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So I’ve heard (and believe) this for years: the targeting of ad networks borders on useless. But as the old adage goes: I know 50% of my advertising is worthles

So I’ve heard (and believe) this for years: the targeting of ad networks borders on useless. But as the old adage goes: I know 50% of my advertising is worthless, I just don’t know which 50%. So why haven’t we run out of suckers yet if this stuff is really that bad? If businesses weren’t seeing the ROI, you’d think they’d see that. So either, as bad as it is, it’s still worth it, or they aren’t able to measure ROI properly (a distant third: they are able to, and still do it?) I’d love to hear from someone with first hand experience.

edoceo 6y ago
"why haven’t we run out of suckers yet" New suckers are created at a rate of approximately 1/minute.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Fact check: True
dahdum 6y ago
If you're running high volume campaigns with fast sales cycles you'll see huge gains from using advanced targeting options. All of them are best guesses and far from certain. Income targeting may be inferred by their (inferred) zip code and (inferred) age for example. Identifying what to optimize is trivial at scale, simply look at your campaign performance by targeting options and it usually screams out at you. Doing better in the female, 18-25, urban demo? Raise bids for them and lower bids in the non-performing groups. It hardly matters to me how often Facebook or Google got it wrong if pulling the lever still works. Most of the sour grapes I've seen are brand or lead gen campaigns run by the inexperienced griping about individual clicks. If you can't start broad and prune, you need to start hyper targeted and closely monitor.