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I stopped advertising and nothing happened

• whatever1 5y ago
  I stopped eating for a day and nothing happened. Therefore, food is useless.
• trollied 5y ago
  I don't understand why this has been upvoted. If you read the article in its entirety, there's no point whatsoever.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    People hate advertising and upvote anything that implies it is useless. Whilst most of HN is employed by advertising companies and their offshoots ...
    • micromacrofoot 5y ago
      It's not useless, it's predatory, deceiving, and outright hostile. I literally have to screen my entire network to avoid being tracked by it within my own home. I don't answer phone calls because of it. I have to screen media for my children so they're not manipulated by it.
      • slivanes 5y ago
        Sounds like you're heavily manipulated by it already.
        • micromacrofoot 5y ago
          I think you're intentionally being flippant at my expense, but it's impossible to live in society and avoid advertising's influence. Facebook and Twitter will adjust who you see content from to increase your likelihood of interacting with advertisement. As more and more social interaction happens online, this can influence who your friends are if you're not careful. I see no reason to deride someone trying to wrest back some control.
    • a4isms 5y ago
      I did not read this as suggesting advertising is useless, the author says outright that it can help build up a critical mass of brand recognition. But the author's point is that once you reach that critical mass, advertising may begin to cannibalize your organic search results because users click on your ad instead of clicking on your site in the search results. I own a copy of "Ogilvy on Advertising" I bought in the 1980s. In it, David Ogilvy basically says, "test, test, test." That's the message here. Test. The advertising you're doing could be useless. I'm not sure I agree that when you reach a certain point, ALL advertising is useless. Maybe when you reach the point where most of your advertising has no ROI and is cannibalizing your organic SEO, you need to change your spend and try to find ways to get your ads onto search results that don't feature your site. If you find that works, you can then adjust your SEO and see if you can make that advertising go to zero ROI too. Lather, rinse, repeat.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      'Whilst most of HN is employed by advertising companies and their offshoots ...' If a man knowingly supports a cause that is against his financial interest, thats worth paying attention to
  • paulcole 5y ago
    Discussing the pointlessness of fields like marketing and advertising is catnip on HN.
    • mirntyfirty 5y ago
      I think society has been somewhat brainwashed into the importance of online marketing. I like scientific approaches that refute that. For example, I don’t think that people should be following their dentists and plumbers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
      • kristofferR 5y ago
        > I like scientific approaches that refute that. No doubt, but this is as far away from scientific as it can get. "I stopped advertising. My sales rose at the same time. Advertising doesn't work" is basically the thesis, but his only "evidence" is an unreasoned assumption that the two things are casually linked instead of just correlated by the timing.
        • mirntyfirty 5y ago
          Agreed. I was being somewhat tangential to the article at hand and responding more to the catnip comparison. I can only recall a few articles that were particularly well-reasoned.
    • jgurewitz 5y ago
      I think it's hard for people to appreciate just how much human behavior is driven by those fields.
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    What do you mean there's no point? No point in ads - yeah. No point in article - they stated that ads are not universally working. Sometimes you don't need groundbreaking results to make an interesting article.
  • ajkjk 5y ago
    Er... sure there is. There's a whole 'lessons learned' section with a list of points.
  • bcrl 5y ago
    Sure there is. A healthy business' best assets are its customers, and happy customers will tell their friends about your business when it comes up appropriately. Word of mouth is worth far more than web advertising ever will be.
  • a4isms 5y ago
    The author made an excellent point in TFA: If you do your SEO right and use advertising to build up some brand recognition, you reach the point where your web site appears on the first page of search results alongside your paid ad for your web site. However, Google has designed their search results to encourage clicking on the ads, so many users who actually find you with search will click the ad you are paying for instead of the search result for your site. The author presents empirical evidence that not paying for ads doesn't reduce traffic, because users will click the site in the search results, instead of clicking the ad. That is very much a point, and one that can save people a lot of money if they test it and find their site adn advertising have the same dynamics.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Until your competitors start buying ads under your name. And you have to buy ads back to counter-attack. And Google laughs all the way to the bank.
      • aantix 5y ago
        Is there a smart counter attack to this?
        • ben-schaaf 5y ago
          Try to drum up public outrage to get them to stop? Maybe if they use your trademark there's cause to sue? Otherwise good luck.
        • dotandgtfo 5y ago
          Branded search terms cost way more for competitors for reasons I can't be bothered getting into, most likely they are losing money by doing it. You can counter it by bidding yourself - which on branded search terms is usually dirt cheap. But ultimately, the only real counter is delivering a better service.
          • aantix 5y ago
  • antattack 5y ago
    His point is right at the top: I was spending time optimising the 'bid' in automated advertising system, trying to get the best bang for buck. Why was I doing it? Everyone else seemed to be doing it. This was a terrible reason to do it.
    • bwb 5y ago
      Ya but a better lesson would be to do what has ROI. Ads work great, but you have to measure them, and you don't pay for traffic you get for free (such as your brand name).
  • jdrc 5y ago
    That title thought
  • kristofferR 5y ago
    I agree, the post itself is borderline useless, but hopefully it will spawn an interesting discussion here.
  • artursapek 5y ago
    People don't read anymore
• tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  It's a nice anecdote saying that people should validate their assumptions before continuing. In this case, the author proved that advertisement doesn't work for him, and that he can turn it off, at no loss. One point though, this business seems well established. At that point, turning off advertising may not be so damaging. What would be interesting to know is, would he reach his current profitability if he didn't start with advertising, and depending on the organic search from the get go?
  • a4isms 5y ago
    The author says right in the article that paid search is valuable for bootstrapping when you have no or few users, which suggests that the author does not think they would have reached their current profitability without some paid search early on.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    Another conclusion could be that he was doing bad advertising, and should have improved it.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    Probably the best case for no advertising is Tesla: they still did loads of marketing, just not any direct web/tv/etc advertising.
  • chmod775 5y ago
    >and depending on the organic search from the get go? You don't even need search, as some businesses to which search and ads are essentially useless haven proven. Think of closed/invite-only community platforms: they will have little value to anyone who just gets there via an ad or search, since they have no entryway to any community.
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  Some of the best products don't need advertising at all. Raspberry Pis for example, I actually cannot recall ever seeing an ad for a Raspberry Pi. Word of mouth, seeing examples of it in use - now you might call a Youtube video on how to set up a Pi as a headless server on your local network 'guerrilla marketing' or something, but I rather doubt that was paid for, people just like showing off their little Pi projects.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    >I actually cannot recall ever seeing an ad for a Raspberry Pi You hear about them in the media all the time, though. I'd be shocked if they didn't have a solid in-house PR team.
  • jordache 5y ago
    rasppi is a niche product. There will never be mass consumer appeal. Just like how you don't see advertisement for Ergodox keyboards. Even if they spent money on ad campaign, it will likely not move the revenue needle
    • epicide 5y ago
      Maybe we need more products that don't target mass consumer appeal.
      • bwb 5y ago
        Why? Can you explain that thought process? i.e. everything should be niche? Like toothpaste for devops engineers who want their teeth to grow in the dark when they are around 2 or more wifi networks?
        • xanaxagoras 5y ago
          I mean, I would buy that.
          • 5y ago
• irrational 5y ago
  TLDR seems to be, advertising might be helpful when you are starting out, but once you are established it is probably a waste of money.
• kristofferR 5y ago
  > The chart above shows our average conversion per cost over the lifetime of our adverts. The average was 3.25, meaning we were being told for every £1 we spend, a user spent £3.25. Sounds amazing right? Just spend more money on adverts, surely. Nope. We turned off all adverts. Sales increased. This isn't really valuable without more and better information. The post is almost totally devoid of data. For all I, and maybe he, knows, sales might have increased more if he kept advertising.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    You can't do an statistically correct test on everything. At some point you have to just assume something (yeah, even when doing a formal test). Here he assumed that, given there was no new fact on the short period he analyzed, he could expect short term trend to stay the same if he did nothing. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption.
• VoidWhisperer 5y ago
  One thing that this article doesn't mention and I'm curious about: while the author didn't see it in this case, if you are in a much more competitive niche, if you completely stop ad pay, what is stopping google from then displaying a competitor who is still paying them for ad space at the top of a search result related to your brand/market niche where you are otherwise the first non-ad result?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • deeeej 5y ago
    Hi, original author here. Great point. In fact other firms seems to be able to get away with even using your brand-name in their advertising. Simply put, nothing stops this, and it will happen. It comes down to how confident the customer is looking specifically for you and not anyone else. In competitive niches, this could be tricky, but if they searched on your brand name, there is a high chance they'll dig to find your website.
  • dazc 5y ago
    Nothing, which is why you may get to the point where you're advertising to protect your brand rather than advertising to build your business.
    • throwaway2048 5y ago
      I find it completely plausible that advertising is a zero sum game for the reason above, and a negative sum game when you consider the externalities and the money spent on it.
  • sam0x17 5y ago
    The nonexistence of a competitor in many cases. But yes you’ve hit the dirty secret of search ads — they are often a highway toll to receive the traffic you would probably already receive barring fierce competition
  • johnx123-up 5y ago
• soared 5y ago
  Person who isn’t an expert in advertising and doesn’t know how to run tests makes conclusions about advertising by not doing proper testing. Exciting stuff. This is why you hire an electrician rather than doing your own electrical work. They actually know what they’re doing.
  • brutusborn 5y ago
    I'm interested in how such testing works. What is wrong with his method of advertising-cold-turkey?
    • soared 5y ago
      The author doesn’t provide and data or specific info on what they did, but a few general points: 1. Seasonality. It sounds like they’re comparing a few months on to a few months off, which likely is affected more by the time of year than anything else. Year over year data would be a better comparison. 2. Attribution windows. If I serve you an ad, then “turn off my advertising”, then you convert, depending on how you look at the data my ad either did drive the conversion or did not. Likely he’s just looking at google analytics with default settings, so he’s missing post-view data and assists. 3. It’s not that difficult to run an actual test, and most advertising platforms give you tools and documentation on how to do so. 4. The author doesn’t understand advertising from a technical perspective and most likely is not doing the analysis correctly. The big red flag is when talking about buying a display ad and it only driving 2 conversions. It sounds like a prospecting ad, which is top of funnel and is not supposed to drive post click conversions. I highly doubt they had an impression tracker on the ad and looked at post view data with different attribution models. Or even multichannel funnel reports in ga. Those would show the actual impact of the banner, not just 2 post click conversions. I don’t mean to bash the guy but this post is rehashed all the time here and I end up reposting the same stuff.
      • brutusborn 5y ago
        Thanks for the detailed reply. I didn't interpret the parent as bashing, I think that it's good to be critical of these kinds of posts especially when the analysis is shallow and lacks data.
• dna_polymerase 5y ago
  Especially in online advertising measuring your success is rather simple. So at any point in time you should be able to have numbers to show for your efforts. While the article sounds promising the lack of data really makes it useless.
• sdoering 5y ago
  What I missed from the article was the question if the author measured the goal performance of their advertising. Also the ROI. Additionally it is (or should be) common knowledge to check if you are canabalizing your SEO results because in your niche you are not working against other organic search results or advertising of your competitors. Because this would have potentially shown from the get go if advertising in this case was unnecessary or if it supported the business until SEO had cached up.
• wellokpetejr 5y ago
  > In the end I decided the only real way to tell if what we were doing was working, was to turn it all off, for several months to see if there was a measurable difference. This is how he should have started. It’s called incrementality. You have a control group with no ads and you compare against a group shown ads. Then you can measure lift. This is Marketing 101.
• jgurewitz 5y ago
  These articles typically come in the form of, I was paying for my brand name when I was number one on organic search. I wasn't validating any of my other ad spend, I stopped and didn't see any negative impact, therefore advertising doesn't work/is a scam. As someone who's worked in the industry a while, I agree that it's a sad state of affairs generally but when people extrapolate that this means all advertising is bs it's just not true. Fundamentally business orders should track results from their ads the same way they look at impact anywhere else in their business.
  • z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
    No, it's because all advertising really IS bs... Advertising is nothing but psychological seduction and manipulation. "You're Satan's little helper, kill yourself."
  • tetsusaiga 5y ago
    Exactly, all this does is prove they never knew how to run ads to begin with. It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      > they never knew how to run ads to begin with This feels like a no true scotsman. I have doubts that the vast majority of digital advertising platforms do anything other than clutter websites, waste bandwidth, annoy people, and pay a small slice of tech employees. I'm open to seeing research on the topic (and I am pretty sure there is some), but what I've read is that most advertising has insufficient statistical power, thus confidence of advertising outcomes being anything but random flukes is low.
      • tetsusaiga 5y ago
        I appreciate your thoughtful criticism of this. The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start, and would have known much earlier whether they were getting a return on their investment. If your only way of measuring advertising results is to "turn it off", you're just flying blind, and one can't expect success with a (lack of) strategy like that. That said, you are not wrong that a meaningful percentage of advertising is being run with similarly insufficient statistical power, and to that I would say those businesses are also incorrect, for the most part. I delineate because at some point, say when you're Apple or Microsoft, you are so big that "brand awareness" advertising takes over performance advertising. For the most part though, I'd say those aren't the types of businesses we are discussing in a context like this one.
• throwmeariver1 5y ago
  Good advertising works, good advertising is hard so hard that even advertising agencies are not able to produce it most of the time. It's more a question of time and space I always go for opportunistic advertising is there something in the aether or is there a trend coming up which my product perfectly fits? That's the time to ramp up ad spending. There just is no need to have campaigns running just to produce background noise. Nobody cares about it most of the time not even yourself.
• jdlyga 5y ago
  Traditional advertising is becoming less and less effective. The brands that are having the most success right now use TikTok. They don't necessarily advertise, but instead create content on the platform. It comes off a lot more genuine. For example, Duolingo and their creepy giant stuffed owl stalking people who didn't do their Spanish lessons: https://digiday.com/marketing/how-duolingo-is-using-its-unhinged-content-with-duo-the-owl-to-make-people-laugh-on-tiktok/ https://digiday.com/marketing/how-duolingo-is-using-its-unhi...
  • schleck8 5y ago
    Duolingo also interacts with the community in the comments under random videos
• onpensionsterm 5y ago
  It seems like a disproportionate amount of ad spend is protection money to avoid the Don't Be Evil mob from selling your trademark to your competitors. A search for Total Car Check should not return competitors above the website itself.
  • TheCapn 5y ago
    I get that impression sometimes too. I had a comment a couple years ago on this site about how dumb it is that when I search for "TeamViewer" the first result is an ad for TeamViewer... why are they paying to advertise above their own page? But someone pointed it out, if they aren't paying for that ad spot, then RealVNC, or LogMeIn, whoever else is competing will. Seems ridiculous.
    • bmelton 5y ago
      It's also not necessarily guaranteed that it is in fact TeamViewer running the ad for TeamViewer. It's a pretty common marketing practice to arbitrage referral benefits so that you might sign up for a product that offers cash referral bonuses of (let's say) $5 per signup. An affiliate marketer may take some petty cash and run some experiments, determine that ~5% of the people will sign up to an ad with highly effective copy, so then now they can run ads, potentially pay higher rates per click than TeamViewer does, and make a little passive income on the side.
      • nicbou 5y ago
        To add to this, this is usually explicitly forbidden by most affiliate programs.
    • clearleaf 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure they do this because sometimes google returns the right sites seemingly by complete accident. Have you ever submitted a search, and there's a result for the right site, but it's to an irrelevant subdomain or archive section? Sometimes google gets me into parts of a website that users aren't supposed to be able to navigate to. Google has exposed weird personal files to me that were stored on commercial web sites multiple times, yet it couldn't return the actual intended entry point for those exact same websites. I have no choice but to assume malice over stupidity here.
• tetsusaiga 5y ago
  >In the end I decided the only real way to tell if what we were doing was working, was to turn it all off, for several months to see if there was a measurable difference. What? If this person genuinely thinks that there is no way to measure an ad's performance while it is running, they are either too ignorant to be in business, or they hired someone who lied to them.
  • yojo 5y ago
    If you’re full e-commerce the only metric that really matters is conversions. How do you know your ads aren’t just taking credit for customers who were going to buy anyway? You can get great CTR and conversion rate running ads against your brand name. But if your SEO is sound you’re pretty much just canibalizing your organic traffic. I’m not aware of a way to determine whether an ad just claimed credit for a customer it didn’t earn. I’m interested to learn though.
    • tetsusaiga 5y ago
      I agree that only conversions matter, but you should be able to track whether a customer originated from an ad click vs. SEO, whether they clicked one ad and had 4 sessions since, etc. While it's not a perfect system, you should know with a reasonable degree of accuracy how many dollars you get back for every dollar you put in to ad spend. As far as the SEO traffic issue, this can also be accounted for once you have scaled your ads beyond the levels of what SEO could yield. At low budgets this can be more of an issue, at high budgets much less so.
      • Nextgrid 5y ago
        > whether they clicked one ad and had 4 sessions since, etc. That's not trivial to do, both from a technical point of view (browsers - rightfully - fight these kinds of tracking attempts) but also legal (GDPR mandates that the customer opts into this kind of tracking but they have no incentive to do so).
        • tetsusaiga 5y ago
• vmception 5y ago
  ITT: ad spend koolaid drinkers that the online ad industry depends upon to attempt ad spend for every half baked idea
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Though only in a single industry and an n=1 case, we got to see what would happen if a movie went into wide release with no advertising. Would enough people see the movie poster or listing for what's playing at the theater and be curious enough to see the movie? Or would the lack of advertising doom it? 'Delgo' was released to theaters on over 2000 screens with an all-star cast in December of 2008 and virtually no marketing budget. It averaged roughly two paying customers per showing. More people saw Conan O'Brien making jokes about it on his show than saw it in the theaters. Though critically panned as derivative and several years out of date with its CGI, movies with far worse reviews have done much better. The real difference seems to be that no one knew that it existed. That said, a new Star Wars movie with no advertising likely would still end up with plenty of ticket buyers. Existing brands can much more easily get away with taking their foot off the media buying accelerator but how long could they do it before a slow-down occurred? Seems like Marvel and DC still purchase lots of advertising for their well-known and currently popular franchises. What would happen if they stopped? Not sure if we'll ever know since they're unlikely to take that risk.
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    That seems like a very specific case, though. Looking at wikipedia for this movie (which I'd never heard of), the all-star cast was: Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Anne Bancroft, Chris Kattan, Louis Gossett Jr., Val Kilmer, and Malcolm McDowell. Apparently development started in 1999 (so the cast makes sense), and animation started in 2001... 2001 -> 2008 is pretty bad timing I think, both in terms of just raw number of years, and also in terms of... I mean those were pretty busy years in terms of CG, right? I bet whoever owned MGM in 2008 found it in their stack of stinkers and figured "why not shovel it out the door?" Movies seem like a bad example for this sort of thing as a result -- big investment, want to recoup some of it, but sometimes a failure is pretty obvious, so why invest further in a big (and one-off) ad campaign?
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    Advertising is pretty important for commodities. When you can 10,000 movies, advertising can have a huge lift to nudge you. Same with food. If there’s a dozen kinds of sour cream at the store, an ad might lift one brand hugely. Probably less valuable for industries with less competition. Like do I really need to see an Apple ad? Is not seeing one gonna make me go Android?
• msavio 5y ago
  To summarize the article: "I paid to show up both in the paid (SEA) and organic (SEO) search results. I switched off the first and the other one is still there!" For some unknown reason he seems to be surprised by that.
• st3ve445678 5y ago
  My experience is similar. I tried on and off for several years to get some traction on adwords to suppliment my organic. I learned everything I could, tweaked campaigns over time. Nothing. I then hired a reputable certified adwords company. Again, nothing. Literally almost zero conversions over a good period of time. I really wanted it to work, but had to stop the losses after many months of trying. It could just be my industry though, I know some people do make it work for their business. So I guess try it, but watch for results and don't fool yourself for too long if nothing is working.
  • com2kid 5y ago
    > My experience is similar. I tried on and off for several years to get some traction on adwords to suppliment my organic. I learned everything I could, tweaked campaigns over time. Nothing. When I was running my hyper-local startup, my best conversion rate was through reddit ads on the city subreddits. Super targeted Facebook ads also worked. I didn't even try adwords, wrong ad product for the job. IIRC email sign ups were costing me like ~20-25 cents each. Reddit ads were obscenely effective.
• sourabhsybero 5y ago
  The best way is always putting right efforts. Ads and paid campaigns are never long lasting for any business. The genuine ways may take time but the best for long term business.
• aerosmile 5y ago
  The authors of that HBR article along with a few others [0][1] should be ashamed of themselves. They keep perpetuating a false narrative that really hurts our community's know-how in how to build and scale businesses. Why is it a false narrative? The basic premise is simple: company X spends money on ads, then turns those ads off and finds that the revenue does not change. Then the conclusion is made that ads don't work. On the surface, it seems like sound logic, and that's why articles like that do find their way into reputable publishers. But allow me to make an analogy that will hopefully highlight how absurdly oversimplified that takeaway is: Company X decides to switch from PHP to Go, and in the process ends up with all sorts of bugs due to how the new garbage collector works. This costs the company a lot of money, and the conclusion is made that Go is a shitty programming language. What both of these cases have in common is that neither takes into the account the proficiency level of the operator. It's somehow intuitively obvious that as you trade programming abstractions for performance, you will require a higher level of developer proficiency to extract that performance. But nobody makes that connection in the marketing world. The often quoted examples of marketing calamities, Ebay and Uber, have marketing budgets in the 100s of millions, which can be only deployed using multi-channel strategies. In other words, you might give 10% of that to Pinterest, and might be delighted to see that Pinterest reports a 300% ROAS. But it turns out that Pinterest will also report on a much longer lookback window than other platforms, and will use a different attribution model than, say, Facebook or Google. If you turn off your Pinterest spend and discover that the reported 300% ROAS was not accurate, it doesn't mean that ads don't work - it means that Pinterest had bad incrementality, and that it was some other platform that deserves all the credit. In short, in the days, weeks and sometimes months that it takes for a customer to convert, Pinterest had some impact, but much less than its in-platform figures indicated. You can measure incrementality using 3rd party vendors like Measured.com. The fact that Ebay's and Uber's marketing teams were apparently not doing that is inexcusable. In some cases, the lack of ad performance is not just channel-specific, but true across most channels and sometimes even across the board. For example, some purchases are triggered by emergencies, and that's where search channels outperform TV and social. And in other cases, your customers just cannot be reached by ads at all - eg: military contracts. I am sure we can come up with many more examples that seem to show that ads don't work. But what those examples really show is that there's a certain amount of minimum qualification to make ads work, and a lot of people simply lack those qualifications. That's alright, a lot of people also lack experience in Golang, but at least they think twice before making all sorts of assertions about the viability of that programming language. Not so much when it comes to marketing topics - somehow there's this belief that if a certain ad channel didn't work for you with your specific value prop and your specific expertise in this field, this is somehow relevant to everyone else. I can see how newbies can make that mistake. But for Rand Fishkin or the CMOs of Ebay and Uber to fall into that trap... blows my mind. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/?sh=35f54451166d https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi... [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/something-is-rotten-in-online-advertising/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/something-is-rotten-in-online-adv...
• uxamanda 5y ago
  Seems like a good reminder that invalidating a hypothesis is sometimes easier than validating it.
• swader999 5y ago
  Can anyone here remember an add they saw yesterday or one they clicked on this year? I can't...
• civilized 5y ago
  It's pretty obvious why this site didn't need advertising. It had good SEO, and SEO is what matters for this kind of website. Someone in the UK who wants to check a car will Google it and they will find this website. Other channels are probably much less impactful. I care about checking a car when I want to check a car, and at that time I will search for that service. I don't care about checking a car when ad guys want me to care about checking a car. I'm not going to subliminally remember to use TotalCarCheck when I buy a car because I saw an ad weeks ago. I'm going to Google it and I'm going to go to the top result. And yet the ad people in these comments are getting all their hackles up that anyone would dare question the value of advertising in each and every and all possible situations. Obviously if it's not working for you, you just aren't doing it right and you need to pay top dollar for some Ad Professionals to get in there and fix it for you. Seems a little insecure to me. Is it so hard to admit that some businesses just don't benefit that much from certain kinds of advertising? Or maybe because the ad industry is a Paperclip Maximizer, and admitting something like that might fail to maximize the paperclips, it cannot be admitted?
• stevespang 5y ago
• Disruptive_Dave 5y ago
  These posts are always useless without relevant information. Convince me that you know *how* to advertise and then tell me that it "didn't work" and we can have an actual conversation about it. Author didn't even show the actual ads! Targeting, timing, copy, creative, landing pages, retargeting, follow-up... Give us something to work with here.
• yubiox 5y ago
  I am blown away that online ads work at all. I just assume every ad is a scam.
• JimmyRuska 5y ago
  Recently, I was using facebook ads for awhile. The CPC was inexpensive, I had many signups to my site. However after 2 days, 0% of the facebook signups stayed on the site vs 50% of the Google Ads signups. Even if your metrics look good for the ad, make sure you add additional tracking.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  > Over 85% of our organic search traffic comes from users typing in our brand name - Total Car Check. If they see an advert at the top of the organic search results, for the user, its just a shortcut to get to the site, especially since Google started putting organic search results below the fold in many search results, except it would cost us money to buy a user who was going to find us anyway. Sure, but you wouldn't want your competitor to effectively rank #1 for your brand. I've always viewed this like an extortion racket.
  • atestu 5y ago
    Absolutely! I remember Basecamp's CEO tweeting about this https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 In the replies Google says: "we don’t restrict trademarked terms as keywords. We do restrict trademarked terms in ad text if the trademark owner files a complaint" It's a gamble on the strength of your brand to not buy that ad. I think it makes sense that eBay can do away with it, because people typing "eBay" in Google will scroll down for eBay, they won't click on "Company X - Best eBay alternative." Most brands aren't that strong...
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  Very glad to see this article on a used car startup included the phrase "your mileage will vary."
• andhika 5y ago
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  Oh man! I remember reading awhile back that the same thing happened at eBay. eBay actually performed the same experiment and found that people were not finding eBay through ads. At least not enough to matter. If anyone has a source for this, let me know. I can't find the link I had on it.
• quadrangle 5y ago
  I probably hate ads more than most people but when I hear or see an ad, it kills my willingness to engage with a business. I mean, this isn't entirely conscious. I was thinking about whether my kid would like those creative boxes from KiwiCo that I heard good things about organically. Then, I heard an ad for them on a podcast, and I noticed a new extra resistance and hesitation to buy anything from them. I don't want to be a sucker for ads. I don't want to support businesses that support our ad-polluted world. With my limited capacity to donate directly to creative work (which I'd incidentally rather do as part of a coordinated general public than just unilaterally), I favor donating to those who forgo ads rather than reward or support anything that accepts ads. Now, I've hated ads for a long time. But I was still surprised how much I no longer feel fine considering KiwiCo. Now that I heard their ad, I feel like I don't want to be one of those people who is seen as following ads, and I don't want to support them. I imagine there's other products that don't budget as much for ads that I should go out of my way to seek out instead. So for anyone like me, if you do paid ads, you just harmed your credibility with me.
  • cwkoss 5y ago
    When you notice a product being advertised, it means that part of the price of that product/service is being redirected from focusing on quality to manipulation. The amount something advertised is inversely correlated with value.
  • saulpw 5y ago
    Ads work subconsciously. By the time you're looking for a new X and go shopping, you'll recognize company A making an X and it will register as a viable option, only because you heard about it somewhere--having forgotten that you saw their ad and vowed never to buy something from such a money-grubbing corporation. Also, basically everyone has to advertise these days, so good luck finding an X made by a company who doesn't advertise. If you do, in a year or two you'll be extolling the virtues of this wonderful product that you can no longer buy because the company went out of business.
    • nitwit005 5y ago
      Have to disagree with the idea that you have to advertise. Word of mouth still dominates in many industries. Restaurants generally don't need to run ads, and even some chains like Krispy Kreme don't bother.
• teewuane 5y ago
  Great article with a REALLY great summary about fixing problems by subtracting and not always just by adding. Thanks for the share!
• theartfuldodger 5y ago
  Summary: I ran online advertising myself with no knowledge or experience and it did not go well. How surprising! For context, for over a decade across thousands, maybe tens of thousands of campaigns, a 30% increase in sales and leads has been a low benchmark that is easily achieved within 60 days of acquiring a client with few exceptions. As the space has become more congested, it has not become more congested with capable people, actively identifying lower competition mid to end funnel terms has remained a very stable and reliable method. You'll also find that so few digital advertisers are actively modifying and testing landing pages and expanding that inventory of landing pages based on what their conversions teach about their audience. The language of the article makes it clear he never should have added a credit card to an ad account.
• willmadden 5y ago
  I had the EXACT experience with both adwords and facebook budgets. I kept remarketing on but cut the other campaigns and our growth rates didn't change, and our CAC dropped like a rock. The key word rates in our industry are ridiculous because we have overfunded competitors throwing away money trying to funnel customers into higher margin products. We were literally throwing money away competing for keywords with companies that have different cost structures.
• lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  Couldn't this really be a case of, they're so well known now that they don't need to advertise? If the did this when they started, probably things would be different.
• syngrog66 5y ago
  long ago ran a little computer game company. early on I'd spend <awkwardly-large-amount> on Google advertising, and that channel resulted in say a <= $100 revenue over company lifetime I'd then go spend say $200 to attend a game convention, with my own private little display booth, and... it resulted in >$200 in revenue from game sales. (forget numbers exactly but it was far better return than buying Google search ads ever was.) granted it might have been because my Google ad placement/messaging was not tuned ideally -- who knows. But I always value concrete results over theory or might-have-beens. and so its effected my views on advertising ever since
• jyu 5y ago
  advertising arms race. if you're a startup with millions in ad spend and a mandate to spend it in a couple years, how do you spend these millions? the same way all the other startups do, by dumping into google, instagram (fb), amazon. makes me wonder how many of these same VC's also own large positions in said advertising companies?
• clearleaf 5y ago
  No matter how much the internet gets "sanitized" or "civilized" it's embedded in my DNA to never trust any online ad. The first thing my brain does on a new page/screen is separate the real parts from the junk, and I don't even perceive the junk anymore. It's become an instinct that causes me to skip or miss sections in text books because if they get cute with the formatting it can trigger the same reflexes. If I were to break this habit completely (not that I want to) I don't think I have it in me to ever believe a product or company in an online ad is even real, let alone legitimate. That's just how I see online ads. I don't trust any ads but if it's on TV or a billboard I at least believe it's a real if scum sucking company.
• innagadadavida 5y ago
  This article is basically an advertisement! However, not everyone can get promoted to front page of HN. Just wondering how the OP get his story upvoted so much.
• sngz 5y ago
  freakanomics podcast has two part episode touching upon all the debates / arguments going on in this thread https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
• youngtaff 5y ago
  “Last year, a study by the UK’s ISBA found that almost half of every advertising dollar spent on tracking-based programmatic advertising is eaten by the adtech ecosystem before it reaches a publisher” https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/advertising-is-essential-to-the-free-web-but-tracking-isnt/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/advertising... https://www.isba.org.uk/knowledge/executive-summary-programmatic-supply-chain-transparency-study https://www.isba.org.uk/knowledge/executive-summary-programm...
• muaytimbo 5y ago
  A lot of comments, probably from marketers with a vested interest in the status quo, seem to make the argument "better marketers would achieve better results." But I haven't seen a single citation arguing that 1) advertising works at all or 2) differential impacts from different marketers.
  • vgeek 5y ago
    90%+ of marketers are bad at their job, but since everyone else is, too, it doesn't seem to matter. New/incremental sales (think brand agnostic, high funnel terms with intent like boston electrician or cleveland mortgages) are out there, but their costs typically approach the lead's intrisnic value. If you are paying $10/click and converting 10% of clicks to leads, you're at $100 for a lead. Of those leads, if you close 25%, you're at $400 acquisition cost. Maybe great for a SaaS or insurance company with a high LTV, but awful for a plumber with an average call of $250. At this point, paid ads are basically a game of trying to out-optimize your click to lead and lead to sale funnels relative to your competitors unless you want to give all of your margin to an ad network.
• Traster 5y ago
  Honestly, this genre of "Look! We don't do X!" topics on HN recently have been a little absurd. Advertising has it's place. If you're buying ads on your own brand name then yes, you're wasting your time, but since advertising is quite expensive I would've thought you would put some effort into doing it well. It's the same thing for the unit testing article and the article about staging environments. Yes, if you do something badly, it's probably going to be worse/more expensive/slower than not doing it at all. But the whole genre could be concisely summarised as "Be concious of where you are focusing your efforts".
  • aldebran 5y ago
    If you don’t buy ads in your brand name your competitor might and May encourage users to try them instead. Even if you lose 5% each time, that can build up. Companies do this all the time. Even for something like App Store submissions. People use their competitor name as a keyword to increase their top of funnel.
    • Traster 5y ago
      I'm sure it happens, but you've got to be looking at that as a pure cost. You're not generating any revenue from people searching your brand, and you're paying significant sums for click through on people who already had the intention to come to you. In some ways I could see the normal position being "We only advertise on our competitors brands" because atleast that way you are picking off your competition, not bidding up people who already wanted to come to you.
• adamsmith143 5y ago
  I think major brands in particular are wasting a lot of money on ads. For example searching Macbook in google returns an ad for apple.com as the first result and the same exact link as the first non promoted link. Why on earth is Apple paying for an ad in this case? It's literally wasted money. I can't imagine that having an ad link above the real link gives them any revenue delta
• ghusto 5y ago
  This is fantasticality fortuitous. I was just discussing this very thing with somebody close to me. He's worked for many years to become the number one in his field — let's say he's a performer of sorts. He's a _very_ hard worker and it's all paid off for him, he's the top hit for when you search for what he does. So naturally, he's frustrated at paying what he says is about 10% of his income to advertising. I said he could probably get rid of the ads now, if he's already at the top, but then we began to wonder. I wouldn't put it past Google to start pushing his results down, just to get him to spend again. I'm well aware all the negative terrible things Google has been doing in the last years has likely just left me a little paranoid, but what do you guys think?
  • adlorger 5y ago
    the answer here is about the competitive space that he's in and whether his competitor is buying brand terms around his area. if not, he's probably fine and he can use his organic strength to stay tops.
  • cwkoss 5y ago
    Google ads, at scale, gradually transform into a protection racket.
• gw67 5y ago
  Why not excluding the brand name as negative phrase keyword?
• Razengan 5y ago
  I’ve only ever seen defense of advertising by the people working in the advertisement industry or those exploiting ads, as seen by the comments here. Every other human on this planet is fucking annoyed by ads, or has evolved a blind spot for them and ignores them. When was the last time anyone in your social circle said, “I saw an ad for it, let’s buy that!”? The ads racket employs some of the worst of societal ills: Manipulation, deception, greed, vandalism of public spaces, wasting people’s time without their consent, all to advocate a cycle of endless consumption… not to mention how some ads systems are just a front for spying. If an individual displayed these behaviors, he or she would be considered extremely creepy and disgustingly clingy (SIT HERE and PAY ATTENTION to me for 30 seconds!) but the ads industry literally selects for and rewards these traits on a massive scale. Please, stop this guessing game of violating people’s privacy trying to figure out what they want to see and when it should be forced upon them, and just develop better search/filter/discovery/consensual recommendation systems: Let us TELL YOU what we want, dammit. But of course that would only benefit the product creators and service providers and consumers, not the ads people whose livelihood depends on flattering the naked emperor for his non-existent clothes, so here we must suffer.
• hownottowrite 5y ago
  These optimizations are great if you’re selling things people are looking for. However, when you’re selling something people want but don’t yet know it even exists, the problem is thornier.
• m3047 5y ago
  Could there be a more perfect storm than the confluence of advertising and medicine in the United States of America? Medicine in this country has been characterized as a "confuseopoly" where the consumer is "enabled" to choose, but not on price or quality. Banks are much the same. Does this have some bearing on the abdication of basic services and constant churn of add-ons?
• stereoradonc 5y ago
  Use Adguard or uBlock Origin to get rid of pesky ads. I wonder if there is a ROI on digital ads. Does it always correlate with the sales?
• stodor89 5y ago
  Hush now, this is supposed to be a secret!
• dumbfounder 5y ago
  When I do a search for a site that I know will come up first in results and I see an ad up too for that same site, I feel sad. And I scroll past the ad and click on the non-ad link and I think about why this is a thing. As long as google rules the browser and keeps pouring money into being the default search this will be a thing. It’s tragic.
• aagha 5y ago
  This reminds me of this article I read last year: https://www.nutshell.com/blog/facebook-spend-experiment https://www.nutshell.com/blog/facebook-spend-experiment
• simne 5y ago
  I just don't understand, why this text got so much attention. In Russian this usually named Captain Obviousness. - Ineffective ads are extremely typical thing on established highly concurrent markets, even if we assume, effectiveness where measured with extremely high accuracy. I believe, author will create another post, with much more details, on how he become to his conclusions. I mean, how measured ad effectiveness, how made a-b testing and/or marketing researches; how many tests where made with changing ad details (color, shape, time to run ad, targeting, etc), to make most effective ads.