7 ms·

> 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

by 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.
    - Udik 11y ago
      Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product? I think that ads tend to be about costly stuff (if that is true) because they have to discount their own low accuracy. You can make money by showing me ads for goods worth only a few dollars, if there are enough chances that I'll buy them.
      - vinceguidry 11y ago
        > Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product? Why would you expect them to be able to? Algorithms aren't mind readers. Just because a human could look at all those individual data points and reach that conclusion doesn't mean a computer could.
        Udik 11y ago
        So they're able to infer where I work (the address), my type of job (based on search, stackoverflow is my first result in 50% of my searches) and where I parked the car- but they can't infer my role or the company's business?
        vinceguidry 11y ago
        Obviously not, otherwise they'd be able to tailor a segment directly to you and sell your eyeballs for way more money than 'mere' retargeting.
      - goldbrick 11y ago
        But you have to ask, why would Google go to all the trouble of being your personal experience curator? Google is not in that business. They are interested in showing you the highest value ad that they can, and obviously that's nail polish.
  - dsjoerg 11y ago
    Udik and his responders are talking past each other a bit. Udik is talking about Google + their advertisers as if they were a single entity, and it is dumb for "them" to advertise stuff he's not interested in. However Google and their advertisers are not a single entity at all. It is efficient/smart for the advertisers to do retargeting (although a cap and funnel adjustments would make it even smarter) and it is efficient/smart for Google to take the money and run the ads. Udik, ultimately and in the long run I agree with your point; smarter advertising infrastructure will uncover the lost value that you are pointing out. However, given the current structure of the advertising market and state of existing tools, neither Google nor the advertisers immediately stand to gain by changing their approach to people like you. We're in a local minimum/equilibrium.
ssharp 11y ago
A few comments on this: 1) The company might be better off capping their impressions to you. 2) The company might be better off focusing on setting their remarketing pixels further down the funnel (unless you entered their funnel as part of the process). 3) How do you reasonably expect the company to treat you differently than they do actual leads? I'll assume the majority of traffic that goes to their website is interested in their services and not researching for a job interview, so unless there is some way they could reasonably figure out you're not interested and exclude you, I don't think what's happening here is that wrong. Marketing to people who already visited your site is almost certainly going to be worth more money to advertisers who are prospecting based solely on your interests.
- Udik 11y ago
  I don't understand why the job of figuring out how to place the ads best should be a concern of the company, instead of Google itself. Google knows basically everything about me, including where I work and what type of job I do, I'm surprised they can't do a better job at placing their customer's ads.
  - RobertKerans 11y ago
    Maybe because they don't 'know' in the way you seem to indicate; Google's not a person, making those inferences is hard - clearly the state of the art is very much advanced from even 5-10 years ago, but how do the algorithms know that you don't also want to buy things from the company you applied to? That's not a simple inference, given a (by necessity) limited graph without human capabilities
  - ssharp 11y ago
    You have to understand how ad exchanges work (and what they are) and what intermediaries there are. Ad Exchanges handle the actual delivery of ads. They have a massive inventory of ad slots available on a massive amount of websites and it's their job to fill those ad slots up while making as much money per ad slot as possible. Google (Doubleclick) is not the only display ad exchange [1]. There are quite a few other ones like OpenX, AppNexus, Microsoft, and so on. You can directly buy on these platforms but it's generally better to use a Demand Side Platform (DSP) because they provide a wrapper around these platforms and you can manage bidding, targeting, etc. in one place. They also offer various programatic techniques like real-time-bidding (RTB) that can end up costing you less than you'd spend directly in an exchange. Lastly, some exchanges operate in such a way that small advertisers can't utilize them. It's a human-intensive process that involves spending a lot of money, signing and committing to insertion orders, etc. Because of this stuff, most people are now using DSP's. The DSP's buy large batches of inventory from the ad exchanges and it's their job to maximize the revenue they get for their purchased inventory. As an advertisers, I can set up my campaigns in the DSP, which might involve setting targeting options, setting up remarketing pixels on my website, etc. With RTB, I set a maximum bid amount (in CPM) in my campaign and when it comes time to serve an ad, if the ad slot matches my targeting or remarketing preferences, I compete in an auction against others and the highest bidder gets the impression. In almost all cases, the ad exchanges are going to make more money (by means of providing value to end-advertiser) selling to people who are setting their own targeting preferences rather than trying to guess. Within the targeting options presented to advertisers, there is lots happening in the background by machines that are doing things humans can't. Ad tech is pretty sophisticated, even if it sometimes seems that it's not. Ad tech has created much more value for advertisers than it's lost when it isn't perfect. [1] Many people may think Doubleclick is the exchange but that might be because Doubleclick is the most common ad slot you see on a webpage. However, that ad slot is a different product, Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP). You can drop in inventory for any exchange (or even hardcode an ad in cases of a direct buy) in DFP, so it's displaying ads from other exchanges, not just Doubleclick.
mtanski 11y ago
> That's silly and a big waste of money. Most sites that do retargeting do it based on number and stats. They know that if a rando that visits their site (but doesn't buy anything, doesn't sign up for a new letter, doesn't click on contact me) will convert at X percentage if they show him an ad. So they do the math to figure out what that looks like after impression 2, 3, 4, 5, etc... somewhere there's a point at which the cumulative conversion percentage doesn't go up or goes up so slowly to not justify the cost and they stop. So what seams like a big waste of money to you, seams like a profitable business decision based in fact to them.
- takno 11y ago
  Certainly this seems like the way it should work. In order for it to actually work like this it would require the marketers to actually understand retargeting rather than believing the hype spread by ad networks, and it would require the inventory to be delivered through systems which could provide adequate tracking. Click-though is often not the expected success criteria for these ads though, instead they depend on overwhelming you with reminders until you crack. This has two consequences, the first is that successful campaigns are absolutely designed to annoy you and not give up at a point which is decent, and secondly the tracking becomes extremely weak, with high rates of inferred success where the retargeting ads may not have had a positive influence at all.
TheCapn 11y ago
My biggest gripe is when I explicitly search for a product instead of using their URL and the first ad is the same as the first result. If I go to Google and type in "TeamViewer" the first ad is for TeamViewer, the first result is for TeamViewer... I hope they're not paying for that.
- yardie 11y ago
  They have to. If they didn't then Teamviewer's competitors could purchase that placement and the next time you search for TV you'll get Citrix or someone else. It might not lead you to click on it but now you'll know you have 2 choices.
xivzgrev 11y ago
I run remarketing campaigns. One thing they can do is exclude people who visit job related pages. Its small but saves a few bucks (and annoyed interviewees).
nostrademons 11y ago
When a random person searches for a company, it's probably > 100:1 odds that they're interested in the company's product, not in a job at the company. That's why companies put their products on the landing page and not their job openings. You have to understand that whenever you do anything as a consumer in modern corporatism, you are part of a numbers game. The company does not care about you, they care about the aggregate "you" that represents the average of millions of consumers. If 100x as many people search for a company hoping to buy its product, then it only becomes rational to spend engineering effort if the opportunity cost of losing the one customer who is job-searching is 100x greater the lift that can be achieved by fine-tuning the product-buying case. Retargeting would have to be pretty tapped-out for that to be the case. I face a similar problem - as an entrepreneur, when I Google a company, it's usually because it's a potential competitor that I want to learn about. As a result, my YouTube & AdSense feeds are filled up with ads for competitors. Which is kinda handy, in a way, but probably not why those competitors are buying ads.
- Udik 11y ago
  > When a random person searches for a company, it's probably > 100:1 odds that they're interested in the company's product, not in a job at the company Really? There are companies that have very few customers that pay lots of money for very specific machinery or services. Customers which might be banks, large businesses or large manufacturing companies. How many among the visitors of their websites are the decision makers that are evaluating their products and those of the competition in view of a purchase? You say 99%.I say 1 out of 1000.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    There are, but again, we're talking in averages, and we're looking only at transactions where Google makes money. If a VP at a bank buys some financial software for $10M, it's great for the vendor, but Google still only makes about $10-20. If an engineer at the bank searches for software to make their job easier and clicks on the link, Google still makes that $10-20, but no sale happens (immediately). The financial software vendor has folded the costs of those clicks by non-decision makers into the lead-gen cost of their product, and I would bet that there are 100x more clicks from engineers, managers, and salespeople interested in the product than there are from VP decision makers (or people interested in working at that firm, for that matter).
jpadkins 11y ago
it's not based on the search, it's based on the your visit to their web site.

by Udik 11y ago

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.
  - Udik 11y ago
    Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product? I think that ads tend to be about costly stuff (if that is true) because they have to discount their own low accuracy. You can make money by showing me ads for goods worth only a few dollars, if there are enough chances that I'll buy them.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      > Google knows where I live, what job I do, where is my office, at what time I go to work in the morning, and almost every page I visit on Wikipedia. It even knows where I parked the car the last time. Is it possible that with all this information it can still mistake me for a potential buyer of that company's product? Why would you expect them to be able to? Algorithms aren't mind readers. Just because a human could look at all those individual data points and reach that conclusion doesn't mean a computer could.
      - Udik 11y ago
        So they're able to infer where I work (the address), my type of job (based on search, stackoverflow is my first result in 50% of my searches) and where I parked the car- but they can't infer my role or the company's business?
        vinceguidry 11y ago
        Obviously not, otherwise they'd be able to tailor a segment directly to you and sell your eyeballs for way more money than 'mere' retargeting.
    - goldbrick 11y ago
      But you have to ask, why would Google go to all the trouble of being your personal experience curator? Google is not in that business. They are interested in showing you the highest value ad that they can, and obviously that's nail polish.
- dsjoerg 11y ago
  Udik and his responders are talking past each other a bit. Udik is talking about Google + their advertisers as if they were a single entity, and it is dumb for "them" to advertise stuff he's not interested in. However Google and their advertisers are not a single entity at all. It is efficient/smart for the advertisers to do retargeting (although a cap and funnel adjustments would make it even smarter) and it is efficient/smart for Google to take the money and run the ads. Udik, ultimately and in the long run I agree with your point; smarter advertising infrastructure will uncover the lost value that you are pointing out. However, given the current structure of the advertising market and state of existing tools, neither Google nor the advertisers immediately stand to gain by changing their approach to people like you. We're in a local minimum/equilibrium.

ssharp 11y ago

A few comments on this: 1) The company might be better off capping their impressions to you. 2) The company might be better off focusing on setting their remarketing pixels further down the funnel (unless you entered their funnel as part of the process). 3) How do you reasonably expect the company to treat you differently than they do actual leads? I'll assume the majority of traffic that goes to their website is interested in their services and not researching for a job interview, so unless there is some way they could reasonably figure out you're not interested and exclude you, I don't think what's happening here is that wrong. Marketing to people who already visited your site is almost certainly going to be worth more money to advertisers who are prospecting based solely on your interests.

Udik 11y ago
I don't understand why the job of figuring out how to place the ads best should be a concern of the company, instead of Google itself. Google knows basically everything about me, including where I work and what type of job I do, I'm surprised they can't do a better job at placing their customer's ads.
- RobertKerans 11y ago
  Maybe because they don't 'know' in the way you seem to indicate; Google's not a person, making those inferences is hard - clearly the state of the art is very much advanced from even 5-10 years ago, but how do the algorithms know that you don't also want to buy things from the company you applied to? That's not a simple inference, given a (by necessity) limited graph without human capabilities
- ssharp 11y ago
  You have to understand how ad exchanges work (and what they are) and what intermediaries there are. Ad Exchanges handle the actual delivery of ads. They have a massive inventory of ad slots available on a massive amount of websites and it's their job to fill those ad slots up while making as much money per ad slot as possible. Google (Doubleclick) is not the only display ad exchange [1]. There are quite a few other ones like OpenX, AppNexus, Microsoft, and so on. You can directly buy on these platforms but it's generally better to use a Demand Side Platform (DSP) because they provide a wrapper around these platforms and you can manage bidding, targeting, etc. in one place. They also offer various programatic techniques like real-time-bidding (RTB) that can end up costing you less than you'd spend directly in an exchange. Lastly, some exchanges operate in such a way that small advertisers can't utilize them. It's a human-intensive process that involves spending a lot of money, signing and committing to insertion orders, etc. Because of this stuff, most people are now using DSP's. The DSP's buy large batches of inventory from the ad exchanges and it's their job to maximize the revenue they get for their purchased inventory. As an advertisers, I can set up my campaigns in the DSP, which might involve setting targeting options, setting up remarketing pixels on my website, etc. With RTB, I set a maximum bid amount (in CPM) in my campaign and when it comes time to serve an ad, if the ad slot matches my targeting or remarketing preferences, I compete in an auction against others and the highest bidder gets the impression. In almost all cases, the ad exchanges are going to make more money (by means of providing value to end-advertiser) selling to people who are setting their own targeting preferences rather than trying to guess. Within the targeting options presented to advertisers, there is lots happening in the background by machines that are doing things humans can't. Ad tech is pretty sophisticated, even if it sometimes seems that it's not. Ad tech has created much more value for advertisers than it's lost when it isn't perfect. [1] Many people may think Doubleclick is the exchange but that might be because Doubleclick is the most common ad slot you see on a webpage. However, that ad slot is a different product, Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP). You can drop in inventory for any exchange (or even hardcode an ad in cases of a direct buy) in DFP, so it's displaying ads from other exchanges, not just Doubleclick.

mtanski 11y ago

> That's silly and a big waste of money. Most sites that do retargeting do it based on number and stats. They know that if a rando that visits their site (but doesn't buy anything, doesn't sign up for a new letter, doesn't click on contact me) will convert at X percentage if they show him an ad. So they do the math to figure out what that looks like after impression 2, 3, 4, 5, etc... somewhere there's a point at which the cumulative conversion percentage doesn't go up or goes up so slowly to not justify the cost and they stop. So what seams like a big waste of money to you, seams like a profitable business decision based in fact to them.

takno 11y ago
Certainly this seems like the way it should work. In order for it to actually work like this it would require the marketers to actually understand retargeting rather than believing the hype spread by ad networks, and it would require the inventory to be delivered through systems which could provide adequate tracking. Click-though is often not the expected success criteria for these ads though, instead they depend on overwhelming you with reminders until you crack. This has two consequences, the first is that successful campaigns are absolutely designed to annoy you and not give up at a point which is decent, and secondly the tracking becomes extremely weak, with high rates of inferred success where the retargeting ads may not have had a positive influence at all.

TheCapn 11y ago

My biggest gripe is when I explicitly search for a product instead of using their URL and the first ad is the same as the first result. If I go to Google and type in "TeamViewer" the first ad is for TeamViewer, the first result is for TeamViewer... I hope they're not paying for that.

yardie 11y ago
They have to. If they didn't then Teamviewer's competitors could purchase that placement and the next time you search for TV you'll get Citrix or someone else. It might not lead you to click on it but now you'll know you have 2 choices.

xivzgrev 11y ago

I run remarketing campaigns. One thing they can do is exclude people who visit job related pages. Its small but saves a few bucks (and annoyed interviewees).

nostrademons 11y ago

When a random person searches for a company, it's probably > 100:1 odds that they're interested in the company's product, not in a job at the company. That's why companies put their products on the landing page and not their job openings. You have to understand that whenever you do anything as a consumer in modern corporatism, you are part of a numbers game. The company does not care about you, they care about the aggregate "you" that represents the average of millions of consumers. If 100x as many people search for a company hoping to buy its product, then it only becomes rational to spend engineering effort if the opportunity cost of losing the one customer who is job-searching is 100x greater the lift that can be achieved by fine-tuning the product-buying case. Retargeting would have to be pretty tapped-out for that to be the case. I face a similar problem - as an entrepreneur, when I Google a company, it's usually because it's a potential competitor that I want to learn about. As a result, my YouTube & AdSense feeds are filled up with ads for competitors. Which is kinda handy, in a way, but probably not why those competitors are buying ads.

Udik 11y ago
> When a random person searches for a company, it's probably > 100:1 odds that they're interested in the company's product, not in a job at the company Really? There are companies that have very few customers that pay lots of money for very specific machinery or services. Customers which might be banks, large businesses or large manufacturing companies. How many among the visitors of their websites are the decision makers that are evaluating their products and those of the competition in view of a purchase? You say 99%.I say 1 out of 1000.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  There are, but again, we're talking in averages, and we're looking only at transactions where Google makes money. If a VP at a bank buys some financial software for $10M, it's great for the vendor, but Google still only makes about $10-20. If an engineer at the bank searches for software to make their job easier and clicks on the link, Google still makes that $10-20, but no sale happens (immediately). The financial software vendor has folded the costs of those clicks by non-decision makers into the lead-gen cost of their product, and I would bet that there are 100x more clicks from engineers, managers, and salespeople interested in the product than there are from VP decision makers (or people interested in working at that firm, for that matter).

jpadkins 11y ago

it's not based on the search, it's based on the your visit to their web site.