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Their whole ad empire is desperate for a massive audit. Google had to be sued to deliver a $400,000 refund they owed but later claimed couldn't be delivered, c

• echelon 7y ago
  As someone who has adblocked everything since my teenage years, the whole ad industry seems to be making orders of magnitude more money than it should. I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads. Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products. Do we really trust ad tech accounting? They've been caught inflating numbers over and over again. The whole house of cards seems like it could fall over if actually investigated. Google, Facebook, Twitter - every single one of them. Influencer and direct social referral advertising seem much more "legitimate" than injected ad impressions. How can we get the thing to implode? Google has destroyed the web to prop up its ad business. I'd be happy if they couldn't cause any more trouble.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    I think most marketers are aware that a lot (maybe half) of clicks are bots/fraud. At the end of the day, if your ROAS is good, you don't care that much.
  • cbsks 7y ago
    If Google’s ad business dries up, what do you think they will pivot to? It scares me to think about what a desperate company with that much data would do.
    • Mountain_Skies 7y ago
      They have lots of cash but a pretty high burn rate too. Google has lots and lots of fat they could cut. Guess it would really matter how quickly the advertising business died as to whether or not they'd survive long enough to do something monumentally evil.
    • droidist2 7y ago
      Maybe they're going to blackmail everyone. $10 a month or all your past Google searches get published.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      Google has been trying to diversify from just adtech for over a decade - unsuccessfully. Still 90% of their profit comes from ads. They are much less diversified than Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
  • ijidak 7y ago
    Yes. As an advertiser, who traces each ad, I can say that advertising has demonstrably made me thousands upon thousands of dollars. However, 80% of ads are trash peddled by blind men leading blind men. There are very specific advertising techniques that work consistently, but most "marketing types" optimize for flashy artistic ads that have literally ZERO selling power. In fact, in some studies, ads actually REDUCE sales -- by, for example -- accidentally highlighting something that is an unexpected turn off to customers. But, the problem is, most companies don't trace their ads. And that's why overwhelmingly a lot of advertising money is wasted. But this state of affairs has been going on since the 60's. So I wouldn't underestimate the number of gullible humans to keep paying for advertising. As long as you have eyeballs you'll probably always have an excess of ad spend.
    • brigandish 7y ago
      I'm not in the industry so please forgive my ignorance, but what is ad tracing? Is it the same as ad tracking, if it is then I really don't understand as there seems to be a huge amount of tracking going on!
    • fnord77 7y ago
      just out of curiosity, what are some specific advertising techniques that work consistently?
      • gesman 7y ago
        Brand awareness ads. Pretty much it’s irrelevant what you say about brand ‘X’ as long as you bombard gullible observer with ‘X’. Then buying ‘X’ would be more familiar choice for millions than buying ‘Y’ or ‘Z’.
        • VBprogrammer 7y ago
          I'm not saying you are wrong but brand awareness ads are, if I'm reading correctly, exactly the kind of wasted ad money the parent was talking about. They are the cluster bombs of the advertising world. I think the Parent was actually advocating surgical PPC management of the style patio11 has written about extensively.
  • cdumler 7y ago
    It's well known in business that ads are generally dubious at best and likely mostly a fraud. Unfortunately, there isn't an alternative than doing all the work in-house. And, if you're good enough to do it in-house to make it a business, you'll easily figure out that you can cheat other people. IMHO, ads should be treated as a national resource with open accounting and a non-profit goal. This would instantly force companies to have to charge for services, pushing things back into competition.
    • IAmGraydon 7y ago
      Honestly, everything after your first sentence is completely incoherent. I'll stick to the first sentence. >It's well known in business that ads are generally dubious at best and likely mostly a fraud. You're using the phrase "it's well known" in an attempt to support a consensus that you completely fabricated. I spend over $100,000 every year on digital advertising, and I can assure you there is a very measurable return. Colleagues who manage much larger (and some smaller) marketing campaigns are also making measurable returns. You clearly have no experience in what you're talking about. So why talk about it? There are lots of unsophisticated business owners and marketing "professionals" who think they can just throw money at digital and it will magically return. These same people don't understand how to effectively measure, so they may not even realize they're burning money. Like any failed venture, that is THEIR fault. In no way does that make advertising "generally dubious at best and likely mostly a fraud".
      • heavenlyblue 7y ago
        I have worked for a company that spent a multiple of your amount in a single day on a PPC advertising. The fact that it works for you doesn’t mean that if that industry wasn’t as monopolised and unregulated you wouldn’t pay 1/10th of what you paid for the same.
  • throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    Are ads effective? Yes. Are highly personalized and targeted ads more effective than, say, location+context? Dubious
  • ProfessorLayton 7y ago
    To my surprise yes ads are very effective. Without getting too specific, my close relatives run their own business as home improvement contractors. In the early days, before they had their reputation built, I setup a google adwords campaign for them — having never run an ad campaign before. It was a simple PPC campaign that included keywords in google search results and geofenced it to the SFBay. Here are some numbers and findings: - PPC costs were about $1-2.50/click with a ~$15/day max spend - Selected cities by hand to fit the service area - We did in fact get clicks outside of the zones we selected. Many if them were B2B trying to sell their services. - Customer acquisition costs specifically for the google ads campaign was ~$70 (clicks/conversion) $70/customer sounds like a lot except these home improvement contracts were typically thousands of dollars, so the campaign was a fantastic ROI. Furthermore, we dialed down ad spend as the reputation was built, and now most leads come via referrals and review sites. In the end all that mattered was that customers were signing contracts so even if there was some funny business going on it was still worth it for our particular case.
    • ohazi 7y ago
      That's not exactly a shining endorsement... "Yeah, Google was robbing us blind and kind of scamming us with their geofencing shenanigans, but we were making enough money that it wasn't worth fighting, and eventually we figured out how to stop buying ads from them."
      • chmod775 7y ago
        I don't think it was supposed to be an endorsement.
        • muro 7y ago
          If I could pay just 70$ per customer bringing in 1000+$, I would spend all I could and borrow heavily to run those ads. From a business perspective, it's a great endorsement.
          • im3w1l 7y ago
  • IAmGraydon 7y ago
    First, yes they are effective for effective marketing professionals. Digital advertising is a vehicle. The marketing creative is still the payload that does the work, and it has to be carefully and strategically created to maximize return. You can easily lose money if you don't know what you're doing. Second, any marketing professional worth their salary is measuring with a number of tools to verify that the information they're getting from Google/Facebook/etc. is accurate. There are many metrics that only they can provide, but there are enough independently measured data points that fraud would be obvious. Finally, you're blaming Google, but the advertising industry's current state is a product of extreme corporate greed (on the part of advertisers). It doesn't matter whether Google goes away, greed will continue to corrupt in other ways. Look what happened with the rise of ad blockers - native advertising, which is just a nice word for the paid corruption of editorial space, has become so prominent that you can't trust most of the articles you read on sites that were once considered reputable. The "influencer" marketing you mentioned is a perfect example. People with social presence and influence are being paid to lie about a product. You think this is somehow better or more "legitimate"? I would love to hear more about that. At least with Google, I can clearly see where the ads are. So you can try to implode Google or any other facilitator of digital advertising, but money will find a way. It always does. You're trying to change human nature.
  • cookie_monsta 7y ago
    The old saw was that 50% of advertising is useless, it's just that nobody knows which 50%. I guess that's why people are so excited about click tracking, analytics, etc, etc.
    • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      I think it's more like 99%. When I was running advertising for a small business we put vouchers in to track advertising. The only people who brought in vouchers were people who were already customers who said they were already coming. So, we spent money to reduce our revenue. (I do the same, hunt for vouchers after making a buying/visiting decision.) I was on national TV and national radio (UK) - none of that blipped our visitors/revenue. Only thing that ever definitely worked was handing out flyers and chatting to people in the street (and being top of Google SERPs).
      • lordnacho 7y ago
        What were you selling?
      • cookie_monsta 7y ago
        Funny you should mention vouchers - it reminded me of the article discussed here[1], which likened advertising with Google to handing out coupons to people who are already in your store [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
  • puranjay 7y ago
    Ads are massively effective. My friends and I launched a physical product over the weekend last week. I put together a basic landing page and bought some Instagram ads. We spent about INR 250 (around $4) before I stopped the ads to do some optimization. That $4 in spending brought us 1 customer who placed 2 orders worth $35. He also referred 2 other customers who placed an additional order of $35. $70 in revenue for the simplest of funnels is wildly lucrative.
    • tomaszs 7y ago
      The problem starts when you want to scale actually
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • mattlondon 7y ago
    They are hugely effective. Even if only a small percentage (e.g. <2%) click on the and, and then a similar small percentage actually buy anything after clicking, you are still making money so long as the cost-per-conversion (i.e. per sale) comes out low enough that you still make a profit. Spending $3-5 to make a sale in say a pair of shoes that retails at $100 with a profit margin of $30-40 is good business. People are making huge amounts of money/doing huge amounts of business directly as a result of the ads, and that is not just Google and Facebook, but everyone all the way down to little mom and pop businesses. When you track things down to the level of sales it very often works (not always - depends on products/business models etc), and that is why people are using online ads. AdWords and Facebook ads would have fizzled out years ago if people were not benefiting from advertising their business
    • jakobegger 7y ago
      The problem with this kind of accounting is that it doesn't consider whether the ad was really necessary to make a sale in the first place. With a lot of brand keyword advertising, companies are paying for people to click an ad when they were already looking for your website anyway. So spending $3 on that customer is not a $27 profit but rather a $3 loss....
      • nl 7y ago
        While buying your product name (or your competitor) is sometimes the case, this isn't the main source of volume in your pipeline. And it's still a $27 profit, even if it is possible you could have saved money. Most of the time a well-optimised PPC pipe looks for specific (non-brand) keywords and buys them, not just the product name.
        • jeltz 7y ago
          While I agree that ads often are very effective, no it is just a $3 cost in some cases. Your ads can cannibalize on tge revenue from other, possibly cheaper, channels.
        • jakobegger 7y ago
  • mrep 7y ago
    > I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads. What is so different about seeing something you are interested in from an ad or from a website you clicked through to yourself? > Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products. Do you buy many products online at all? If you don't, then they probably won't be useful as you aren't someone who spends much money online for anything. However, there are many people who do. For example, my girlfriend and many other women I know spend tons of money on clothes/shoes/jewelry online and a decent amount of the products they find out about and like come from advertisements. To give you an example of the scale, I spent over $1,200 dollars online yesterday during black friday on clothes, shoes, and jewelry for her. While I don't know how many of those products got sourced from advertisements, I'm sure some of them were because most were from a doc she has been using to keep track of things she wants and she likely saw them first on an advertisement.
• buboard 7y ago
  google is just taking advantage of the old "Half of my ad money is wasted". They sell pretty dashboards to advertisers so they can pretend they 're working , and have a huge network effect among agencies now. very tough for a newcomer to find a crack without competition, it's only going to get worse