12 ms·
We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely u
by nutanc 6y ago
We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition.
Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)
In our early days we used to be scared and bid for it.Lost a lot of money doing that. Then we talked about it and stopped. Again, no change in customer acquisition. Turns out, customers scroll down the ads and still click on our website.
Are our competitors getting some of our traffic?
Of course.
But my business is not built on the assumption that people will not find my competitors. Its built on the fact that people will explore options and try to find the best fit for them. So its ok.
- 1f60c 6y ago> Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) DHH (of RoR and Basecamp fame) has been beating the drum about this for a while now.
- nutanc 6y agoYes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)
- pb7 6y agoCurious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?
- aaronmdjones 6y agowhy do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in? My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".
- pb7 6y agoSounds like a pretty valuable service that connects you to the things you are looking for. Why do you feel entitled to get this for free?
- aaronmdjones 6y agoWhat? I didn't ask for anything for free. I'm just telling you what happens. Normal people don't remember domain names. I'd hazard a guess that half of them don't even know what those are. If they want to get anywhere, they put it into a search engine, even if it's something ridiculously common like Wikipedia.
- pb7 6y agoThat’s fine. But if you want to use a service, you have to agree to the service’s terms. That includes ads that appear before results and competitors bidding on ads for any search terms. That’s just how it works in a rational world. It doesn’t really matter the reason you had to use the service. Otherwise, why is Grammarly a billion dollar company? People are bad at grammar, let them live! And use the service for free, according to your logic.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThat's how it works under certain market conditions. Calling out flaws, or wanting a change, doesn't mean people are demanding the strawman you've constructed of "exactly like you get today but free". Just as an example, the people at the top of a few organizations could flip a switch and make all the major browsers default to nonprofit search engines.
- Pxtl 6y agoI'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.
- bhouston 6y agoI first ran my such Google Ad in 2005. And yeah our competitor at the time was pissed. Google makes money with these so they allow it as long as the ad text does contain the trademark.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoYou need to have a thick skin in business. What matters are whether consumers are happy.
- notatoad 6y agoThere's nothing illegal about referencing somebody else's trademark as long as you're using it to talk about their product. Having a trademark doesn't forbid your competitors from talking about you.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoWhat I think should be made illegal is that Google (and others) is essentially collecting another toll even when users enter in the brand name of the target business in the first place. That is: 1. User types CompanyFoo (whose real URL is www.companyfoo.com) into their address bar, which lands them on Google (because Google owns Chrome and pays billions for the privilege on other browsers). 2. Since Google will sell this keywords to others, many businesses always bid on their own brand name to ensure it comes up first. 3. Thus, an ad for CompanyFoo shows up first, even though www.companyfoo.com is the first search result, so when user clicks on the CompanyFoo ad Google takes its cut. Again, this is also because Google has done as much as possible to make ads as visually similar to SEO results as possible - just the teeny 'ad' banner, compare to the big yellow box of early Google. I don't have as much objection for other companies buying branded keywords, but the way Google has set up things up they are taking their cut from everyone even when they are giving very little value.
- efreak 6y agoTip: URL suggestions are rarely advertising, and pop up faster than the results page does. Check the suggestions before searching.
- bdefore 6y agoToo much to hope for: a Chromium fork to have the search hint dropdown provide suggestions + Duck Duck Go results. And maybe block the enter key unless a resolvable address had been entered to prevent inadvertent Google searches.
- maxwelljoslyn 6y agoI had a hunch and looked at MDN's list of web extension APIs. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Browser_support_for_JavaScript_APIs#omnibox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... It seems like you could implement your described behavior as a cross-browser extension, for everything except Safari (and Android Firefox -_-). Easier than forking Chrome! :)
- bdefore 6y agoThanks. It does seem tantalizingly there. Now that I've pondered it a bit more I think what I want is a one-way direction from Google's suggestions into an ad-free browsing space. The omnibox is a bit of a misdirection.
- takeda 6y agoWhat's the point of listing Edge or Opera? Is the same damn browser as Chrome after they forgo their engines.
- maxwelljoslyn 6y agoSearch me. Perhaps there are other factors influencing compatibility; perhaps these lists were created before the forgoing of the engines.
- nuclearnice1 6y ago> searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) Tried it. One ad. From ozontel.com
- davidmurdoch 6y agoSame
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wtn 6y agoI saw Dialpad
- kroggen 6y agoIt appeared 2 ads for me, the first one very big with 3 clickable links
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoOne ad from dialpad for my try.
- wraptile 6y agoI've got two ads: salesforce and weeloy.
- Akababa 6y agoozontel.com doesn't exist. Is that a typo or did a competitor really buy ads to a nonexistent domain?
- rofrol 6y agoozonetel.com
- nuclearnice1 6y agogood eye. That’s a typo on my part
- swiley 6y agoWe're probably not in your target market but most people here probably know anything marked with "ad" is very likely to contain malware and probably won't click it even if they think it goes where they want.
- nl 6y agoThis isn't true. Google search ads are rarely malicious - Google does a pretty good screening them.
- dannyw 6y agoI disagree. When searching for crypto related terms, more often than not I see phishing sites as ads than legitimate ads.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kirill5pol 6y agoI have recently been getting straight up spam (“you won 1 million dollars!” type) as ads in Gmail. No idea how these managed to show up when these would have been easily marked as spam if it was an email.
- 6y ago
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoIf anything, FB ads were worse than useless for my business, all they attracted was 90% fraud. Looking at what business Ozonetel is in (i.e. sales are directed towards business owners), I'm not suprised FB ads were also worthless for you. I get the sense FB ads are really only good for things a consumer might impulse buy (e.g. clothing, games, small gifts, etc.) but anything where the user is probably going to do some more in-depth thinking about the purchase, they're beyond useless. Which pretty much makes sense - even if you've drilled down your targeting well for business decision makers who may sign up for Ozonetel, it's highly unlikely that decision maker is going to really want to know more about Ozonetel while they're looking at cat vids and fighting with crazy uncles about politics.
- edgyquant 6y agoFacebook ads are the worst from a users perspective. I bought a floor mat through them once and for the next week all the ads were for floor mats. I just bought one I’m not interested in buying another. I bought a PC chair recently with my credit card, now I see a bunch of ads for PC chairs, again, I don’t need another one.
- modin 6y agoSame thing with kitchen appliances, but not limited to Facebook. I'm not going to buy another refrigerator for at least 10 years, but still I'm treated as Mr Fridge.
- rtkwe 6y agoHonestly this might be a good thing, it seems to show that ad networks don't have or at least don't provide your actual purchase history to the ad space buyers because given that info they probably wouldn't be spamming someone who just bought a $thing with ads for $thing_but_from_us. As annoying as it is it's probably better than the alternative of ubiquitous access to your purchase history.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
- TriNetra 6y ago> For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone. > When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves. Isn't above an example of a criminal intent of deliberate fraud?
- pjc50 6y agoYes, and? How on earth are you going to even explain it to the police, let alone find which jurisdiction to use?
- yreg 6y agoYou are buying it from some vendor, their company is invoicing you. You can use either your or their jurisdiction, whatever fits better and you can also sue them directly. You explain it like: >For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone. >When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves." You don't have to be a genius software engineer to understand that.
- fegu 6y agoUsually you will have to choose the jurisdiction of the party you want to take to court. This is part of the reason some regulated industries require you to have presence locally.
- yreg 6y agoAh right, usually you can sue on your home turf only if there's a treaty for it (e.g. when both parties are based in EU).
- iamacyborg 6y agoAd fraud is HUGE online.
- KingOfCoders 6y agoLuckily bidding on your competitors name is illegal in Germany. We did get our competitors to not do that with some letters from lawyers.
- baybal2 6y agoI always thought that it was clear cut decided by Interflora case in EU court, and that such bidding is only prohibited if impersonation happens.
- KingOfCoders 6y agoIANAL In Germany there is a law against dishonest competition, called "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb".
- riverdroid 6y agoFrom my limited experience, resources are better spent to SEO to boost ranking. Also, you can request review on google ads keywords to prevent competitors from using your name, especially if you have a trademark.
- somedude895 6y agoYou can keep them from using your brand name in their ad text, but you can't keep them from bidding on and showing up on searches for your brand.
- utopcell 6y ago> Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) Fact checking you: On Google, I see at most a single ad (on most refreshes for Ozonetel, on one occasion for something called dialpad, on some cases, no ad is shown) and then your website, whatever it may be. It would seem that you are trying to piggyback on this article's discussion to increase awareness of your brand, which is not cool.
- ajit_singh 6y agoGreat initiative. Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads. They randomly change distribution models, ignore the bot traffic, and present eye candy line graphs to show "tremendous" impact from ads. And this keeps on running until cash graph goes below the threshold and CEO goes into the "introspection" mode.
- collyw 6y agoOne place where I worked spend a lot on ads, but they also hired some marketing people and a leads conversion person who seemed to be able to quantify how much return on investment they were getting from ads.
- somedude895 6y agoThing is, everybody involved has an interest in making the numbers look good. And it's really easy to make them look good even without faking anything. Just omit the fact that you're counting post view leads, stretch the lookback window, etc
- collyw 6y agoI think he did a bit more of an objective job than that. He compared platforms where we were advertising and I remember that Pinterest generally gave a far better return on investment (than Facebook, which was the main platform we used).
- ehvatum 6y ago> Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads. How the hell do I structure my empire so that it out-lasts my reign as obsessive good emperor? I am the one guy who can finally say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good person and a great VP of marketing, but you’ve done such a great job that you’re now just marketing yourself really and you’re fired.”
- ashtonkem 6y agoHonestly, the way that ad companies treat brand specific search terms has a whiff of fraud to me. Surely Google is well aware that by the time an end user is searching for a brand, they have no interest in anything else; they just forgot the specific URL. If I ever found docs encouraging such behavior, I'd upgrade it from "whiff" to "pants on fire".
- crossroadsguy 6y agoThat's at least something related being offered :) When I searched for a very specific pillow type (and added country name to the search to get local results) I get this as first result on Google https://i.imgur.com/Fxx9b80.png https://i.imgur.com/Fxx9b80.png. It's a mattress/pillow start-up/brand in India. The ad shows the exact thing I am looking for. But when I click, and I am redirected to the actual product page https://i.imgur.com/eI6sNtJ.png https://i.imgur.com/eI6sNtJ.png that has none of these features and the product description is completely different from what it shows on Google Search result page. I had reported this to Google sometimes back and nothing changed in their SEO gymnastics the last time I had checked a couple of weeks later. I think what they are doing is fraud (wrong? unethical?). But what really annoyed me is it wasted a lot of my time as I thought I was doing something wrong and probably they actually had the product I am looking for.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoSEO isn't Paid its a different channel
- roenxi 6y agoPrefacing this with an acceptance both that HN culturally has US management principles and that I've got no idea how to run a business... Why is it an initial assumption that customer acquisition and ad spend are linked short or even medium term? That doesn't seem right. When I see an ad for washing machines it doesn't make me run out and buy a washing machine. It gets me familiar with Samsung the brand so in 6-12 months when I buy a washing machine I am familiar with Samsung and buy their brand. Or it means that if my washing machine starts to sputter I'm more confident knowing where to go to buy a new one. It doesn't seem enough to stop advertising for 6 months and claim no damage is being done. It seems well understood that repeated exposure to a brand has a powerful effect on humans.
- bitcharmer 6y agoDon't know how much of that is true as I am not a practitioner but when I was studying marketing we were taught this (continuous brand awareness reinforcement) only works for FMCG.
- pvorb 6y agoSo this is arguing against GP's point since a washing machine should last for several years and is not fast-moving, right?
- bitcharmer 6y agoYes, that's correct
- roenxi 6y agoUber is about as fast-moving a consumer good as it gets. Up to the local speed limit.
- austincheney 6y agoIn online marketing/merchandising online advertising is very alluring for two reasons: immediate feedback and the few key players are well known. Essentially online advertising makes a marketing team’s life much easier even though it could be a net negative for the business revenue. When I was doing some work in this space for Travelocity many years ago the biggest problem was cannibalism of data and traffic. Yes, the traffic coming in from ads was shitty and generally costs more than it returned, but even still cannibalism was the bigger problem. We would have been better off taking all the ads off the site and spending money in other offline venues. It was so apparent that ad spend was a drug addiction. I still don’t understand how this was a mystery to anybody in management considering the strength of the brand and the success of their television ads. Eventually the business imploded and the partner/affiliate segment became more valuable than the core business partially because it was absent online ad spend.
- phire 6y agoIn my experience, the loss of conversion to competitors was not the problem with google ads on your brand. The problem was phishing attacks on our customers.
- danpalmer 6y agoI think it's worth countering this with the fact that FB ads work very well for us at Thread, because in the HN echo chamber it's very easy to lose sight of this. This is going to depend entirely on the product and the market. We're B2C, and a very "personal" service rather than a service for one's professional life, so that probably helps. Plus our target market isn't defined by being tech-savvy. As with all channels, optimising for customer acquisition (not just clicks), and lifetime value (not just easy sales) is critical for the long term health of the channel.
- exikyut 6y agoSerendipitous but of anecdata... was curious where you were located (ah, CA), so googled :) aaaand my keyboard decided I wanted, uhhh, "ozometel" (???). Did you mean: ozonetel? Nice. (Gboard bit me again while typing it out here too lol)
- supernovae 6y agoTwitter has been by far the worst ad spend i've ever seen. When I complained that the clicks i got weren't real people, they blamed the landing page. I was advertising to 3 keywords "free astrophotography data" and the landing page was 0 ads, 0 popups and a link to free data to download. They charged me for the ads, I complained to credit card company and did a charge back and they never followed through... in fact, they offered me more credit to try advertising more. For the life of me, I'm not sure how you can pay for 1,000 clicks to a very specific keyword and not have a single person download anything. The download was also valid for any user type. If you were on a mobile device, it showcased data that you could see on your mobile phone vs requiring a tool to download XISF or FITS data - it allowed you to download the high res image(s) in native iOS/Android formats. Beyond the improbability of landing page being junk, Google analytics didn't fire for the majority of the traffic and twitters response was "the landing page may be too slow" the landing page was < 1 second load times even within the twitter iframe nonsense. anywhoo... the same ads on facebook, bing and google all had 75% click through and downloads but there were still a ton of clicks that had no analytics, no web time, didn't load anything in web analytics that we got charged for too... the whole thing seems like a scam
- piccolbo 6y agoFYI, Ozonetel bid successfully for the top line ad in my google search [ozonetel], dialpad taking second. You don't get there if you don't bid.