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Yes. Brands, third parties, google, etc have all ran incremental sales lift tests, brand lift studies, customer lifetime value tests, etc and determined how suc
by soared 5y ago
Yes. Brands, third parties, google, etc have all ran incremental sales lift tests, brand lift studies, customer lifetime value tests, etc and determined how successful tactics are and moved budget accordingly. There is a reason google/etc are worth billions.
I’ve posted this comment before, but:
1. It’s hard to tell when someone has bought a product. You buy it at a reseller and the brand will never know. Or you buy it on mobile, but have researched the brand on desktop. Or you purchased it at work, but were researching it at home. Advertisers suppress known buyers but they don’t perfectly match you to all of your devices.
2. Just like there are not so good developers and not so good code, there are not so good marketers who aren’t that great at their job. Or they have too much work and didn’t set it up correctly. DSPs are extremely extremely complicated, so it’s to make mistakes.
3. Retention and advertising to previous purchasers drives more additional purchases. Maybe you only purchased blinds for the main floor of your house but not the basement.
- Syonyk 5y ago> It’s hard to tell when someone has bought a product. How about, "I've literally got it in my last-day purchase history on eBay and they keep showing me the same thing and a bunch of related stuff to the item that hasn't even arrived yet, but that they've taken my money for"? ... and then eBay follows me around showing the same stuff on other sites. The thing I've purchased. From eBay. At least, they did, until I got more aggressive blocking ads and started using the internet a ton less.
- david_allison 5y agoIf you buy a product and you're dissatisfied, you're more likely than the average person to buy a similar product.
- pooper 5y agoA certain national bank which I shall not name had a banner on top of its app. The link opens a web page that goes to double click and then opens the bank's website. Why would a bank app take me through a double click link just to take me back to their own website? My guess is this is the same reason why eBay shows you ads for things you just bought. There are massive inefficiencies in these large organizations. I'm sure everything they do is locally optimal but not even close globally.
- dylan604 5y agoif it didn't do the round trip, it would leave a hole in the analytics. They get paid on the analytics, so the analytics must be kept whole
- soared 5y agoIn-app analytics is done through a “mobile measurement partner” which have limitations in tracking so sometimes you need workarounds like using a redirect. Also likely the app is a totally different team and getting them to change a link is difficult, but giving them a link where the web team can change the redirect is easy.
- names_are_hard 5y agoWow...I think you just discovered a hole in Apple's draconian app store policies. They don't let you link to your website from your app if the site has a way to buy a subscription without paying the Apple tax. But what if you sell ad space in your app through an intermediary, and then turn around and bid on ads for users that have your app installed? You might be able to get them to notice you and sign up on the web instead of through the app. Genius. (I'm only being half-facetious)
- pooper 5y agoThank you for your reply. I went back to look at where I had mentioned that I had used an iPhone but you're right. I have an iPhone and and Android phone but I use banking apps exclusively on the iPhone. Interesting idea. Probably still would be cheaper than paying 30% tax to Apple.
- iamstupidsimple 5y agoIt's called a "house ad" and is generally free for the publisher. They appear when there's no other inventory (like insurance ads). Usually double-click stuff is all negotiated by publishers and has little to do with AdSense or bidding.
- soared 5y agoThis doesn’t seem like a genuine discourse, but purchase suppression can occur in batches. So that purchase data may not get fed back into all the advertising systems for days/weeks if it’s using a poor set up. For example, sometimes for suppression brands literally just export a csv of customers and upload it to google. If your marketing guy does it once a week.. I’d assume eBay’s doesn’t work like that, but it’s possible. Also possible they just don’t suppress recently bought items !
- Tomte 5y agoMy standard response to this: Prior purchases do have predictive power. They can very well be positively correlated to further purchases. I've often bought stuff that didn't work for some reason. It was broken, or it had something that was bothering me. Maybe the power adapter was annoyingly loud (looking at you, Kyocera). So I sent it back. But before I managed to go to the postal office a few days later I was already searching for a replacement online. If I buy a TV set, I have indicated that I need/want a TV set. The rate of returns is broadly known (and maybe even specifically for me the return rate is known). So Amazon et. al. do well to recommend similar stuff or things from the exact same product category to me. Even right after I have bought a graphics tablet I'm infinitely more likely to buy a graphics tablet tomorrow, compared to my parents who have never bought one in their lives, and never will. Or maybe the new TV turns out to be great, and I realize it would be nice to have a second one in my sleeping room, and why not buy a third one for the bathroom? ;-)
- onion2k 5y agoBut before I managed to go to the postal office a few days later I was already searching for a replacement online. While plausible, that sort of situation doesn't sound common enough that it should underpin the entire online advertising industry. Even right after I have bought a graphics tablet I'm infinitely more likely to buy a graphics tablet tomorrow, compared to my parents who have never bought one in their lives, and never will. But you're more likely still to buy another stylus, or art software, or an accessory, or physical art materials, etc. Why don't advertisers understand that?
- watwut 5y agoNone of this sounds super frequent?
- Tomte 5y agoDoesn't matter in the slightest. You've identified yourself as someone who is definitely interested in that product. And not "just looking", but actually paying money. That's super valuable to businesses. I still maintain that people who have bought a TV yesterday are more likely to buy a TV today than people who haven't bought a TV yesterday. Very few people buy a TV today. Or in the coming days. It seems like a straightforward application of the base rate fallacy. Sure, most people who bought the TV yesterday keep their TV and don't need a second one. But unless you have specific information about other people's interest in buying one, they may still be your best shot at selling another one. Also, both you and sibling commenter argue as if there were a scarcity of ads. Amazon showing me a TV ad doesn't preclude Amazon from showing me a kitchen utensil ad on the next page.
- Scoundreller 5y agoAt least it’s a thing you bought. I wanted to sell a thing, so I went onto newegg to copy the description and paste it into my eBay listing and I got ads following me around the internet to buy the thing for weeks. Like, I’m the opposite of interested in buying it, I’m trying to get rid of it.
- XorNot 5y agoAs far as I know, the convention about this is that when you buy a thing, the most likely next purchase statistically is in fact the same thing because you are unhappy with the one you bought.
- vba616 5y agoEver seen really weird combinations in "people who bought X also bought..."?
- amelius 5y agoJust give me a button "I already own this".
- mikewarot 5y agoIt is entirely possible that large corporations measure the effectiveness of their advertising by comparing it to sales, and are confusing correlation with causation on a massive scale. They spend more on advertising, and point to sales in the same time frame, as a cause, even if reality disagrees. There are zero incentives for anyone to figure this out and fix it within corporate structures. I'd be thankful it makes advertising easy to spot, and less effective in real life. ;-) Imagine if you're in the middle management of Google and you realize that target ads don't work, and the results to this point are just luck. You'd want to do something like "Improve your advertising spend" by making the ads "more efficient", and selling targeted ads to people that you know have already purchased, but the advertiser doesn't. Eventually you could advertise that your ads are measured to be more than 80% correlated with a rise in sales. (Leaving out the reversed causality). If this IS the case... shhhhhh... don't tell anyone. It would crash Google's stock price. Nah, who am I kidding, the market stays irrational for decades. ;-) Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
- oblaff 5y agoAgreed. Online advertising measurement remains opaque and there is no incentive to fix it. The book Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang does a good job covering this! (It is a solid bear case for fb,g,etc as well :p)
- soared 5y agoYou clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Entire business are built on testing the effectiveness of online advertising, and providing that as a consulting device to brands. Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”. Nobody is confusing correlation and causation. These are rigorous studies completed by literal data scientists and statisticians. They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study, and showing positive outcomes where they do not occur would be hugely detrimental to their business. And to your point, realizing advertising does not work happens all the fucking time. I see it literally all the time. It’s why you run studies. Then you take your budget, move it somewhere else, and run a test to see if it’s effective. Every major brand does it this way.
- Joeri 5y agoYou are going to have to provide sources for these claims. Freakonomics podcast did an episode on the topic of online advertising and argued largely the opposite of what you’re saying, that there is massive overspending on online advertising, and increases in sales often get misattributed to ad campaigns when they have other causes. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
- distribot 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising#:~:text=It%20revealed%20that%20targeted%20advertising,on%20the%20ads%20into%20buyers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising#:~:text=I... Markets are imperfect and irrational, but you really don't think that there is a trillion dollar misunderstanding about the efficacy of the practice? Idk jack about advertising but it seems unlikely to me.
- newaccount74 5y agoSelling homeopathic medicine is also a huge market, so big that every single pharmacy in Austria has an huge range of homeopathic medicine on display. Just the fact that people buy ad campaigns doesn't mean that they have any effect at all.
- distribot 5y agoThat's fair but homepathic medicine is dwarfed by regular medicine in the industrialized world. There's no homepathic Pfizer or Bayer. I think if there was another practice that was way better than targeted advertising, targeted advertising might exist as a distant woo-woo second.
- amelius 5y ago> Advertisers suppress known buyers but they don’t perfectly match you to all of your devices. And in case of doubt ... they found that it is more advantageous to them to just keep bothering you.