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The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric
- DailyHN 7y agoDesensitization to ads caused by perverse tracking and targeting. It's not getting better.
- DevKoala 7y agoThere is no such thing. People still buy online marketed products a magnitude times more than non-marketed products. In fact, advertisement techniques are now so advanced that consumers believe they were not "influenced" in their purchasing decisions. "Hahaha, my ad-blocker and 7 proxies make me un-trackable"
- cameronbrown 7y agoAll elements of the marketing mix matter, especially word of mouth advertising. Even if adblocker users think they're protecting themselves from ads, they know plenty of people who aren't. And those people will talking about those products. It's one-step removed and more filtered, but it's still effective advertising.
- JohnFen 7y ago> advertisement techniques are now so advanced that consumers believe they were not "influenced" in their purchasing decisions. This isn't a new thing. People have believed that for the entire existence of advertising, and it has never been true.
- perl4ever 7y agoI just checked, and Facebook is advertising "The Uber of Snow Plows" to me. I can't be influenced because I don't have a clue what it is. Next ad is "Liberty Tax Service", which is guaranteed not to sell me anything because I do my own taxes and am unwilling to pay anything since the Intuit scandal. Next one is trolling for victims of "clergy abuse"; I've gone to church maybe 2-3 times in my life and don't know any clergy. Next is sildenafil, next is State Farm, next is Taco Bell, all of which I am extremely aware of existing and do not plan to ever purchase. There are a bunch of things relative to my interests as a consumer, because I follow some local businesses. But they aren't strictly speaking ads. The ads are complete garbage.
- drmabus 7y agoeventho i'm completely banner blind i suspect my subconscious still picks them up. one time I had to ask for help finding a download button on an almost empty page. i was pointed to the "blank" spot in the middle of the screen and then the button appeared. it was a shocking experience. the wetware addblock is probably storing all the adds? then it uses them for god knows what? a terrible invention, we would do so much better filling heads with productive things?
- DevKoala 7y agoIt isn't a new thing, but the false belief among tech elites that by using ad-blockers or a tool like Thor you are unaffected by modern marketing technologies is new and perhaps naive. You'd have to boycott street ads, tv and radio, our financial system, reputable news sources, friends who use cellphones near you, and more to actually remove marketing influence from your life. The cookie will be dead in 2 years and every DSP has a plan to continue operating normally.
- zenincognito 7y agoAfter 10 years of spending 100k on average per month, we stopped spending in 2019 and put money into cold calling. Conversions tripled and we could only spend half our yearly budget in our call campaign. Google is expensive and returns now suck even more than they did in 2017.
- staticautomatic 7y agoAre your cold calling ops in house?
- busterarm 7y agoNot accusing, but it's still worth considering - could it just have been that your targeting was bad? I worked in a heavily regulated industry with some of the Top 10 most expensive keywords and we spent about $150 million a year on advertising with a solid 1/4 of it going to digital (almost exclusively Google) and it was worth it. Digital spend got customer acquisition costs way way down and we spent significant effort into trying to _reduce_ our call center operations (mostly via automation). It's important to invest in people to crunch the numbers and get your targeting right. TV was still king though.
- DevKoala 7y agoI am not rejecting the author's analysis, but the industry is moving towards cost per conversion. Even marketers for small time ad agencies have gotten savvy and realized that the click is nothing but a proxy. Also, I never realized Google actually posted CPC numbers, I don't track B2C in depth, but considering the amount of synthetic traffic, CPC numbers can be meaningless.
- busterarm 7y agoAbsolutely. I feel like in the early days of digital advertising everyone was used to broadcast where there's a phenomenal amount of waste (you have to buy commercials at times and on channels when there's no listeners to get pricing down. Also a significant amount of the ad you're buying doesn't actually run and you have to employ people/services to verify your ads ran and get rebates). The amount of data for digital got an entire generation of marketers savvy on cost optimization from the razor thin budgets for staffing and digital campaigns with a much higher velocity (short 2 weeks campaign vs 3-6 month TV campaigns). Now just having reach isn't enough. Google got a lot of years of band-aiding the problem with PageRank and marketers still want to do better. Now Google is facing competition for spend by the very companies they partnered with for add-on services. Instead of "get eyeballs to my site and charge me" it's "improve the interaction with my brand and charge me"
- fogetti 7y agoI think you are conflating the seller and buyer side. In Google's case the CPC is actually a revenue and they do not see it as cost as the marketers you described. So from marketers' POV, yes, conversion makes more sense. From Google's POV they couldn't care less I think. And the important thing is the trend, not the actually quarterly numbers anyway. Which I assume would be the same even if we took a look at the conversions.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoGoogle absolutely cares about conversions. Customers that don't see conversions will eventually stop doing business. Iirc in the early days of google analytics one of the much touted features was the ability to connect google ad clicks to the conversion funnel.
- leonidasv 7y agoNot related to the article, but this video autoplay is super annoying. An alternative version for those who also find this annoying: https://outline.com/5Vd9BS https://outline.com/5Vd9BS
- lucasverra 7y agofirefox has autplay off by default.
- H8crilA 7y agoI wish that shareholders would frequently vote on what data is included in the financial reports. Either that or have the SEC be much much more pressing on the issue. Perhaps even a minority of shareholders (say 30%) should be allowed to enforce data publication rules. Why should the management decide on which data is disclosed and which is not? It should rather be entirely decided by the management's supervisors, this is the shareholders or the regulators. Makes no sense to me otherwise. "Yes, it's all your money that we manage here, but you can't look at it. You can only look at what we allow you to look at. Now go model our company and figure out what our stock should be worth without whatever it is that we don't give you."
- flokie 7y agoThe SEC does decide.... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-sec-wants-to-know-why-google-doesnt-report-youtube-revenue-2018-02-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-sec-wants-to-know-why-...
- H8crilA 7y agoI mean yeah, but they should be much more pressing. And I doubt they have enough bandwidth to monitor the thousands of publicly traded companies, so would make much more sense to just legislate a standard way of a shareholder mechanism for explicit control of the non-GAAP metrics.
- Scoundreller 7y agoUgh, one of the graphs is for YoY decline in CPC rates, but it it shows 2015 at the right and 2019 at the far left. Who does that? And it shows it by quarter, so is this a rolling window? Then: > As long as Google can keep growing the blue line -- growth of paid clicks faster than the red line its ad click deflation -- then it is golden. > Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%. NO! The blue line, from the 68% value, was their growth in click quantity. And the direct comparison between CPC and clicks isn’t valid: GOOG could have the less clicks but increase its CPC revenue if it targets poorly. Total revenue is what we should look at. Other than all this, this seems to be much ado about nothing. If GOOG can better target ads, they’ll get more clicks. And when an ad pays well, publishers create content that will show that ad, driving down rates but increasing clicks. And GOOG’s ad growth is international. Where GDP is lower; as CPC rates will go lower. And international increasingly favours CPM in my opinion. A fast food chain or a brand of soap doesn’t need clickthroughs.
- floatingatoll 7y agoNewest-left graphs would make sense in analysis domains that consider “the most recent time interval” exponentially more important than “the least recent time interval”, and would display the most valuable data (most recent) correctly on mobile screens of any width leaving truncation to cut off ancient histories.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoThey're also used to make age the X axis without requiring the time period to be specified somewhere else.
- vgeek 7y agoGrowth in Asian/South American countries with less advertisers and lower CPCs. There may also be disproportionate growth in branded CPCs, which have a significantly lower CPC (but higher CPM due to high CTRs) than commodity terms.
- 7y ago
- cavisne 7y agoThese graphs suck, but it looks like last quarter was a much lower decrease than the past. That doesn’t fit the articles argument that CPC is falling off a cliff and google is trying to hide it.
- Thorman 7y agoIf these graphs were segmented by device, network (search vs. display/youtube) and the country it would tell the story. Users are doing more searches and clicking more as a result of the convenience of mobile devices. Desktop users were and are more intent-driven (worth more to advertisers), but now comprise a much smaller percentage of the total. Display and Youtube impression inventory may be becoming a larger percentage of total, but has lower value than search thereby bringing down the average. As stated by another user international expansion into lower income regions would lead to lower average CPC as well.
- corentin88 7y agoExplains a bit the recent redesign of ads in SERP. Google seems to struggle to keep growing Adwords - it still make an astounding amount of money still.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoMore competition from Amazon whose ad revenue went up 40% last year