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I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!" To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we woul
by AlbertCory 4y ago
I was in Google Ads 2008-10, and people from outside the company always said, "Oh, I never click on ads!"
To which I responded, "Well, someone does, or we wouldn't have all this free food."
There's a simple test of your hypothesis, which they can do easily inside Google but it's harder to do from outside: has CTR gone down over the years?
- rdsubhas 4y agoYou cannot expand the mouth of the funnel (grow the market) and keep conversion static at the same time. Maybe something like rate of change of CTR is stable relative to the rate of change of traffic.
- blitzar 4y agoCTR are and always have been comically small - its like spam and scam calls - a pure (big) numbers game.
- AlbertCory 4y agoLike spam: 1% of a gigantic number is still a pretty big number.
- bamboozled 4y ago...or, companies just think it's enough to be putting ads infront of people and paying for that privilege ?
- readthenotes1 4y agoAbout 2010 I published a stupid little Android app and added ads to it just because I wanted the experience. I was shocked to actually make $25 a week off of an app that I didn't think anybody was really using. I put the ad someplace where people had to click on it on purpose, and I guess a lot did. That or Google did it for me
- loveparade 4y agoI don't think it's that simple of a hypothesis to verify, even inside Google. There are lots of reasons why CTR may be constant or go up despite fewer people converting through ads. Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS, but that doesn't help the advertiser because I'm not going to buy anything. CTR only matters in the short-term. In the long-term, what matters is if the market of advertisers believes ads are profitable for them. If their CTR goes up 10x but they cannot verify conversions, they may eventually stop buying ads. That won't happen quickly, because attribution is so hard and you can never be sure where your conversions really come from, but the decline of ads may still happen over a longer time frame.
- GeneralMayhem 4y ago> Examples are bots, crawlers, more kids playing with iPads, or malicious website design, e.g, I have clicked on ads because I was tricked on it by the HTML/JS Google considers all of those spam, and goes to great lengths to detect them, refund them, and remove them from the stats. Changes in spam-cleaned CTR, which is what advertisers see and what Google talks about for aggregate metrics, should not be explainable with any of those. Also, even in the short term, CTR as a primary metric only matters if you're paying a fixed amount per impression on a fixed number of impressions - i.e., almost never, unless you're looking at a particular fixed subset of the network. If prices go down, e.g. because of adding enough new inventory to decreases auction pressure, or if you add new lower-CTR inventory in a CPC auction, then the total amount of ad spend can still go up as CTR goes down. Google-wide CTR has been dropping for years, mostly due to mix shifts. In particular, Youtube ads, which have lower CTR than search, have been growing a lot faster.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThanks for the note about cleaning CTR. The Ad Spam team was large even in my day. As for "impressions" -- that's a term for content-based ads, not search ads. Search ads are enormously more valuable than banner ads.
- asdff 4y agoI identify with the "oh I never intentionally click on ads" segment, but I still click on ads mainly on mobile. That's because mobile developers are entirely user hostile like the early 2000s web developers who brought us popup ads. half the time I try and scroll some article on a mobile website these days, I get a banner ad that pops up which I accidentally misclick. I even misclick 'benign' banners on ios native apps all the time. If you were looking at clickthrough rates from, say, before smartphones to now, you might be observing an artificial bump just from people fat fingering an ad that's honestly tricky to avoid not tapping on by mistake.