Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

https://youexec.com/dev/2017/1/14/google-facebook-ads-traffic-is-useless

by somid3 • 10 years ago

540 368 10 years ago

dbg31415• 10 years ago

90% useless is still better than most of the alternatives.

Seriously though, it's hard to track success.

If I'm showing an ad wanting people to rush out and buy sneakers... it's rare that it will hit the right person at the right spot in their sneaker purchase decision journey.

But what I want is to bombard them with information so that when they are ready to buy sneakers, they think positively of the sneakers I am selling.

I don't care if they don't follow a perfect path on my site... if they click around and click off... they most likely aren't going to click and buy on the spot. I'm OK with this.

How do I know if my advertising is working? Well... tracking users is one way, but just asking users is something a lot of stores don't bother with. A simple "how did you hear about us?" or hit them up with a customer satisfaction survey after the purchase with a few questions -- incentivized with a coupon. You'll get some great metrics that will help you understand if you marketing budget is being well-spent.

somid338• 10 years ago

True. Early on when I used the Google Keyword tool it told me it could drive 400 clicks with a max bid of $0.50 per click. In reality I can get 10 clicks for $1.25 per click -- and that is when the conversion rate is an order of magnitude worst.

For me that means I am paying 100X more than what I had expected.

soared6• 10 years ago

Keyword tool covers the total market, not what you can expect to get. Quality score increases your cpc, and you'll never ever get 100% of clicks.

somid338• 10 years ago

The case I am making is I believe Google & Facebook mix "active" and "non-active" users to create an artificial stream of users such that paying by impression is always worst than CPC.

soared6• 10 years ago

Sorry man, but you're not experienced enough to make these claims. Search, display, and social are entirely different channels and have completely different strategies. Display is for awareness, you shouldn't be trying to get clicks.

You get charged for misclicks so maybe that's what you are seeing. But cpm bidding generally isn't for driving traffic anyways. Cpc is usually more expensive because it is way more targeted and is intent based.

exclusiv• 10 years ago

Agreed. You definitely have to do retargeting campaigns too so you can stay in front of them and help drive them to convert when they are in the consideration phase.

However, if you are bidding on keywords showing purchase intent (usually on Google Adwords), the user's should be more engaged. If the Google PPC traffic isn't engaging you may need to optimize your landing page and do some A/B testing.

Facebook is quite different because the user isn't expressing intent at the time they see your ad (usually interest/demographic based targeting) and are having to jump off FB to check your site out. So your landing page has to be really compelling and quicker to digest for that audience. You have to try and capture an email and drop a FB retargeting pixel for sure.

The strategies should be different based on those channels because of the context and frame of mind the user is in.

tdkl• 10 years ago

Well it still tells something that 90% of majority of Googles revenue is based on fabricated BS.

somid338• 10 years ago

Correct. This is the main point of the claim, and that their CPM is a fabricated stream of visitors with a specific mix of "active" vs. "non-active" users - which they control.

RodericDay• 10 years ago

But what I want is to bombard them with information so that when they are ready to buy sneakers, they think positively of the sneakers I am selling.

This is horrifying. It's so weird to me that people think this is normal, ethical behavior that it's okay to admit to.

jslabovitz2• 10 years ago

This whole thread is horrifying to me. And I'm saying that as someone who has been online for 35 years, and who (I cringe to admit) worked on the first web-based advertising in 1993. It's like watching a child grow up to be a cruel dictator.

javitury• 10 years ago

Was it a Search or a Display Campaign for Google? I could understand that adsense webmasters used clickfarms. However finding out that google is using clickfarms for Search campaigns would be uncovering the greatest scam of the Internet.

somid338• 10 years ago

I was optimizing for best behavior - so, in the case of Google - Google Search Network only, no network partners. I also moved Mobile devices to -100% so I don't bid in that space. So, desktop & tablet only.

jpalomaki• 10 years ago

Automating clicks on competitors ads might be beneficial for companies who are competing on the same keywords.

This could be of course just ordinary user behavior. When searching something, I'm opening tens of different pages. Probably I scroll quite quickly through most of them. Just made some quick tests and I think on mobile phone I also act as described, so just flick to the end of the page glancing stuff on my way.

beejiu• 10 years ago

Interestingly the behavior is similar to what I have observed with Mouseflow recordings for organic Google+ and Facebook posts. The page is opened, the mouse never moves and the 'user' scrolls a couple of times. I wonder if these records could just be the regular reviews that Google and Facebook do; their visits do not show up on Google Analytics but Mouseflow is able to take recordings.

somid338• 10 years ago

Well, I have 100s of such visitors, I doubt they have 100s of auditors to review my page after 10 seconds each.

PeterisP2• 10 years ago

Isn't that how legitimate mobile or even laptop trackpad users look ? If I don't intend to click anywhere, the "mouse" cursor never moves - the page loads, I scroll, and go back by keyboard.

With a mouse, you get slight movement even while scrolling or pressing buttons, but with a trackpad or on a mobile device you don't, there's "mouse movement" even if you explicitly do some aiming before a click.

ckdarby• 10 years ago

Why are the two gifs so vastly different? The times are fairly close to each other just 10 seconds difference but the Facebook/Google looks to be altered to give the impression of them doing nothing.

The replay shows them both at 1x but they're not the same at all, the second gif is like 10x the speed of the first.

That behavior looks exactly correct for mobile traffic.

Flagged the story, looks like title click bait to probably hit front page; There seems to be manipulation on the gifs to drive their point.

somid338• 10 years ago

The second gif animation is actually slower - you are correct. Both gifs were speed up 3X. The Google/Facebook one is a very very slow scroll.

The point I am making is that 80-90% of the traffic is a simple user interaction.

Sorry, but the scroll is so slow that I decided to speed up both animations 3X - that is stated in the article.

Jabbles2• 10 years ago

See the bottom-right of the GIF "Skip inactivity", which explains the difference you're seeing.

somid338• 10 years ago

Correct, thank you.

somid338• 10 years ago

I basically used Camtasia and changed the clip to 3X the speed, I didn't do it via the Fullstory UI

Jabbles2• 10 years ago

Does the auction-style pricing already take this into account?

somid338• 10 years ago

I don't believe it does. It seems from my data that CPM will always be more costly than CPM. I am suggesting this is artificial.

robryan2• 10 years ago

You set your bid though. What you mean is that the going rate for CPM is higher?

krmmalik• 10 years ago

We've been doong FB for almost a year now and have learned alot in this space, (with still alot to go).

Here are some things that might help you.

1. The type of ad you run and the copy you use has a big impact on the user's behaviour. Not all ads are created equal. Good copy that really taps i to why someone should be clicking through and what value they can expect to attain the other end makes a big difference. But this isnt an exact science. Its more of an art.

2. If you're targeting is off, you will also get undesired behaviour. People might click through because they like the ad, but if they havent been targeted correctly, it will cause issues. You may need to get more laser focused in terms of targeting. Age range, custom audience (through email upload), lookalike audiences, interests etc.

3. People via email, trust you to some extent and have a relationship with you. They're a warm audience. This is the real reason the organic approach is working for you. You have a relationship with those people. Its not the same with paid ads. You need to build that trust and warm them up. You might take a layered/re-targeting approach by offering them some value and then re-targeting the people that interact with your content with a second and third round of ads. You might also grab their email and then target them both via email and fb.

FB can work, but it take alot of iterations and time to get it right.

Alternatively you could just run an FB ad that does something to collect email addresses, then run an email nurturing campaign, warm up the audience and then target via email.

FB can work, but it takes time.

somid338• 10 years ago

This is true. What would be amazing is if there was a way to audit their advertising algorithms to know it is fair. I tried their new Contact Form tool, but the cost per lead is about $17/lead.

At the end of the day, if someone is advertising a product that is incredibly good, they should be able to use CPM instead of CPC. The point I am trying to make is that I believe the CPM model is dependent on making CPC & other more costly services look like a better alternative.

geocar• 10 years ago

Publishers want to get paid for the opportunity (CPM) but Advertisers want to pay a portion of their revenue (PPA): PPL, PPV, PPC and PPM are all proxies for that customer acquisition, so if you want to buy effectively, you need to start by figuring out what your costs per acquisition are. If you can't even hypothetically afford anything close to $17/lead, you might not be able to purchase customers yet, but if you can, then figuring out your lead-to-sales ratio is a lot easier than working out everything between the impression and the sales.

You might consider looking for an agency that specialises in PPL/PPA; basically doing revshare, and letting them build appropriate site lists, and user demographics, and copy testing and so on to help figure out what makes your product sell -- they will put skin in the game because they can leverage their expertise.

incompatible• 10 years ago

I wonder if it's a touch-screen vs mouse/keyboard difference.

abalashov14• 10 years ago

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about which keywords to target, and mimicked the reputedly successful approaches of my competitors. Nada. Would have been better off shoveling cash into an open pit.

The only customers I've gained through web marketing have been organic, coming through bona fide referrals on other sites. The "hit rate" on that has been pretty good, suggesting that the blame can't lie entirely with my crappy sites...

dajohnson897• 10 years ago

We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we've learned over the years to ignore all ads.

Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I'm not served ads.

marze• 10 years ago

What does this have to do with the topic at hand?

The topic is that the traffic the ads bought were bots or click farms.

victorhooi5• 10 years ago

What exactly is "dumb" amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority.

People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they're not cheap, they would totally pay for content.

Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it's a race to the bottom.

Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).

Many attempts have been made to monetise things (a la micropayments).

I believe Google did something before, where you paid cents, or fractions of a cent to authors for article views. This was back in 2012:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407

And recently Mozilla's Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin micropayments. I'd love to see it gain traction, but I don't see it going mainstream.

Look, I know some ad networks go too far - but IMHO, Google/FB ads are hardly that intrusive. (I personally hate pop-up/pop-under ads, and auto-playing videos)

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ads - above opinions are purely my own).

Fiahil• 10 years ago

Oversaturated and desensitized, yes, but too few non-technical people are bothered enough to install an ad blocker. This is an issue because the biggest security threats, today, come from ad-network-delivered-junk.

It has become so much of an issue that my advice on which antivirus to install has shifted from xxx to uBlock Origin. It's just basic computer hygiene, and I would really like if content creator would move away from ad network based advertising.

agumonkey8• 10 years ago

Depends on the audience too. I'm anti consumerist somehow and reject ads mentally (it's as if they didn't exist on TV to my mind).

The few times I've clicked on ads were for odd geek products (SBC). A few times I found a website / company that indeed taught me something about a brand / product / idea ... but in retrospect a webpage ad is way too superficial for me to know that in advance, and doesn't trigger curiosity much (offseted by the browsing experience penalties).

Nition• 10 years ago

This sounds like a joke but when an obtrusive ad comes up I literally only see Close, X, etc now. Totally tune out the whole thing except the parts that look like they might make it go away.

phicoh• 10 years ago

I'm always surprised how bad ads are on some systems. I usually like ads in specialty paper publications. It is nice to know what vendors are around, what new products they have. And you can skip an ad in a fraction of a second.

Before I installed Privacy Badger, my experience was usually ads for stuff I really didn't care about, unrelated to the subject of the website. Then I start searching for something, find what I want to buy and buy it. Then for months I get ads everywhere for the product I just bought. Never for example for accessories.

Of course, ads have to be as obnoxious as possible. Not just being there if you want to give them some attention, no they have to destroy your reading experience.

I once gave a news site a nice donation. By sheer coincidence right after that they changed the layout to the point I stopped visiting. Of course, my donation could easily be seen as a reward for the articles I read there before, but it didn't feel right.

maverick_iceman• 10 years ago

Why not just use adblockers? It's free.

somid338• 10 years ago

Hallelujah

usaphp• 10 years ago

Is your product specialized to technical users? I've noticed that businesses with more technical clients have harder time getting customers via ads, because most technical users don't click on ads

somid338• 10 years ago

No. Anyone with a career in a large org.

abalashov14• 10 years ago

Indeed; you can see some links in my profile. Our product is unquestionably a big-ticket, slow-moving, long-sales-cycle kind of thing.

However, there were plenty of clicks. I've just never had a single sale, and only a very small handful of low-quality enquiries, despite lots of traffic.

ar15saveslives• 10 years ago

I sell an OSX app for advanced users, and as you said, they don't click on ads and it would make more sense to heat my house with $20 bills instead sending them to fb/adwords.

However, I ran 2-day flash-sale and it went unexpectedly good. I never thought devs and tech-savvy people visit websites like that.

tonyedgecombe3• 10 years ago

I suspect most technical users don't see ads anymore.

0898• 10 years ago

The testimonials you have up from the Google and P&G employees are from stock photo sites. (I didn't reverse image search the others.) I'd consider fixing this.

somid338• 10 years ago

Yes, they all wanted to remain anonymous so we used stock images of people similar to them to prevent identification, either via reverse image search or by colleagues identifying them. We run into issues of people judging others when they feel they receive insights to rise... it sets a weird tone.

Though your point is well taken, we need to find a better approach. People are sensitive about the topic.

jondubois• 10 years ago

I felt the same when I tried LinkedIn ads... It doesn't even compare to a poorly targeted Reddit post.

I don't know if big companies get special treatment, but as a small startup, these ad networks just don't seem to work at all.

Sometimes I feel that the reason why big companies advertise through Facebook/LinkedIn/Google is not to promote themselves, but rather, to bleed small competitors out of business by inflating the CPC/cost of acquisition for their industry.

abalashov14• 10 years ago

That is a cynical, but not wholly implausible view.

Big companies' ad campaigns do have their weaknesses. Their keywords can be poached by small competitors. Well-known brands invite comparisons, e.g. "HipUpStart.io is a better $BIG_BOX_BRAND."

somid338• 10 years ago

It could be that the 10% traffic does give them an edge, or you're right about the CPC inflation argument as well. Overall, there is something wrong with the current model since it impedes innovation by allowing smaller players to properly reach the masses. A weird way of defensibility via marketing.

wheaties• 10 years ago

Big companies use more advanced features like adaptive audience segmentation or dynamic creatives to better target viewers. Hence they tend to bid on those who are statistically more relevant to them.

matt40776• 10 years ago

I'm spending ca $150/mo on google and getting a few hundred in revenue from it – not even including repeat purchases from these sales (about 80% y/y retention). It's been like that for 8 years.

Facebook on the other hand... Probably spend $2000 trying all sorts of things over the years and I'm not sure if there's a single new customer that can be attributed to it.

davidgerard• 10 years ago

What proportion of your prospects do you guess are running an adblocker?

somid338• 10 years ago

Thats irrelevant since I'm analyzing clicks from Google and Facebook and then looking at their movements via Fullstory. How does an adblocker alter that process?

DougN7• 10 years ago

Make sure you control which countries your ads can show in. 90% of my budget for high tech equipment was getting spent in Bangladesh. Pure fraud. Once you start clamping down a LOT, results can get better.

somid338• 10 years ago

For the US market, I'd love to see a breakdown of visitors via Google and Facebook and see what % of them use an IP that is associated with a VPN.

If the % is high, then there is a case to be made that most of the clicks are from abroad VPNing into the US.

abalashov14• 10 years ago

Indeed; I limited my impressions to the USA and a handful of developed nations, as well as a handful of middle income countries I know to be good markets for my product.

Bangladesh didn't make the cut. :-)

pryelluw4• 10 years ago

Inbound done well outperforms others. The thing is that it requires a bit more effort. You can really leverage organic and establish low cost funnels. Feel free to ping me if you have questions. No bs or strings.

nrjdhsbsid6• 10 years ago

Sorry to break this to ya but I've never had an issue getting at least some traffic through AdWords.

Bounce rates that high mean something is extremely wrong with your site or the keywords you're advertising for. I've purposely setup some bogus ads to use as controls and I still only get around 85% bounce rate. If your site is interesting enough people will sometimes stick around even if they reach you randomly.

Niche products tend to do better with advertising, less competition.

Basically if it's a complete failure you're doing it wrong. Whether you can get a positive ROI is a different story

nrjdhsbsid6• 10 years ago

Just checked your site. It's well put together but the language is far too technical for AdWords. Engineers don't usually make the kind of business decisions to buy these things at larger companies, it's VP level people.

Find your kinds of customers and tailor a landing page with stuff that they want, instead of having the site explain everything like a users manual.

Ex: Calls centers do not care at all about the other uses for your product, so for ads for "call center phone systems" don't show them any of that.

You can leave the existimg content there, it will help with SEO and people that want to look deeper. Just make sure the first few pages from ads are exactly what they're looking for and nothing else. They will read more into it if they're interested.

The big thing you're running into is bounce rates because most visitors spend 30 seconds or less deciding if your product is what they want. If you can't convince them "yes, it's perfect" in three sentences most will leave. The easiest and surprisingly effective way to do this is to make the title of the page huge and make it match their search query exactly.

Your sales site should focus on uses, not features. Nobody cares about anything technical so take off the stuff about being built in Node etc... The people looking to buy this don't even know what that is. Too many words they don't know is scary, maybe this isn't what they're looking for.

Dumb down everything so that moronic managers will forward a link to your site to the guys that actually know wtf you're talking about :)

abalashov14• 10 years ago

Thank you for the suggestions!

The intentionally deep technical content of the site may be motivated by reasoning backward to your thought process:

Usually it's the technical guys, tasked with researching and finding a product that fits the requirements, who find the site and forward the link to their managers. The managers have no idea what any of it means, but "it looks like good stuff", so "contact them and find out more".

This has been my experience. Of course, that may be a reflection of the self-selecting group of prospects that the site does reach, so your observations are entirely valid!

GFischer• 10 years ago

I second that opinion. The site has a good technical explanation, but it doesn't have a "value proposition" - why should I, as a manager, buy your product? (I guess it makes calls cheaper? Is it needed for what?)

gjjrfcbugxbhf• 10 years ago

How about having the technical page but also having an overview page for managers (who are hopefully used to the concept of technical people writing them summaries). Maybe the main ui for such a product's site could even be explicit with e.g. 'executive summary' and 'technical summary' tabs.

Gustomaximus2• 10 years ago

I see these posts all the time of DIY Adwords/FB and then a claim it doesn't work. This would be like me, a non-carpenter, trying to build a house, seeing how bad it looks and then claiming building materials suck.

There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. So because Adwords/FB didn't work for you doesn't mean their traffic is 90% useless. And dont get me wrong, I completely acknowledge there is junk traffic on the networks, but filtering this to a minimum is part of getting advertising right. So to get 90% useless traffic, it means you set up campaigns without proper targeting or content, not Adwords/FB is 90% useless.

somid338• 10 years ago

If that were the case, here what I propose. That developers audit their code once a year to make sure it's fair.

My main point is the CPM versus CPC audience-mix.

vivekd• 10 years ago

I agree, I don't know much about digital marketing but I know that anecdotal evidence, which is all the author is presenting, is next to useless. I've heard other claims from people about how they made enormous sums on facebook.

The real issue is that neither of these claims constitute data. Only large scale research tracking traffic across many websites would let us come to meaningful conclusions and that sort of research is something I haven't seen yet . . . which is likely why we are stuck with all these he said she said stories about how social media is a useless moneysink or a veritable gold mine depending on who you ask

somedangedname2• 10 years ago

Also, the target moves as time goes on. What worked for someone five years ago won't necessarily work today.

WhitneyLand3• 10 years ago

Who says ads are a goldmine? I'd like to read up on that.

obstinate• 10 years ago

Anyway, if the traffic is 90% useless, doesn't that mean it's 10% useful? I mean, just going by the title. -- Google employee, but not in ads. Take my words with the appropriately sized grain of salt.

somid338• 10 years ago

Yes, but if Google advertises in the Keyword Tool that I can get 400 clicks at $0.50 per click, and then when I join I get 4-5 clicks per day at $1.20 per click -- for the same exact keywords. Ok, thats acceptable. Thats about 3X as expensive and 1/100 the scale, ok.

But if I then see that traffic behave about 90% like garbage relative than organic visitors -- that puts me at two orders of magnitude off, which is quite insane.

SomeStupidPoint• 10 years ago

Sure, but that 10x cost per useful amount of traffic probably tips the cost-benefit analysis against it.

WalterSear6• 10 years ago

At my last company, we worked with Google's in-house team to build adword campaigns, eventually spending the better part of a million dollars over the course of 9 months or so, with free assistance from them in the development of campaigns and with their ongoing guidance and advice. From our meetings with them, they were quite confident that our strategy was appropriate, that there existed an audience that we could reach via our keyword choices, and that they could drive the kind of traffic we needed to our site.

It was an abject failure, and a chief contributor to the downfall of the company.

rdslw• 10 years ago

Can you name the company?

point782• 10 years ago

Sounds like a bad product

somid338• 10 years ago

Damn.

somedangedname2• 10 years ago

...we worked with Google's in-house team

I'm no expert but I don't think the incentives were aligned properly there. Here's a Reddit thread that says it better than I can:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1nwzdy/what_do_your_go...

Maybe work with an agency next time?

edblarney3• 10 years ago

Why would you spend $1 Million on ads that were not working?

Did you not test your ads to grasp the conversion rate before spending the money?

shostack4• 10 years ago

I can say from much first hand experience that Google's in house teams don't typically deliver what I would consider great work. And that was with the top tier of support at a search agency. I'm not entirely surprised at your results.

Most savvy people I know managing search for a living would but run something Google put together without quite a few changes.

Some of this comes from lack of understanding the business as well as someone on an account or in house, some is lack of experience since you often can have people barely out of school working on this stuff. Even when I had veteran teams there were still tweaks needed.

Things like keywords that didn't make sense, poor targeting settings, etc. were not uncommon. I know they've made big efforts to improve here, but they still have a long way to go.

Gustomaximus2• 10 years ago

Using the Google team...there is your mistake. They always approach reasonable spending accounts to try and offer account optimisation sessions. But their motivation is to make you spend not perform better, albeit they are better these days.

I used to have a team account team constantly approach myself and my boss and say I could be doing account management better. My boss started to question my credibility as Google people must be the best at Google.... so I offered them to set up their own separate campaigns rather than mess with mine. The results were atrocious. They do what the manual says to do vs what actuly works. To get the best out of Adwords you need to twist the system to suit your agenda, not Googles. Seriously get an independent professional in to manage Adwords. Try a few if you dont have experienced PPC marketing people in the office as there are many snake oil salesmen in this area. Also watch out for agencies that pitch you with their experienced guy but then put the junior in charge of running the account. Always ask to interview the person that will be hands on with the account and having direct contact to them. Adwords type platforms can be awesome when used well but you can't just throw money at it and expect results.

majani• 10 years ago

Google's in house teams usually have no real world experience converting Google Ads to sales. It's the same way game developers are usually not esports pros. There's a big difference between knowing how a product works and being great at making it work

elastic_church3• 10 years ago

So to get 90% useless traffic, it means you set up campaigns without proper targeting or content, not Adwords/FB is 90% useless.

at least one similarity to Poker, Daytrading, Daily Fantasy Sports

so with a more objective criticism, "the full story", new projects might nix these kind of ad campaigns from the budget and Facebook and Google will get one tenth of the revenue?

stepanhruda2• 10 years ago

You incorrectly reference zero sum games (actually, negative sum because of the middle man), where winners' gains come entirely from the losers. Ads are definitely not that, they are a regular market with supply and demand. It seems that the top actors get a disproportionate amount of profits though.

gk1• 10 years ago

Here's a more familiar analogy: Imagine a marketer cobbling a bunch of [pick your language] code together with help from StackOverflow and, when it fails or runs slow, declaring that [language] code is slow and useless with some recorded execution times as evidence.

edblarney3• 10 years ago

"There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. "

You'd be surprised how a lot of marketing budget is wasted.

Especially in brand advertising, where there is no directly measurable ROI.

Toothpaste, paper towels, cars, cereal - they spend gazillions on those brands.

But think of this: most 'ad spend' is spent on completely commoditized products - I'll guarantee you the 'no name' toothpaste is as good as 'Crest' or whatever.

Our economy is made up of huge 'soft monopolies'.

The grocery stores, pharmacy chains, 'big brands' like P&G - they are all systematically slow, barriers to entry are surprisingly high (you can make toothpaste easily, but you cannot build a brand easily). Car companies, entertainment channels. Banks.

Talk to some of the front line marketing people buying ads. They are often clueless. They have no idea often if the money is well spent or not. But the have a 'budget' and 'have to spend' it across various channels. They know they need to 'go social' so they buy ads from 'known brands' like Facebook and Google.

Now - the other source of more profitable ads are simply things where you can reasonably get conversions online. Anything for your household that you can buy at Ebay, Amazon etc., i.e. consumer goods.

And then the scammy stuff.

Some of the above complaints about the value of ads have merit - that said - they may not be making products that are amenable to online ads.

hackerboos• 10 years ago

How many times do you hear "if I don't spend my budget it will be reduced next year"?

dx034• 10 years ago

Creating brand loyalty is very expensive, but can definitely be worth it. I guess most of us have brands they buy without any specific reason, other than that they somehow like them or that they always used them.

While it's very hard to measure the effect of ads trying to create this loyalty, it doesn't mean that it's not worth it.

I've discovered that for myself where I saw ads on Facebook that I didn't click, but later saw a product in store and tried it out. If you just follow conversions, you'd say that the Facebook ad was worthless, whereas it actually influenced my buying decision.

I'd argue that most money on ads is well spent, but to be effective, you must have a huge budget. People need to see your ad multiple times, so that they'll be familiar with a product. If you don't have that budget, it'll be very hard to use ads effectively. But that's no fault of FB or Google, that's just psychology.

BorisMelnik2• 10 years ago

My sentiments exactly. It is all about demographic targeting, crafting a good landing page, writing good copy, and writing good ads.

I could easily make a shitty ad and send it to a blog post I just wrote that 99.999999999% of the world doesn't care about, and find 100% bounce rate and burn through $10,000 in a few days.

I work with Adwords for a living (part of it, anyway) and can assure OP that if 90% of this traffic was useless, I'd be out of a job. I use heatmaps and other CRO tools and regularly watch my funnel go from an ad > a form generated on a website.

soared6• 10 years ago

OP is simply doing it wrong. Advertising works, and the title's claim only shows how inexperienced op is. I work at a digital ad agency. Ads work if you do it correctly, but it's incredibly easy to waste money. People like op are why google and Facebook make buying ads overly complicated - if it were easy you wouldn't have to spend so much money.

If op is reading this, I'd be happy to hop on a phone call and help you out.

flashman• 10 years ago

Once upon a time there was an affiliate link that paid me $5 per referred sale. I sent them Adwords traffic at 30c/click and a 10% conversion rate ($3/sale = $2 profit for me) until they eventually realised they could just do Adwords themselves.

It doesn't matter if you're only converting 1% of advertising traffic if that 1% is profitable.

somid338• 10 years ago

Sure, can I can show you my data and make you believe otherwise, I really want to get to the bottom of this since others also believe it to be an issue.

somid338• 10 years ago

can you email me at somid3 at gmail?

Fomite2• 10 years ago

People like op are why google and Facebook make buying ads overly complicated

Buying ads is literally one of the easiest things I've ever done on Facebook.

onion2k• 10 years ago

Buying ads is easy. Buying effective ads is not.

somid338• 10 years ago

@Soared, aside from the self-marketing of your firm how about you put your money where your mouth is. Let's use the same landing page - I'll make a campaign, you make a campaign, we each spend $500 and we track conversions in a specific period of time.

The one who converts more for less will owe the other $1000 - we can make the accounts public so that (1) the world can see your "expertise" and (2) how "confused" I am. Game?

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

I would love to see this.

Every article about rampant ad fraud inevitably contains a comment thread where ad consultants appear to make claims that other people "just can't do it right". Let's see it done right, then.

PeterisP2• 10 years ago

The landing pages (most likely multiple, targeted and tailored differently for different incoming traffic) are a big part of doing things right - for many people in this thread, a big part of what they are doing wrong is where they send the traffic. Many successful ad campaigns would have negative ROI if they simply sent people to the product home page.

mistermann• 10 years ago

This article seems to demonstrate that bots are clicking links though, any comments on that? I mean, if it's true, and those are costing you money, you better be able to design some pretty effective campaigns with that extra overhead.

sumoboy• 10 years ago

This article is 99% useless. Adwords and Facebook are very complex and take experience, time, and $ to get campaigns dialed in right. The targeting and audience choices have become increasingly complex but you can create cost efficient ad placements if you know what your doing and I think in this it's not the case. Plenty of businesses rely upon these platforms to drive traffic, leads, and sales, so your argument for leaving offers no compelling reason why to leave these platforms.

visarga• 10 years ago

Maybe it depends on the product.

somid338• 10 years ago

I'm not suggesting we leave these platforms, but rather that we evaluate their true offering, and perhaps audit the algorithms to make sure its fair for everyone. So far, in this long thread it seems others have noticed the same.

rpedela2• 10 years ago

A bit off-topic, but how did you create those videos? It seems like a useful tool to test/optimize design, find UI bugs, etc.

EDIT: They used FullStory (https://fullstory.com). I missed that when I read it the first time.

arbesfeld• 10 years ago

There are quite a few of these screen-capture tools around (Inspectlet, Mouseflow, Hotjar), most of them for UX optimization.

If you're looking for a more developer-focused product, you can also check out LogRocket (https://logrocket.com).

rpedela2• 10 years ago

LogRocket looks interesting and may be very helpful for debugging problems in production or optimizing performance. But FullStory or something like it fits my current needs better. I just want a video of real users interacting with the site to see where they get confused. And I don't want to spend a lot of time integrating code to get it to work. That is what FullStory is promising but I haven't tried it yet.

encore2097• 10 years ago

How does this reflect on a sites privacy policy? Are there any open source versions?

eli• 10 years ago

Isn't this just Sturgeon's law in action?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

tyingq• 10 years ago

There are some niches that are overflowing with stupid advertisers that are bidding higher than the amount the referral is actually worth. In those cases, there really isn't anything you can do. You can wait it out, but there are rubes already lined up to replace the ones that go bankrupt and leave.

That's why you'll find people swearing both cases..."adsense is worthless" vs "adsense is a goldmine". It really depends on the niche.

kkt262• 10 years ago

You're so right. FB & Google doesn't work at all. Stop advertising on those sites, you're making my CPC go up.

somid338• 10 years ago

Well said, except for the second sentence :)

harry8• 10 years ago

People being paid by large advertising companies like google an facebook should declare this in their responses.

deedub• 10 years ago

Hey there, can you tell us a little more about how you were targeting your users and with what kind of content? There could be some bots in there but it also looks like folks land, do a quick check of the content on the site and bounce because it's not what they are looking for. I do this sometimes, especially if I accidentally click on top level ad content on accident. I know you said you did some super targeted ads - what does that mean? It kind of looks like the people converting on your ads are not the ones you're looking for. I'd look at the audience first and then ad content.

It's great to budget your spend where it makes the most sense and your communities and earned ads/content should do great for you. Just watch your spend there and lways budget some for experimentation and try NEW things. Just because you have written off a gold mine doesn't mean there isn't gold there. Maybe you were mining it incorrectly. However, If you feel there is gold all over the ground I'd pick it up before I started digging for it.

elastic_church3• 10 years ago

I wonder how snapchat ads are converting

Its pretty covert because so many people are dismissing it as something their daughters use to do frivolous things

But I bet they didn't even know about the election ads, or the short form stuff thats decent at getting the point across quickly, or the location filter ads

codedokode• 10 years ago

Could it be a third party click fraud? For example, if you buy ads in Adwords on thrid-party sites, their owners' income depends on how many clicks are made so they might be motivated to add bots to real user traffic.

And even if you buy ads on Google's own sites (like Youtube), the channel owners could hire bots to maximize their income.

Regarding Facebook, I don't know if there is any third party, maybe this is just people who clicked on ads accidentaly?

bebop22• 10 years ago

Agree with this post. Approximately 90% bots in our FB ad network acquisitions. It's a total scam.

oblib• 10 years ago

I haven't use google ads in years but I did study my logs and watched them in real time and came to the conclusion they were either hitting me with bots or foreigners getting paid to click their ads. It was blatant theft in my opinion.

somid338• 10 years ago

Agreed.

ransom1538• 10 years ago

A fun evening for me is getting a 6six pack and creating a website like "Bob's BBQ", then running google ads for it. The access_log is hilarious. People from Pakistan, people not requesting css (wtf?), on and on.

neya2• 10 years ago

I recently started writing a book on programming and set-up a landing page for it, to do a pre-launch campaign and I set up some ads on Facebook.

Fortunately, I work in the Analytics industry, so I set-up scroll tracking on my website using Google Tag Manager and started noticing the same patterns as the author as well. Just so to add on to the author, I even excluded the top fraud-prone countries (Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, etc.)

In effect, the only pre-orders I've gotten are from Amazon's own internal organic advertising combined with my personal Social media posts. I tried increasing the budget, but that didn't work out either.

Mind you, I track almost every important action on my site (click a button, fill in a form, etc.). The behaviour of these "bots" are very strange and the only thing I've gained in this gamble is an ultra high bounce rate (~90%, < 2 seconds session duration) like the author. Again, I feel it's too early for me to conclude that these networks are useless as I keep reading posts from other people saying Facebook works extraordinarily well for them.

j_s• 10 years ago

Wouldn't 90%+ of your target market ad block your ad?

Steve_Moneytis• 10 years ago

It depends on what you want the new users to do. Ads mostly bring visitors who don't know about your company. If you are in a business where branding or trust is important, it's more difficult. If you are in a commodity business where prices matter, I think it's easier.

That's normal they have a different behavior. Comparing Google Ads and Facebook Ads is hard as there is a user behavior difference between them.

- Visitors from Google Ads often have a purchase intent - Visitors from Facebook Ads are currently entertaining thanks to Facebook photos & videos. (you need to create a need, a urgency to sign up / purchase)

-> my startup has experienced that. Google ads bring qualified users to Moneytis.com (comparison of money transfer options), whereas Facebook ads bring curious people to sign up on neomy.io (fun alerts about currency exchange rates)

altitudinous• 10 years ago

Readers that come from your newsletter are already converted to you. Readers that come from an advertisement do not know who you are and are evaluating your website to see if they want to convert to you. It is reasonable to expect that only 10% of these people want to convert to you. The other 90% after scrolling down your website are not interested in converting to you. Your website did not contain the hook to make them convert. You should improve your website.

TL;DR The adverts performed 100% in bringing visitors to your website. That is their job. Your website is not converting them to real users 90% of the time. Your website failed.

crablar• 10 years ago

This is due to the ad fraud bubble. We have covered it extensively on Software Engineering Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud

somid338• 10 years ago

Ah, thanks for your email!

jjn2009• 10 years ago

The details and numbers which are revealed in this podcast are really eye opening. highly recommended.

disiplus• 10 years ago

we have those, the amount of invalid clicks in adwords does not mach the ones i see in my logs, there 20-40% difference where adwords shows less. i cannot fix that from my site. i block ip ranges when i find them but they can just move.

ernestbro• 10 years ago

Thank you! This makes perfect sense: "A huge percentage of online advertisements are never seen by humans. They are viewed by bots–automated scripts that are opening web pages in a browser and pretending to be a human. Advertising scammers set up web pages, embed advertisements on those pages, and then pay for bot traffic to come and view those advertisements."

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/12/20/ad-fraud-res...

shostack4• 10 years ago

So the bots are driving billions in trackable revenue for companies then? Branding advertisers aside (which search isn't always great for), direct response advertisers don't often care about some of these metrics between spend and sale other than directionally.

Sure you might have attribution questions, but a bot likely won't spend like a person would.

somid338• 10 years ago

One of the visitors to this thread shared this link with me via email: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud - might help others researching the topic.

rackforms3• 10 years ago

I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.

I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a monthly income of just over $5000. Not bad for what started out as a side-project. I took none of this for granted, and worked by butt off every day.

It's key to note from 2007 to 2011 a great consolidation was taking place, with Google eating, for me at least, 90% of all search traffic.

Then the spammers hit. My site was targeted with millions of low quality links, which lead to a Google penalty in 2012. I lost 90% of my traffic and along with it, 90% of my revenue.

4 years on and I've never actually recovered from my penalty, with traffic being manually limited to under 30 clicks on any particular day.

I've done my best to advertise, with Google capturing the lions share. Unfortunately I too have very little luck with this channel, with only 1 $4 conversion after hundreds spent.

The real kicker here, and my reason for posting, is the difference between what was my organic traffic then, and my ad traffic now, is nowhere near the same in terms of quality and obviously, conversions.

I guess my point is the current situation, basically 2 companies controlling so much traffic, seems, well, bad for small business in this country. I value what they bring to the table and fully understand why they're so popular. But is things keep on this way where does that lead the guys like me? Is this just the way it has to be? Is the dream of the open Internet already dead?

emmanuel_1234• 10 years ago

"I guess my point is the current situation, basically 2 companies controlling so much traffic, seems, well, bad for small business in this country"

Why "in this country"? Isn't it a problem for the entrepreneurs in the rest of the world too?

SloppyStone• 10 years ago

More importantly, which country?

rackforms3• 10 years ago

Yes, and I should have said as much.

iopq3• 10 years ago

Chinese businesses don't care, Russian businesses don't care, etc.

beedogs• 10 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, I've been blocking ads the whole time.

cconcepts4• 10 years ago

The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page three.

It wasn't till we realised we had 10,000+ spammy links pointed at our site that we wondered whether we had been the victim of some malicious attack. We couldn't recover the penalty to the site no matter how hard we worked and have had to rebuild at a new domain as a result.

For small businesses like us, is it really possible for a competitor to just destroy our online credibility like that or am I just paranoid?

Taek• 10 years ago

Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results.

SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.

rokhayakebe3• 10 years ago

1) Update your Disavow file properly, which I am sure you've done

2) Email Google directly. It is sometimes difficult to find a way to email, but once you do they'll take care of it.

neya2• 10 years ago

I second the other commenter's opinion on disavow-ing links. It did have a positive impact on one of my online properties.

Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

digi_owl• 10 years ago

I dunno how much it has evolved, but Google got started by weighting search results based on how many other pages linked to that page. More links and your pages was found closer to the top of the results page.

So a easy way to game that was to set up "link farms" that pointed to each other, but not really offering anything worthwhile except a bunch of words people were likely to search for.

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

It's a sad situation but I can pay $5 on Fiverr to attack you that way. Google should really handle it better.

EdHominem• 10 years ago

Supposedly Google now doesn't count these as negatives, they just disregard them. Specifically because of this vulnerability.

thinkloop• 10 years ago

I wonder why google doesn't count spammy links as zero rather than negative.

WhitneyLand3• 10 years ago

My site was targeted with millions of low quality links

Are you saying competitors maliciously sabotaged your ranking? Or that you bought SEO services from an unscrupulous company?

ehnto• 10 years ago

Either could be just as true, and you can't always tell which SEO company will be unscrupulous. They are masters of the spin, after all. I have resolved to never use the services of an SEO company. Having both been burnt and worked in the industry itself, I would rather not work on a project that relies on "SEO" for important revenue at all. As noted above, it is a fickle and ultimately brittle way to prop a business up.

kyledrake2• 10 years ago

Does Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? How does one determine their site is "punished"?

I have seen the consequences of paying for SEO. They spam your site URL on random web forums. If you pay for SEO, you are very likely paying people to use bots and sweatshops to spam your site url via low quality garbage links dumped on Twitter, on web site hosts, in comment sections and forums. A lot of this traffic originates from criminal botnets. Seriously, don't do it.

As an example I just pulled out of our filter, here's what you're really paying for when you pay for SEO: https://twitter.com/karenhall191

Unfortunately, as a web hosting provider (neocities.org), I have to deal with some of the fallout from this. Google's business model creates this problem, but they provide little support and few tools to help us deal with it (reporting API please?), and we're largely forced to go it alone.

rackforms3• 10 years ago

A valid question.

So I've never done any "SEO" work on the site outside of Google's own recommendations with regard to site content, ease of use, etc.

In other words no link building, keyword stuffed pages, etc.

I'm still in the dark all these years later, but my best guess is:

a. I had a blog and forum that, like most of that time (2012's), has occasional spam posts.

b. Those posts would often, but not always, be referenced by the spam links pointing to my site.

c. I had very high rank in Google for several years leading up to the penalty.

Because of this I don't think it was a necessarily a competitor, but rather spammers trying to leech off of that high ranking.

crottypeter• 10 years ago

Or your competitors bought SEO from an unscrupulous company ... ?

edwinyzh• 10 years ago

It never occurred to me that back links from other websites would hurt ranking, I thought it's OK as long as a website don't point to other spamming sites... So this is really scary, it means that other people can attach your ranking...

brianwawok4• 10 years ago

Hence the disvow link button

danarmak2• 10 years ago

Is the dream of the open Internet already dead?

At most, the dream of ad-funded websites might be dead. (I wish!)

This dream created a lot of value by providing free services to Web users. But it also created a lot of harm by enticing those users into closed gardens full of surveillance, which service providers created to gather data to drive ad revenue. I think on net the harm is much greater; we'd have a much more open Internet today if people had gotten used to paying a few dollars a year for ad-free webmail, IM, social networking, search engine access, etc.

phpnode• 10 years ago

At most, the dream of ad-funded websites might be dead. (I wish!)

What you are wishing for is a world in which access to things like Google Search which we take utterly for granted now are forced to become paid services. What are the implications of that, particularly for the world's poorest?

Forbo• 10 years ago

I'm surprised to not see more discussion of things like ZeroNet in these types of threads. I see the next generation of sites being on a platform like that, where everyone consuming content is also helping to carry the distribution load.

simplegeek• 10 years ago

Pardon my ignorance but why do generally spammers hit a website?

matchagaucho• 10 years ago

Google at least has the organic option.

"If your content is fresh and linked to from reputable sites, we'll promote you in the search results... for free."

Facebook is purely pay-for-play. Paying for boosted posts is the only way to cut through the noise (unless your content goes organically viral, which only has a 24 hr shelf life).

hamfisted2• 10 years ago

If you have watched the SERPS (search engine results pages) over the years you have seen that a number 1 organic ranking has gone from # 1 to something like #20 after all of the ads and what not that are shown above the first organic rank these days.

Some evolution images and stories: http://searchengineland.com/evolution-google-serps-three-key...

It is still "free" but takes a lot of work to get there, and it is worth less than it used to be. Lots of SEO's have gone the way of paid.

robot• 10 years ago

Google worked better for me since people search with intent whereas on facebook you rely on serendipity. They are there for something else and you hope they will have interest in your service.

All in all are you sure you use the right keywords in google so you get the people with right intent?

Facebook's strength is audience targeting. Are you sure the audience you target is the right one on Facebook?

chrischen• 10 years ago

Well since the ad pricing is based on bids, it doesn't matter if 90% is useless as long as some flush-with-VC-cash competitor isn't artificially bidding up keywords on that 90% useless traffic.

reconx• 10 years ago

As someone who spends a lot of money on ads for aBigCo. globally, I can tell you GDN ads and Twitter prospecting ads are quite terrible.

Facebook has a tremendous amount of data about users, but for a B2B campaign, its quite terrible and worthless. Be sure you completely disable all mobile app "networks" placementd (esp facebook - audience network ) --unless you're doing managed placements -- I've seen tens of thousands burned with these networks, which show ads in worthless apps, designed to generate fraudulent clicks.

That said, retargeting across these networks (esp Facebook) can drive responses, although I can't say we've seen anything turn into a big opportunity later in the funnel (big/complex sales cycles)...retargeting requires traffic, so I'm constantly trying to pull in a variety of 3rd party/behavioural data to improve front end traffic, to get the right people to pages.

The ad model is unsustainable, I want BigCo to switch (they have the resources), but it's not easy for a global company.

somid338• 10 years ago

I know what you mean, my 9-5 is also at a BigCo, similar story.

gumby• 10 years ago

Is it common that people move the mouse cursor around while reading a page? What on earth for? Unless it's mindless fidgeting with the physical mouse, wouldn't it slow their reading down?

marcosdumay• 10 years ago

Most people do not take their hands away from the mouse, and will scroll with the mouse wheel. People are unable to do those things without moving the mouse in some way.

Xyik• 10 years ago

It's really easy to get ads wrong. The wrong placement, objective, bid amount, bid strategy, targeting, creative, incorrect tracking, poor landing page, etc can all waste your money.

But just from looking at the home page of the site you were advertising I'm not surprised your ads had poor performance. At a glance, I can't tell what exactly i'm 'Starting today' and I doubt your ad creative would be much better, so most people who click are probably curious and have low intent. If you want high CTRs its easy to 'optimize for clicks' and use a catchy ad copy or image, but then obviously you'll have low conversion. Not to mention 'optimizing for clicks' on display networks obviously runs into issues with bots.

jasonlotito• 10 years ago

This visitor is very different - it feels like it has ADD, or its a paid slave boy somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence.

I'm happy to see you associate someone with ADD with slaves or a non-intelligent bot.

"Each week receive hand-picked insights to help you develop your career & get promoted faster" by learning how to randomly insult people and equate them with slavery.

"BE GREAT AT WHAT YOU DO", like insulting people you've never met.

Do your testimonials come from people who learned how to insult people?

balls187• 10 years ago

So a 10% conversion rate? Seems normal.

somid338• 10 years ago

10% of the entering traffic, acts normal. The other 90% is garbage. So if your initial organic conversion rate is X%, this article suggests your Google Ad, or Facebook ad conversion rate will be 10% * X%. That said, its not an extensive study or anything scientific.

scottmcleod2• 10 years ago

This is on you. Build a better audience.

goldfishcaura• 10 years ago

@somid3 I would like to invite you to our analytics community: http://www.innerjoins.org

and to @vivekd's request for data on this topic: https://my.caura.co/investigating-fraudulent-clicks-in-googl...

- plenty of data here. Happy to provide a SQL interface for it if you can prove that you've got the chops

somid338• 10 years ago

love the analysis

WhitneyLand3• 10 years ago

So many people are saying "you're doing it wrong" but that doesn't explain what seems like artificial users.

lingben• 10 years ago

exactly, Veritasium covers this in meticulous detail in his two videos on facebook fraud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g

autokad• 10 years ago

i dont know if anyone's behavior matches mine, but when i click a fb add, i usually just vertically scroll to the bottom (quickly) looking for anything compelling me to stop.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Yup, pretty much. Probably 99% is closer to the truth. If you want to not give your ad budget to crooks you need to buy 100% cost-per-action where you only pay if the click converts. The other end of that spectrum, impressions, is really like throwing bills out your 10th story window into the crowds below.

"Click fraud" is rampant and Yuuuuge. Because it is both easy and it doesn't get the international police on your back like stealing CC's or user accounts do. So it is a fun game for smart people who make anywhere from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars a day just for writing clever code.

somid338• 10 years ago

I'd love to hear more. I'll email you tmrw. Interesting background.

known• 10 years ago

So Adblock is 90% effective

somid338• 10 years ago

No, of the entering traffic, after they click on the ad, its as if 90% of them are not your typical organic visitor.

siddharthgdas• 10 years ago

People coming from scroll-through-attend-nirvana kind of platforms like fb, twitter etc are expected to behave that way.

Shouldn't you build a rather very specific landing pages for these click-throughs and then compare their behavior? I personally feel that redirection to very good article on your site would rather have them more interested than sending them to a landing page.

tonyedgecombe3• 10 years ago

Adwords used to work really well for me, over the years the return declined and the system got more complex until it wasn't worth the effort anymore.

There is a good post from Andy Brice on this: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/05/26/the-declining-prof...

pryelluw4• 10 years ago

@OP: What's the product? I get that its a newsletter but I can't figure out the content from the copy. Why dont you test putting sample content on the landing page? :)

blockchan3• 10 years ago

I did Adwords for 1 person mom shops and bigger companies in industries ranging from tourism and general aviation to jewelry and software development.

It was all profitable. Ad agencies are borderline scammers - they measure traffic and clicks as performance, which makes you to spend more money to increase "performance" and pay more agency fees.

Sometimes I burned $15000 before first conversion, but ROI was always positive in the end.

People launching ads without any experience, redirecting people to homepage and loosing money are the same kind of people trying trade stock market and loosing money, creating their own amateur e-commerce shop and loosing money getting zero customers, hiring high-school nephew for company website etc etc. You need experience, and before that - knowledge.

First, manage your ads in-house. Agencies have no reason to work for your conversions, that's not their business model. Second, don't treat ads like "we'll slap users with our ad and see what happens". Prepare user flow, conversion funnel, dedicated landing pages, drip campaigns, remarketing etc.

Adwords and Facebook are fully-fledged promotion channels and they have to be treated as such. It's a craft which consultants make huge money from - because they know how to bring profits.

jgautsch• 10 years ago

Do you have a recommendation on the best way to learn to be effective at this craft? Did you learn on the job or from some other resources?

blockchan3• 10 years ago

I'm 100% self-taught. Firstly, gained lot of theoretical knowledge reading blogs, guides, tutorials, ebooks.

Next, I experimented with very low budgets for my own websites.

After that, small business for family friend. It all went surprisingly well and wasn't that hard, really. You just need to be very data-driven and methodical.

Game changer for me was NGO and Adwords grant (https://www.google.com/grants/), which gives you $10 000 per month. You can experiment without fear, trying everything you read or thought about.

When you optimize campaigns and grant limitations are starting being annoying, that's when you are ready for the real big work.

shostack4• 10 years ago

You are painting agencies with overly broad strokes. I used to help lead the paid search group at a top search agency. Rest assured we did not try to pass off clicks as anything but that. Occasionally we had clients with branding goals and we worked with them to make sure we were adding incremental value, but most were direct response (ie. "Show me the money or you're fired").

A percent of media model isn't perfect, but if a client isn't seeing results, the relationship won't last long, and word gets around.

Now, there are scammy agencies out there, but it is hardly the norm. I loved stealing business from them because it was shooting fish in a barrel with all the problems on those accounts.

Be careful about making such broad, and highly inaccurate statements... They really don't help paint you in the best light.

blockchan3• 10 years ago

Be careful about making such broad, and highly inaccurate statements... They really don't help paint you in the best light.

What paints me in good light is my results and my results only. Also, I'm a cool, likable guy :)

I had my share of dealing with agencies and nothing beats knowledge of business goals, internal processes and clientbase and reports honesty while working in-house.

Many agencies exist because it's cheaper to outsource. Just like Indian coders - but quality of work is often questionable.

I stand by my words and refuse all agency work - still, I have many recruiters regularly saying "hi" on LinkedIn.

galfarragem• 10 years ago

90% seems accurate:

- Most times I click in ads, I do it only to help the content creators, I have no interest at all in the ad I'm clicking.

- The remaining clicks I often do it by mistake.

andai2• 10 years ago

I used to click only on ads I didn't like, to charge the creators money, until I realized the networks were optimizing for showing me only ads I hated.

kapauldo2• 10 years ago

I have found that all display ad clicks and all mobile ad clicks are worthless for our business with adwords. You have to blow a thousand bucks to learn that lesson. Once you eliminate that traffic, its not bad. Makes me wonder if google is one ftc lawsuit away from halving in value (tinfoil hat).

blackice2• 10 years ago

There are many traffic exchange sites that use automated software to click or view ads. Most of them run on server ips or they're using a proxy. http://getIPIntel.net is a free and useful service to combat bad / low quality traffic. Though to save you money, your advertiser needs to not bill you for automated traffic. It's unlikely that'll happen because the more views and clicks, the more money they'll get. You can still use GetIPIntel's api to help you pick which advertising company gives you legitimate traffic.

accountface• 10 years ago

"but yeah, that 10% though"

nkkollaw• 10 years ago

I have definitely seen the same thing.

I would like to add that having done both, ads in foreign languages are clicked on by bots many times less than ads in English.

Google Adwords seems to be almost a scam. If you don't disable them, most of your clicks will come from Nigeria, Afghanistan, and other random countries, with Google doing nothing about it.

I've had success with Facebook in Polish and Italian, ads in English seemed to be mostly bots.

Pretty sad for people who spend thousands without knowing.

I guess content marketing is the way to go, most people know this. Write good stuff that is useful to your audience, and share it on Reddit. I've done it in the past, with great results.

chimpnuggets• 10 years ago

Start by making a landing page dedicated to your google campaign traffic. Pay attention to the results and try to make changes to improve conversion rate.

Some of those will be changes to the LP, some of it will be narrowing the targeting of your ads to exclude unprofitable segments.

Is easy really, to get something from ads. You just need to stop half-assing it.

rcar1046• 10 years ago

...Google and Facebook ad traffic useless to 90%

scottmcleod2• 10 years ago

You just don't understand how to use the platforms. I'm generating millions of dollars in revenue for startups from both these channels each month.

These posts pop-up every now and then, what OP doesn't consider is they just aren't a good marketer.

cconcepts4• 10 years ago

In the contract economy, imagine that all of us, with our small contracting companies and associated specialities, are day labourers standing at the dockside waiting to be hired.

The dock manager (Google) opens a gate to the strong looking fellows allowing them into the dock company's holding area. If they are not in this area (front page of appropriate SERPs) then they aren't considered by the task master who later comes to the holding area, scans the candidates that the dock manager has selected, and takes his pick to get the days work done - from which point it is finally up to the individual and their abilities to prove their ongoing worth.

Imagine if you needed to be an SEO, adwords and general internet marketing guru just to get the dock manager to look at you so you could get paid....

EDIT: Clarity

erikpukinskis• 10 years ago

In the contract economy every one of the dock workers has an agent whose job it is to make sure they have the support they need to provide ongoing worth.

Right now most agents won't take someone who can't immediately bill invoices in the high thousands of dollars. In a contract economy the agent services market would have a low end. Tools will emerge to help agents take on large volumes of low dollar value clients.

Double digit percentages of the entire unrepresented labor market are up for grabs. The current setup is unstable.

Unions are different in that they represent a class not an individual and they don't take a percentage of earnings.

swalsh• 10 years ago

I recently ran a campaign to validate an idea. Ultimately I dropped the idea, but out of 300 impressions, i got 10 clicks.. and 6 of those clicks left their email address. Not bad.

I then clicked the "optimize my campaign" button. Suddenly my clicks went up, and my impressions went up... but no one left their email. I think the trick to advertising on Google is to target niches, and scale up "manually". I also think there's something to targeting the long tail keywords rather than the fat popular keywords. "Sofa" might get 50k clicks, but the people searching for "Black modern leather sofa" will probably be a better match.

yosefjaved• 10 years ago

I'm making the assumption that the 90% is your bounce rate for traffic from Facebook and Google Advertising.

I'm also assuming that you probably have left all channels (mobile, tablet, desktop, various display channels, etc) on, and not using remarketing/retargeting.

If all that is true, then what you're seeing is normal. Heck it can even be higher than that in a lot of cases. Ideally, you need to be working on reducing that useless traffic over time.

But this easier said than done especially if you have a a small budget that will be completely gone within a few weeks.

PPC is such a hard thing to do because you need consistent funds for at least 1-4 months to truly test what works and what doesn't. If you don't have that, then there is no point in doing it.

My word of advice is either stop doing PPC and focus on less costly things, or if you're going to do it, then start by using only one ad network (doesn't matter; just pick one) and working within a single channel of that network.

Once you feel comfortable within that one channel, then start adding another channel and another channel over time within that ad network.

novaleaf• 10 years ago

does anyone know if the OP is talking about search ads, or display ads? I stay away from display ads because it's chock full of fraudulent activity, but even search ads I see about 90% lower conversions than organic search. so wondering if this is the same problem....

jivers70• 10 years ago

In-house email will always outperform paid media, so the fact that you record a higher degree of site interaction from people who arrive via email should be of no surprise.

With regard to the advertising on Facebook and Google, what audience targeting was tested and applied? What ad formats were used? How many ad concepts were tested? What testing was done on the landing pages to improve performance? What was the "ROI" of the advertising investment, and what was the +/- on these results relative to the goals ascribed to the investment at the outset?

If you have no answers to these questions, or cannot back up your response with data from the type of testing I refer to here (which is part and parcel to running online advertising), then your article is completely pointless.

hamfisted2• 10 years ago

14 Year PPC guy here. I have built businesses using PPC traffic.

With Google - Turn off search partners and content network and try running the numbers again.

jitbit• 10 years ago

"Facebook fraud" is a video anyone who considers paid ads MUST watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

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