10 ms·

Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

57 points by somid3 10y ago

edblarney 10y ago
It's useful to some things, esp. when there is a high value potential click conversion, i.e. amazon and ebay items. Some ads are bought by brand advertiser with little understanding of the impact because a) it's 'brand' and hard to measure in the first place, and b) they have a huge budget, need to spread it across channels, so they just 'buy X$' of 'social ads' on the 'trusted networks' because that's the marketing mix required of their bosses or client. To be fair - print and TV ads have the same problem. Marketing is not a hard science in many places, and they have big budgets :). But it clearly works for some folks. There should be no surprise at in-links from reddit: theres usually a degree of clear interest in the first place, and second, there is a 'voting' structure that naturally moves better quality stuff to the top of the pile.
xiphias 10y ago
If the advertiser used the same bids on different properties, the campaign wasn't yet set up well. Also the device (mobile/desktop/tablet), query, language and many other features of the user session change the conversion rate, which means the bid should be different. The fact that the ads were useless meant that either there is too much auction pressure and the advertiser wasn't able to compete, or he just didn't set up the campaign well (which is of course a hard task). It would be good to know if the advertiser was using Enhanced CPC or not, which can increase the effectiveness of the ads, but even then it takes money to set up the bids correctly. Disclaimer: I'm working on a relevant product
- rhizome 10y ago
  What is "auction pressure?"
  - xiphias 10y ago
    It means how competitive the bids are for the auction.
Animats 10y ago
Google's third-party ads are known to be almost useless. Referrals directly from a Google search have some value. But this article goes beyond that. It indicates that most clicks on third party ads are coming from bots. It would be useful for a few sites to publish IP addresses and times from which they get bot-like traffic. Maybe a pattern will emerge.
- ssharp 10y ago
  A simple way to try and block out bots is to just not allow your ads to show to Linux users. It's a tiny fraction of most website's traffic but the largest share of bot traffic. I'd further speculate that real desktop Linux users are substantially more likely to have an ad block running anyway.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    And why would a bot disclose that it's a "linux user" and not just send some sort of Windows agent string?
    - fictioncircle 10y ago
      A non-negligible portion of the bot networks are teenagers and college students learning how to manipulate the system. Inexperienced operators like that make amateur mistakes like leaving in default user-agent strings for a variety of tools that are frequently linux-based as its cheap to go on something like LowEndTalk.com, pick up a couple $2/month VMs, pick up some proxies, and test out a small group of bots designed to fake traffic to generate Ad revenue. The reason I said teenagers & students is you have to be really, really sophisticated for that sort of operation to scale beyond $100/month in profit so its generally something I've seen people "learn" on, realize the limitations, and move on. (i.e. Making no amateur mistakes that flag your traffic as non-legit and being able to use an IP address only a couple of times a day in random patterns)
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      I'm interested in that theory too. If anything, bot would like to make an expression of being a wealthy macbook owner using safari.
revicon 10y ago
This line stuck out for me... Also when I turned off "Google Partners" and "external sites" from our campaigns, the ratio of idiot-clicks went down dramatically. I believe that most of the useless ? traffic (i.e.: bots or confused users) come from sites external to Google. Most of the adwords best practices docs I've read, and going through the udemy course Isaac Rudansky put out on adwords, it sounds like the extended google partners network is best left turned off for all adword campaigns.
- somid3 10y ago
  True, that will open an infestation of bots.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    What will, turning it off or enabling it? Your "that" is ambiguous.
    - somid3 10y ago
      Enabling ads to third-party websites other than Google properties.
      - angry-hacker 10y ago
        Or a lot of content farms and other bs that is using adsense. There are decent sites too of course, but you cab target then manually I believe. Arstech for an example.
cm2012 10y ago
Either your ads are effective at driving more sales than the ads cost or they aren't. It doesn't matter what % of the traffic is "fake" as long as the bottom line works.
downandout 10y ago
I have had similar experiences, but even if the traffic is 90℅ useless, that means 10℅ isn't. It's an auction, so bid an amount where clicks from each particular network are profitable to you. There are some niches where brand advertisers and well-funded startups willing to lose money will suck up all the inventory unprofitably. You simply won't be able to compete with that type of activity unless you also have money that you are willing to light on fire. However, there are pockets of profitability within the PPC arena. They shift quite a bit at various times based on the competitive landscape...an unprofitable niche today may be a profitable one two months from now after someone that was driving up bids burns through all their cash. You just have to monitor and deploy when the CPC is low enough for you in your niche.
- salesguy222 10y ago
  ℅ instead of %? this is off topic but curious if you use it deliberately and what you want the reader to feel about it :)
  - downandout 10y ago
    I was just typing on an Android phone I use for development purposes and that was the only key I saw for %. I didn't mean anything by it :)
    - salesguy222 10y ago
      And now we know ^.^ maybe I will start sprinkling deceptively similar symbols in my writing• :)
IgorPartola 10y ago
I wish ads I put out there had a 10% conversion rate. Sorry, this just seems like such a click bait title, I could t resist.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ckdarby 10y ago
This was already on here.
uladzislau 10y ago
It really depends on the product and the industry as well as many other factors like proper targeting, ad copy, matching expectations of the user, etc. I've seen many ad campaigns with fantastical results or at least very positive ROI and many spectacular failures too.
Wildgoose 10y ago
Ah, but which 90%? And 10% useful doesn't sound too bad....
- taylorbuley 10y ago
  10%, yeah not so bad. an issue with CPC is that you still pay for the other 90%.
bambax 10y ago
Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pacomerh 10y ago
I tried it once for a month and I got results, probably more than 10% (To sell a music album). I was super specific with the demographic, I guess that helps.
benologist 10y ago
Gleaning value from their advertising will become the dialup of this generation as entrenched manipulation and adblocking grow concurrently and they can't thwart either group. AOL still milks dialup, but the debate has long-shifted to how they could possibly be getting away with it. That's Google/FB style advertising in another decade when 1 in 1000s of clicks is an actual person you want to pay to reach but they continue to use contrived metrics to justify billing for 100s. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-advertising-metrics.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-advertising...
guyb7 10y ago
Had the same experience with Google and Facebook ads. ~80% of the clicks are simple bots that don't run javascript or store cookies. Additional ~10% are more sophisticated bots that try to mimic real people behavior, but when you compile their actions to a video it's really easy to see that they are not human. Most of these bots are run by agencies with the purpose of clicking on their clients' ads.
synicalx 10y ago
When you think about it, "real" advertising is the same - think how many people drive past a billboard vs how many of them actually buy whatever is on the billboard. Google/Facebook really shoot themselves in the foot by claiming that they only target your ads at people who are already interested in what you're selling. That makes their ad services sound like some sort of marketing panacea and sets the expectation that you'll get a lot more interest than you actually will. What they don't want to acknowledge is that people are just as desensitised to, and disinterested in online ads as they are in "real" ads.

57 points by somid3 10y ago

It's useful to some things, esp. when there is a high value potential click conversion, i.e. amazon and ebay items. Some ads are bought by brand advertiser with little understanding of the impact because a) it's 'brand' and hard to measure in the first place, and b) they have a huge budget, need to spread it across channels, so they just 'buy X$' of 'social ads' on the 'trusted networks' because that's the marketing mix required of their bosses or client. To be fair - print and TV ads have the same problem. Marketing is not a hard science in many places, and they have big budgets :). But it clearly works for some folks. There should be no surprise at in-links from reddit: theres usually a degree of clear interest in the first place, and second, there is a 'voting' structure that naturally moves better quality stuff to the top of the pile.

xiphias 10y ago

If the advertiser used the same bids on different properties, the campaign wasn't yet set up well. Also the device (mobile/desktop/tablet), query, language and many other features of the user session change the conversion rate, which means the bid should be different. The fact that the ads were useless meant that either there is too much auction pressure and the advertiser wasn't able to compete, or he just didn't set up the campaign well (which is of course a hard task). It would be good to know if the advertiser was using Enhanced CPC or not, which can increase the effectiveness of the ads, but even then it takes money to set up the bids correctly. Disclaimer: I'm working on a relevant product

rhizome 10y ago
What is "auction pressure?"
- xiphias 10y ago
  It means how competitive the bids are for the auction.

Animats 10y ago

Google's third-party ads are known to be almost useless. Referrals directly from a Google search have some value. But this article goes beyond that. It indicates that most clicks on third party ads are coming from bots. It would be useful for a few sites to publish IP addresses and times from which they get bot-like traffic. Maybe a pattern will emerge.

ssharp 10y ago
A simple way to try and block out bots is to just not allow your ads to show to Linux users. It's a tiny fraction of most website's traffic but the largest share of bot traffic. I'd further speculate that real desktop Linux users are substantially more likely to have an ad block running anyway.
- ams6110 10y ago
  And why would a bot disclose that it's a "linux user" and not just send some sort of Windows agent string?
  - fictioncircle 10y ago
    A non-negligible portion of the bot networks are teenagers and college students learning how to manipulate the system. Inexperienced operators like that make amateur mistakes like leaving in default user-agent strings for a variety of tools that are frequently linux-based as its cheap to go on something like LowEndTalk.com, pick up a couple $2/month VMs, pick up some proxies, and test out a small group of bots designed to fake traffic to generate Ad revenue. The reason I said teenagers & students is you have to be really, really sophisticated for that sort of operation to scale beyond $100/month in profit so its generally something I've seen people "learn" on, realize the limitations, and move on. (i.e. Making no amateur mistakes that flag your traffic as non-legit and being able to use an IP address only a couple of times a day in random patterns)
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    I'm interested in that theory too. If anything, bot would like to make an expression of being a wealthy macbook owner using safari.

revicon 10y ago

This line stuck out for me... Also when I turned off "Google Partners" and "external sites" from our campaigns, the ratio of idiot-clicks went down dramatically. I believe that most of the useless ? traffic (i.e.: bots or confused users) come from sites external to Google. Most of the adwords best practices docs I've read, and going through the udemy course Isaac Rudansky put out on adwords, it sounds like the extended google partners network is best left turned off for all adword campaigns.

somid3 10y ago
True, that will open an infestation of bots.
- rhizome 10y ago
  What will, turning it off or enabling it? Your "that" is ambiguous.
  - somid3 10y ago
    Enabling ads to third-party websites other than Google properties.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      Or a lot of content farms and other bs that is using adsense. There are decent sites too of course, but you cab target then manually I believe. Arstech for an example.

cm2012 10y ago

Either your ads are effective at driving more sales than the ads cost or they aren't. It doesn't matter what % of the traffic is "fake" as long as the bottom line works.

downandout 10y ago

I have had similar experiences, but even if the traffic is 90℅ useless, that means 10℅ isn't. It's an auction, so bid an amount where clicks from each particular network are profitable to you. There are some niches where brand advertisers and well-funded startups willing to lose money will suck up all the inventory unprofitably. You simply won't be able to compete with that type of activity unless you also have money that you are willing to light on fire. However, there are pockets of profitability within the PPC arena. They shift quite a bit at various times based on the competitive landscape...an unprofitable niche today may be a profitable one two months from now after someone that was driving up bids burns through all their cash. You just have to monitor and deploy when the CPC is low enough for you in your niche.

salesguy222 10y ago
℅ instead of %? this is off topic but curious if you use it deliberately and what you want the reader to feel about it :)
- downandout 10y ago
  I was just typing on an Android phone I use for development purposes and that was the only key I saw for %. I didn't mean anything by it :)
  - salesguy222 10y ago
    And now we know ^.^ maybe I will start sprinkling deceptively similar symbols in my writing• :)

IgorPartola 10y ago

I wish ads I put out there had a 10% conversion rate. Sorry, this just seems like such a click bait title, I could t resist.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ckdarby 10y ago

This was already on here.

uladzislau 10y ago

It really depends on the product and the industry as well as many other factors like proper targeting, ad copy, matching expectations of the user, etc. I've seen many ad campaigns with fantastical results or at least very positive ROI and many spectacular failures too.

Wildgoose 10y ago

Ah, but which 90%? And 10% useful doesn't sound too bad....

taylorbuley 10y ago
10%, yeah not so bad. an issue with CPC is that you still pay for the other 90%.

bambax 10y ago

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pacomerh 10y ago

I tried it once for a month and I got results, probably more than 10% (To sell a music album). I was super specific with the demographic, I guess that helps.

benologist 10y ago

Gleaning value from their advertising will become the dialup of this generation as entrenched manipulation and adblocking grow concurrently and they can't thwart either group. AOL still milks dialup, but the debate has long-shifted to how they could possibly be getting away with it. That's Google/FB style advertising in another decade when 1 in 1000s of clicks is an actual person you want to pay to reach but they continue to use contrived metrics to justify billing for 100s. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-advertising-metrics.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-advertising...

guyb7 10y ago

Had the same experience with Google and Facebook ads. ~80% of the clicks are simple bots that don't run javascript or store cookies. Additional ~10% are more sophisticated bots that try to mimic real people behavior, but when you compile their actions to a video it's really easy to see that they are not human. Most of these bots are run by agencies with the purpose of clicking on their clients' ads.

synicalx 10y ago

When you think about it, "real" advertising is the same - think how many people drive past a billboard vs how many of them actually buy whatever is on the billboard. Google/Facebook really shoot themselves in the foot by claiming that they only target your ads at people who are already interested in what you're selling. That makes their ad services sound like some sort of marketing panacea and sets the expectation that you'll get a lot more interest than you actually will. What they don't want to acknowledge is that people are just as desensitised to, and disinterested in online ads as they are in "real" ads.