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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 tra
by 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 agoI'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 agojust out of curiosity, what are some specific advertising techniques that work consistently?
- gesman 7y agoBrand 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 agoI'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.
- godtoldmetodoit 7y agoBranding is a moat. There's a reason Coke and Pepsi spend hundreds of millions on branding ads and I am sure they know there is a ROI there.
- tomaszs 7y agoBrand campaigns are good if you use vast multichannel campaign to make people remember your product. I dont need to say it is extremely expensive but works. Other reason to use it is when you dont want to be screwed by fake clicks, and are 100% sure people will find your product anyways and buy it.
- morgosmaci 7y agoAnd that was half of this post, the blog was as much about using their new product to track this problem as it was about finding the problem. Kudo's to solving a problem you find while making the product.
- jyu 7y agoNo specific tactic works forever. There is no "1 weird trick." You need to set up your advertising and sales funnels to track as prospects become customers, and continually experiment on the message and the channels. This is where most startups start and a lot of them get it wrong. If you have boatloads of VC money, you can run a lot of bad experiments until you hopefully hit paydirt. Paydirt is +ROI ad campaigns on a large targeted demographic. Then you treat this audience like a goldmine. At first it's easy to mine and pick up gold nuggets in river beds. As the easy pickings disappear, you'll find yourself investing in increasingly more expensive machinery and infrastructure to continue mining operations. As you've extracted most the gold, look for byproduct like copper, silver, etc (in startup terms, introduce ancillary products and services). As you hit one gold mine, keep prospecting other areas (distribution channels like display ads, native ads, social media, etc). If you end up a multi billion dollar unicorn with tens of millions in ad budget, targeted direct ads no longer move the needle like they did when you were a startup. Now for the Director of Marketing to justify increasingly larger compensation, he needs to increase his ad spend and starts whispering about spending money on ads that have no direct correlation to the bottom line. This is called brand advertising. Hint: If an early stage startup spends more budget on brand advertising than direct marketing, run. Effective advertising is matching the product/service with some problem, on a specific channel of eyeballs, with a specific message. There are tons of new channels popping up every few years (think google, facebook, instagram, youtube, twitch, pinterest, wechat, stackexchange, hn, reddit, etc). There are millions of permutations but you have a finite ad budget. The magic is deciding how to show what to who.
- antpls 7y agoFor the "how" and the "what", in the future, I bet ads platforms will ask you to write an long essay about what you sell, and they will automatically generate many different ads with GPT-2 (probably in real-time, to mix some content of whatever the viewer is browsing at the same time), and everything will be automatically A/B tested, segmented, adjusted, etc with reinforcement learning. Even better, no need to write an essay about your services or products, Google already know everything about it by scraping your website, so just point to the URL, and done
- nkkollaw 7y ago
- axaxs 7y agoAre they impulse buyers, or highly specialized? From time to time I see a cool thing that seems targeted to me, do click it, see the outrageous price, then do research and find the best price/quality ratio on Amazon. I assumed most people did the same really. An example from years back: I thought the Little Giant ladder was an awesome idea, but ridiculously priced. I bought a gorilla knockoff type ladder instead.
- anchpop 7y agoI'm not sure, but my girlfriend clicks on ads on instagram and buys things directly from there on a regular basis. I think the people who go on HN might be in a little bit of a bubble about the efficacy of advertisements.
- treebornfrog 7y agoHN is a bubble. I've been running PPC ads for highly targeted keywords for the last 5 years which have generated a ridiculous return. In general ppc is steady and reliable once you have you're keywords and ads running for a while and are well optimized. On the other hand, I've recently been trying dropshipping, advertising the product on Facebook. I did a small test for a unique product, I sourced it from China for around 5 usd and sold them for 25 usd. People actually bought them on site even though Amazon has them at a much lower price. Facebook literally knows people who are high spenders / frequent purchasers and will put your ads in front of them. It's actually stupidly powerful.
- spunker540 7y agoWhy haven’t you scaled out the dropshipping concept further? It sounds pretty solid.
- FussyZeus 7y agoBasically you just rattled off everything I, as someone who never worked in that industry, assumed was going on. There's just a shit ton of money to be made pretending it's 1955. I went into the wrong business.
- summerlight 7y agoYeah, it's funny to see a bunch of people complaining about both ads being ineffective AND conversion tracking being pervasive. But the reality is that unless there's perfect conversion tracking, garbage ads will be inevitable. This is why I have a (very unpopular) opinion of putting precise conversion tracking into the web standard (No, not the garbage one that Apple recently proposed).