bad bad. Outside of Search they can't compete, and even for Search ads you can't do proper gender and age targeting with your ads. Don't even get me started on Mobile.

slantaclaus 11y ago

The writer probably (ok, definitely) has never managed an adwords campaign