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Hi Jesse, I saw a lot of youtube channels and reddit posts discussing how to optimize their ad spend (for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6feWOsbLs

Hi Jesse, I saw a lot of youtube channels and reddit posts discussing how to optimize their ad spend (for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6feWOsbLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6feWOsbLs) In the video the person starts a new online store and shows how he measures his return on advertising investment. It seems to be a pretty direct correlation between his ad spend and his increased sales. How do you match up your thoughts on advertising with the prevalence of these kind of "advertising success stories"?

Faark 7y ago
I don't think the article says advertising never works, but that people should be careful when measuring. Lets stick to the mentioned eBay example. I can totally imagine advertising for the keyword "ebay" not being worth a lot. Those people are likely to visit that site anyway. I was more surprised when "shoes" & co were mentioned. I would have expected bigger impact for those. Hardly any of that applies to a small store with no brand awareness, since there is little/no of the "would have clicked anyway" mentioned in the article. Another problem with measuring can be the competition. Building/Changes brand awareness (incl relative to competitors) takes time and seems unlikely to possibly be fully measured in a short experiment. Especially if the competitor currently doesn't run ads... but you not betting for them anymore might change the price and thus calculation for them.