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I see these posts all the time of DIY Adwords/FB and then a claim it doesn't work. This would be like me, a non-carpenter, trying to build a house, seeing how b

I see these posts all the time of DIY Adwords/FB and then a claim it doesn't work. This would be like me, a non-carpenter, trying to build a house, seeing how bad it looks and then claiming building materials suck. There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. So because Adwords/FB didn't work for you doesn't mean their traffic is 90% useless. And dont get me wrong, I completely acknowledge there is junk traffic on the networks, but filtering this to a minimum is part of getting advertising right. So to get 90% useless traffic, it means you set up campaigns without proper targeting or content, not Adwords/FB is 90% useless.

somid3 10y ago
If that were the case, here what I propose. That developers audit their code once a year to make sure it's fair. My main point is the CPM versus CPC audience-mix.
vivekd 10y ago
I agree, I don't know much about digital marketing but I know that anecdotal evidence, which is all the author is presenting, is next to useless. I've heard other claims from people about how they made enormous sums on facebook. The real issue is that neither of these claims constitute data. Only large scale research tracking traffic across many websites would let us come to meaningful conclusions and that sort of research is something I haven't seen yet . . . which is likely why we are stuck with all these he said she said stories about how social media is a useless moneysink or a veritable gold mine depending on who you ask
- somedangedname 10y ago
  Also, the target moves as time goes on. What worked for someone five years ago won't necessarily work today.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Who says ads are a goldmine? I'd like to read up on that.
  - rokhayakebe 10y ago
    Goldmine for the seller.
obstinate 10y ago
Anyway, if the traffic is 90% useless, doesn't that mean it's 10% useful? I mean, just going by the title. -- Google employee, but not in ads. Take my words with the appropriately sized grain of salt.
- somid3 10y ago
  Yes, but if Google advertises in the Keyword Tool that I can get 400 clicks at $0.50 per click, and then when I join I get 4-5 clicks per day at $1.20 per click -- for the same exact keywords. Ok, thats acceptable. Thats about 3X as expensive and 1/100 the scale, ok. But if I then see that traffic behave about 90% like garbage relative than organic visitors -- that puts me at two orders of magnitude off, which is quite insane.
  - sanswork 10y ago
    Pricing depends not just on price paid but on the quality of your content(as Google sees it) so it is definitely possible that there are people using that keyword and getting 400 clicks a day at $0.50/click.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Sure, but that 10x cost per useful amount of traffic probably tips the cost-benefit analysis against it.
WalterSear 10y ago
At my last company, we worked with Google's in-house team to build adword campaigns, eventually spending the better part of a million dollars over the course of 9 months or so, with free assistance from them in the development of campaigns and with their ongoing guidance and advice. From our meetings with them, they were quite confident that our strategy was appropriate, that there existed an audience that we could reach via our keyword choices, and that they could drive the kind of traffic we needed to our site. It was an abject failure, and a chief contributor to the downfall of the company.
- rdslw 10y ago
  Can you name the company?
  - leatherdaddy 10y ago
    Theranos
- point78 10y ago
  Sounds like a bad product
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    That's not an unfair conclusion. However, our retention rate after the first order was spectacular, and we slowly gathered a core group of users who were using our services exclusively. Unfortunately, despite providing a ubiquitous business service, we couldn't gather customers fast enough to float the boat.
    - point78 10y ago
      Would need to see the product, but right off the bat seems like fb is the completelty wrong platform to be advertising. Marketing department should have been fired after 5 figures spent?
      - 10y ago
elastic_church 10y ago
> So to get 90% useless traffic, it means you set up campaigns without proper targeting or content, not Adwords/FB is 90% useless. at least one similarity to Poker, Daytrading, Daily Fantasy Sports so with a more objective criticism, "the full story", new projects might nix these kind of ad campaigns from the budget and Facebook and Google will get one tenth of the revenue?
- stepanhruda 10y ago
  You incorrectly reference zero sum games (actually, negative sum because of the middle man), where winners' gains come entirely from the losers. Ads are definitely not that, they are a regular market with supply and demand. It seems that the top actors get a disproportionate amount of profits though.
  - elastic_church 10y ago
    or I correctly made an analogy because of the similarities in things that are otherwise dissimilar. Ironic because you pointed out the similarity after deciding to write about the dissimilarities.
    - stepanhruda 10y ago
      Disagree. You called out a pattern that has characteristics, but ads don't match the characteristics. There is a superset of characteristics that this pattern falls into as well, but now you are making a misleading analogy.
gk1 10y ago
Here's a more familiar analogy: Imagine a marketer cobbling a bunch of [pick your language] code together with help from StackOverflow and, when it fails or runs slow, declaring that [language] code is slow and useless with some recorded execution times as evidence.
edblarney 10y ago
"There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. " You'd be surprised how a lot of marketing budget is wasted. Especially in brand advertising, where there is no directly measurable ROI. Toothpaste, paper towels, cars, cereal - they spend gazillions on those brands. But think of this: most 'ad spend' is spent on completely commoditized products - I'll guarantee you the 'no name' toothpaste is as good as 'Crest' or whatever. Our economy is made up of huge 'soft monopolies'. The grocery stores, pharmacy chains, 'big brands' like P&G - they are all systematically slow, barriers to entry are surprisingly high (you can make toothpaste easily, but you cannot build a brand easily). Car companies, entertainment channels. Banks. Talk to some of the front line marketing people buying ads. They are often clueless. They have no idea often if the money is well spent or not. But the have a 'budget' and 'have to spend' it across various channels. They know they need to 'go social' so they buy ads from 'known brands' like Facebook and Google. Now - the other source of more profitable ads are simply things where you can reasonably get conversions online. Anything for your household that you can buy at Ebay, Amazon etc., i.e. consumer goods. And then the scammy stuff. Some of the above complaints about the value of ads have merit - that said - they may not be making products that are amenable to online ads.
- hackerboos 10y ago
  How many times do you hear "if I don't spend my budget it will be reduced next year"?
- dx034 10y ago
  Creating brand loyalty is very expensive, but can definitely be worth it. I guess most of us have brands they buy without any specific reason, other than that they somehow like them or that they always used them. While it's very hard to measure the effect of ads trying to create this loyalty, it doesn't mean that it's not worth it. I've discovered that for myself where I saw ads on Facebook that I didn't click, but later saw a product in store and tried it out. If you just follow conversions, you'd say that the Facebook ad was worthless, whereas it actually influenced my buying decision. I'd argue that most money on ads is well spent, but to be effective, you must have a huge budget. People need to see your ad multiple times, so that they'll be familiar with a product. If you don't have that budget, it'll be very hard to use ads effectively. But that's no fault of FB or Google, that's just psychology.
BorisMelnik 10y ago
My sentiments exactly. It is all about demographic targeting, crafting a good landing page, writing good copy, and writing good ads. I could easily make a shitty ad and send it to a blog post I just wrote that 99.999999999% of the world doesn't care about, and find 100% bounce rate and burn through $10,000 in a few days. I work with Adwords for a living (part of it, anyway) and can assure OP that if 90% of this traffic was useless, I'd be out of a job. I use heatmaps and other CRO tools and regularly watch my funnel go from an ad > a form generated on a website.

somid3 10y ago

If that were the case, here what I propose. That developers audit their code once a year to make sure it's fair. My main point is the CPM versus CPC audience-mix.

vivekd 10y ago

I agree, I don't know much about digital marketing but I know that anecdotal evidence, which is all the author is presenting, is next to useless. I've heard other claims from people about how they made enormous sums on facebook. The real issue is that neither of these claims constitute data. Only large scale research tracking traffic across many websites would let us come to meaningful conclusions and that sort of research is something I haven't seen yet . . . which is likely why we are stuck with all these he said she said stories about how social media is a useless moneysink or a veritable gold mine depending on who you ask

somedangedname 10y ago
Also, the target moves as time goes on. What worked for someone five years ago won't necessarily work today.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Who says ads are a goldmine? I'd like to read up on that.
- rokhayakebe 10y ago
  Goldmine for the seller.

obstinate 10y ago

Anyway, if the traffic is 90% useless, doesn't that mean it's 10% useful? I mean, just going by the title. -- Google employee, but not in ads. Take my words with the appropriately sized grain of salt.

somid3 10y ago
Yes, but if Google advertises in the Keyword Tool that I can get 400 clicks at $0.50 per click, and then when I join I get 4-5 clicks per day at $1.20 per click -- for the same exact keywords. Ok, thats acceptable. Thats about 3X as expensive and 1/100 the scale, ok. But if I then see that traffic behave about 90% like garbage relative than organic visitors -- that puts me at two orders of magnitude off, which is quite insane.
- sanswork 10y ago
  Pricing depends not just on price paid but on the quality of your content(as Google sees it) so it is definitely possible that there are people using that keyword and getting 400 clicks a day at $0.50/click.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Sure, but that 10x cost per useful amount of traffic probably tips the cost-benefit analysis against it.

WalterSear 10y ago

At my last company, we worked with Google's in-house team to build adword campaigns, eventually spending the better part of a million dollars over the course of 9 months or so, with free assistance from them in the development of campaigns and with their ongoing guidance and advice. From our meetings with them, they were quite confident that our strategy was appropriate, that there existed an audience that we could reach via our keyword choices, and that they could drive the kind of traffic we needed to our site. It was an abject failure, and a chief contributor to the downfall of the company.

rdslw 10y ago
Can you name the company?
- leatherdaddy 10y ago
  Theranos
point78 10y ago
Sounds like a bad product
- WalterSear 10y ago
  That's not an unfair conclusion. However, our retention rate after the first order was spectacular, and we slowly gathered a core group of users who were using our services exclusively. Unfortunately, despite providing a ubiquitous business service, we couldn't gather customers fast enough to float the boat.
  - point78 10y ago
    Would need to see the product, but right off the bat seems like fb is the completelty wrong platform to be advertising. Marketing department should have been fired after 5 figures spent?
    - 10y ago

elastic_church 10y ago

> So to get 90% useless traffic, it means you set up campaigns without proper targeting or content, not Adwords/FB is 90% useless. at least one similarity to Poker, Daytrading, Daily Fantasy Sports so with a more objective criticism, "the full story", new projects might nix these kind of ad campaigns from the budget and Facebook and Google will get one tenth of the revenue?

stepanhruda 10y ago
You incorrectly reference zero sum games (actually, negative sum because of the middle man), where winners' gains come entirely from the losers. Ads are definitely not that, they are a regular market with supply and demand. It seems that the top actors get a disproportionate amount of profits though.
- elastic_church 10y ago
  or I correctly made an analogy because of the similarities in things that are otherwise dissimilar. Ironic because you pointed out the similarity after deciding to write about the dissimilarities.
  - stepanhruda 10y ago
    Disagree. You called out a pattern that has characteristics, but ads don't match the characteristics. There is a superset of characteristics that this pattern falls into as well, but now you are making a misleading analogy.

gk1 10y ago

Here's a more familiar analogy: Imagine a marketer cobbling a bunch of [pick your language] code together with help from StackOverflow and, when it fails or runs slow, declaring that [language] code is slow and useless with some recorded execution times as evidence.

edblarney 10y ago

"There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. " You'd be surprised how a lot of marketing budget is wasted. Especially in brand advertising, where there is no directly measurable ROI. Toothpaste, paper towels, cars, cereal - they spend gazillions on those brands. But think of this: most 'ad spend' is spent on completely commoditized products - I'll guarantee you the 'no name' toothpaste is as good as 'Crest' or whatever. Our economy is made up of huge 'soft monopolies'. The grocery stores, pharmacy chains, 'big brands' like P&G - they are all systematically slow, barriers to entry are surprisingly high (you can make toothpaste easily, but you cannot build a brand easily). Car companies, entertainment channels. Banks. Talk to some of the front line marketing people buying ads. They are often clueless. They have no idea often if the money is well spent or not. But the have a 'budget' and 'have to spend' it across various channels. They know they need to 'go social' so they buy ads from 'known brands' like Facebook and Google. Now - the other source of more profitable ads are simply things where you can reasonably get conversions online. Anything for your household that you can buy at Ebay, Amazon etc., i.e. consumer goods. And then the scammy stuff. Some of the above complaints about the value of ads have merit - that said - they may not be making products that are amenable to online ads.

hackerboos 10y ago
How many times do you hear "if I don't spend my budget it will be reduced next year"?
dx034 10y ago
Creating brand loyalty is very expensive, but can definitely be worth it. I guess most of us have brands they buy without any specific reason, other than that they somehow like them or that they always used them. While it's very hard to measure the effect of ads trying to create this loyalty, it doesn't mean that it's not worth it. I've discovered that for myself where I saw ads on Facebook that I didn't click, but later saw a product in store and tried it out. If you just follow conversions, you'd say that the Facebook ad was worthless, whereas it actually influenced my buying decision. I'd argue that most money on ads is well spent, but to be effective, you must have a huge budget. People need to see your ad multiple times, so that they'll be familiar with a product. If you don't have that budget, it'll be very hard to use ads effectively. But that's no fault of FB or Google, that's just psychology.

BorisMelnik 10y ago

My sentiments exactly. It is all about demographic targeting, crafting a good landing page, writing good copy, and writing good ads. I could easily make a shitty ad and send it to a blog post I just wrote that 99.999999999% of the world doesn't care about, and find 100% bounce rate and burn through $10,000 in a few days. I work with Adwords for a living (part of it, anyway) and can assure OP that if 90% of this traffic was useless, I'd be out of a job. I use heatmaps and other CRO tools and regularly watch my funnel go from an ad > a form generated on a website.