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.
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.
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.
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.
Correct, this is not a statistical trial or anything official. In fact, my data is not significant. After years of using Google and Facebook ads that I have never seen CPM out beat CPC.
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.
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.
Which you tell Google/Facebook how much you want to pay for it. The better quality they deliver the more you (and your competitors) will be willing to pay.
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.
For the latter: I worked on Global Network Navigator [1] from 1993-1995. GNN was the first commercial website, published by O'Reilly & Associates. I was the technical director of GNN. We experimented with various types of financial support, including what today would call sponsored content. My first gig at GNN in October 1993 was coding the HTML for the the initial sponsored content article (for a Bay area law firm). Around the same time, Wired (as HotWired) invented banner ads -- I lay no claim to that! ;)
For the former: I think systems like FullStory are incredibly intrusive. Why would I want my personal scrolling & clicking actions captured, played back, and analyzed? How have we come to accept this as normal? I realize most people don't think about this, but that's because they don't realize the level of information that is accrued. I know when I've tried to explain how much information is gathered, my non-techie friends are horrified themselves. Sure, it might be anonymized (or might not); regardless, it's just fucking creepy.
Reading this thread made me double-check my ad-blocker/anti-tracker settings, clear all my cookies, and think again about just disabling Javascript entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This. Not every business has the economics to make advertising work at certain scales.
For many, $17/lead is fantastic because they have an AOV or LTV that supports it. Not every business can do that, so other forms of marketing may make more sense at that stage.
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...
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.
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:
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).
I see why you might think that -- but Spotify's playlists and the discover weekly features overall are much better then Google play. Yet, as a project fi & G apps user, Google play has great download functionality.
I believe ad networks (that rely on third-party scripts and cookies) days are numbered thanks to adblocking. The only ads I see surviving long term are affiliate links, sponcered content and static native ads.
The problems with ad networks are too big to go on for very long. Poor user experience, Ad fraud, malware, the indiscriminate gathering and selling of user information. It's just a matter of time 'till everyone has a adblocker.
Programmatic ads (i.e. Real-time auctions) aren't going anywhere. The old method of phone calls and handshakes to fill adspace is just so inefficient.
The ad networks are just waiting for premium content (eg ESPN) to go programmatic. The cable networks who own that content are slowly wearing down. Once those floodgates open there will be a whole new arms race.
I guess I'm cheap then. I have no interest in paying any amount of money to read most of the things I read online. It seems to me that it's not so much that people are demanding this content for free as it is that people don't think it's worth paying for. It's not that I particularly wanted to see an article about the usefulness of advertising as it is that it's something to read on the bus. I would probably just look out the window instead if the alternative weren't free.
Most articles/videos on sites like HN fall into this category - I wouldn't have paid to read this article for example. To me, this comment thread is worth much more than the article itself and I don't see anybody here upset that they aren't getting paid to comment.
I guess that means that I would probably pay a subscription fee to a site like HN but that I wouldn't generally pay for the content itself, which does seem a little backwards. Still, that's what's valuable to me. Does anybody else feel this way or am I weird?
For some reason comments are often more interesting than the articles themselves, and people never think of monetizing their comments. Somehow karma is enough of a reward.
If I had to watch an ad for 30 seconds or pay $0.25, the proceeds of which would be distributed to commentators by proportion of karma they earned in the comment section ... I probably wouldn't bother.
It doesn't make much sense to me how I arrive at these utility valuations though.
"Websites love talking about how much their readers are cheap, and how, no, they don't publish crappy content, they would totally check facts and whatnot.
Let's be honest - many websites are after monetizing whatever they can. They want content cheap to produce. And if readers don't want to buy it, they'll sell your attention and your privacy to advertisers, until eventually it's a race to the bottom."
At least within your home or on some other place where you control the network infrastructure, you can use dnsmasq and block many in-app ads at the DNS level.
Logically I can't wrap my head around your position. Content, like comments is just the output of someones thoughts. The majority of comments are short off-the-cuff statements, but articles on websites stand a better chance of having gone through a process of deliberation/research/etc. Perhaps you could argue that most content is fluff but even so, all I'm saying is that it stands some chance, versus no chance of being thorough.
So.. to me, the opposite holds true. If lets say I was interested in reviews on some technical product I wanted to buy - I would definitely prefer to have a lengthy article that goes over all the details rather than a comment thread which might detail one tiny slice of their experience with the product. So maybe if enough people comment, I can waste some time reading them all and cobble together a larger slice in my head, but again, its tedious, its just easier to go to a single source that has already done it.
Maybe what we really need is better curation than the current voting model.
I think it depends on the content, but in general i agree with you.
There's some really valuable info on the net: medical research, good product recommendations, educational materials regarding hobbies and work, etc. I wouldn't mind paying for them(and i do buy some books), but most of these are free, or availble via places like sci-hub.
As for the rest, which is basically enterntainment - i can't imagine no good free alternatives for those - hey, there are many blogs from people who aren't professional writers who offer much better content than the pro media.
I wish there was a search engine focused on the best of those - i feel it would improve the internet by so much.
> Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free.
There are 3 problems with this statement.
1) There is a lot of free content, easily found, and content gets more rapidly out of date nowadays. Paid content must deal with this (newsworthy, in depth competition).
2) Your view is US centric; the vast majority (read: not all) of internet users from other countries generally have less money to spend.
3) The cost of loss of privacy is indirect, therefore hidden, and US companies generally get away with it. This is why data mining is currently profitable.
In order to solve #3 shit must first hit the fan, to increase awareness. #1 is solved by collectively putting the high quality content behind paywall. #2 can in theory be solved by globalisation in long-term. Short-term, dynamic price makes sense, but it makes #1 & #3 worse.
Let me quote the rest of your statement:
> [...] 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.
Agreed, except for example for (local) newspapers who also provide online access as part of their sub. Global newspapers have more competition. Especially given the widespread English language.
> Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).
For Google, yes. For privacy, no. In apps on an unrooted Android device, yes. On recent iOS and desktops, no (the latter 2 due to ad blockers).
Also, streaming media such as Spotify proves a subscription in a new market (not newspapers) can work. Netflix proves it for video.
> 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.
Not yet a final, stable non developer version released AFAIK. Also, Eich is no longer part of Mozilla.
1. There is a lot of free content - yeah, the internet is full of free content, but much of is click-bait garbage, or re-posted a billion times. Let's be honest - true, honest-to-goodness original journalism costs money. Good writing costs money. Investigating journalism costs money. Getting people to actually go out into the real world, and interview people, or write about stuff costs money. Who's going to pay for that?
Pick up an article from the New Statesman, or The Economist, or The New York Times - compare that to the offal you get on Buzzfeed, or one of the billion other click-bait sites.
When all those actual journalists go out of business - you'll get everybody coming out of the woodwork complaining that they can't get news, or it's all just PR puff-pieces from companies, or sound-bites from political spokespersons. And people on the internet will whine that <insert random politician> is corrupt and only got elected because nobody could be bothered reporting on politics. Or that everything they read is beholden to corporate or political interests.
2. Your view is US centric - I'm not from the US, so I'm not really sure how to respond to this. Or are you just assuming, because you're not from the US, and it's convenient to erect a strawman?
Or are you saying there's poor people on the internet? Sure, I'm certain there are. In fact, there's poor people without access to access to computers, or the internet either. I suspect those people probably don't care (yet) to read articles from The Economist, or New Statesman either.
I'm specifically addressing people who access these sites, and still want to access them by blocking ads, or circumventing their anti-ad-block. So please don't erect some strawman, or turn this into a "Oh, but I'm poor! Please, give me free stuff!" plea. Poor people have do have problems and deserve compassion - but being able to get free articles from Forbes, or Wired probably isn't their main concern.
3. Cost of privacy is indirect - I see this as market forces. As in, if people don't want to do a normal "I pay a dollar, you give me a newspaper to read", then newspapers need to find other ways to monetise. I do have issues about that - but I certainly don't see either side as particularly clean in this fight.
So poor people don't/won't read the Economist? They "don't care to". wow. BTW, these click-bait sites are rewarded by your employer who then is able to pay you. As an aside: Doesn't google still provide a text only web cache that strips ads? What if I use wget or curl? What about reader view in safari or firefox, absent from chrome of course. Rss? Blocking ads is only one way to go.
The Economist will quite proudly tell you itself how educated and rich its readers are (or take a look at the ads – it's the only periodical I know where you can usually find a small port terminal or newish refinery in the classifieds)
But the actual point you were arguing was: Is it legitimate to block ads and/or circumvent paywalls? What about the poor? or non-Americans?
The latter two aren't actually new situations for publishers – they have actually always operated in 0-marginal-cost environments, and have therefore developed strategies to capture any "consumer surplus" they can get. For those cases, there has always been country-specific pricing as well as discount schemes. Most common are probably student discounts, but you can also do price discrimination by making people jump through hoops to get discounts, essentially trading time for money. That's the principle behind supermarket coupons.
Regarding your technical scenarios: You're trying to do some legalistic hair-splitting, in a discussion that isn't even about legality but morality. I hope we'll get to the point where people realise the importance of professional, traditional print outlets, and see that they can obviously not continue to exist without our willingness to spend some money. I'm rather pessimistic on the former ("yeah I browse the NYT on the loo but it's not worth anything and 15 years ago they were wrong about Iraq WMD and I rather read bloggers from all sides of the spectrum and do the synthesis myself and even learn about Pizzagate and no I don't have a problem with run-on sentences").
The media still has to do its part, as well. I regularly do a shallow read of 10 to 15 publications. I'll happily spend 200$ per year for the privilege, but I haven't found anyone willing to take my money. I'm not going to pay that amount for a single publication as my parents have done over decades.
I'm spending 10$/mo on music now. Before, I had bought maybe two CDs in my entire life. But so far, publishing is blocking "streaming" to protect "CD sales".
>>Let's be honest - true, honest-to-goodness original journalism costs money. Good writing costs money. Investigating journalism costs money. Getting people to actually go out into the real world, and interview people, or write about stuff costs money. Who's going to pay for that?
Investigative journalism is in its death throes, and it's not because of lack of money. It's because of lack of interest from audiences.
Nowadays, journalism is all about who breaks the story first. This is why people are saying (only half-jokingly) that we live in a "post-facto" world: investigating leads and verifying facts take a lot of time, during which your rivals might publish the story and get all the eyeballs and therefore ad money. And if they get the facts wrong, or the entire story ends up being incorrect? No one really cares, because by then everyone has moved on to the next thing that is demanding their attention.
>>Pick up an article from the New Statesman, or The Economist, or The New York Times - compare that to the offal you get on Buzzfeed, or one of the billion other click-bait sites.
I'm not so pessimistic. For example, over here in Holland we have De Correspondent, which does an admirable job at depth over 'breaking first' (it's even their mission statement: beyond the whims of the day, loosely translated). They're very loosely paywalled and get by on paying subscribers like myself.
From what i gather so far, they're doing a wonderful job and expanding rapidly without losing money. I think there's plenty room for initiatives like that in specific niches as well.
My impression of NYT and The Economist and such is that while they're trying, they're still way too tethered to an older model which, among other things, requires more money for (relatively) more crap. And while on behalf of good journalism I lament the period of turmoil as they fight their fight but eventually disappear, I think it's necessary for more targeted, leaner journalism to take over.
1. are you aware that newspaper were dying before the web ? they were mostly financed by advertising which owned them, also they pretty all been bought by rich people or giant corporations. Then out of the content available on the web (I'm not talking of the internet because I've never seen a journal publish on newsgroups or other parts of the internet that are not the web) newspaper are but a really tiny tiny fraction of the content available. The web was designed as a non-commercial sharing space, so it's no surprise that people expect it to still be used that way. At some point advertisers and marketers (who should suck on tailpipes [1]) invaded the web by the selling the idea that you could make money out by hijacking the traffic of a website. The internet and the web built on top changed the rules of the game and your failed business model is not my problem is the attitude you have to deal with from now on.
That said on the matter of independent (read no advertising) investigative journalism publishing online the number of available spots are limited and the first to move will seize the better place on the market. Look at how mediapart.fr established itself in France and how many stories they get out compared to the other newspapers. They are a success established on initial funding giving no power to the funder and now entirely paid by the readers.
Lesson here is there are people willing to pay and support a truly independent online newspaper, the demand is here and the old newspaper who are dependent on ads and controlled by who has the most shares are not fulfilling it.
>> Pick up an article from the New Statesman, or The Economist, or The New York Times - compare that to the offal you get on Buzzfeed, or one of the billion other click-bait sites.
It would be interesting to try an ad-blocking program that has an exception: if this article has been written by the journalist who did all the work(or something close to that) , he can show me ads.
Brave should collect the bitcoin payments, but only pay the site owner when no advertisements or third-party tracking is found on their website for the past month. If the conditions are not met, then the bitcoins are refunded to the users.
This way, it provides site owners with an incentive to remove their advertisements when they see they could be earning a higher amount from user donations. Also, users are more likely to donate, because their donations are encouraging site owners to drop their advertisements, and their payments only go to those that share their vision, and remove advertising.
I think there is some tremendous gap between what a site believes it's value to be and the value to the person behind the keyboard. My opinion is the reverse of yours. Internet users aren't necessarily cheap, the sites overvalue the content they provide. Just because someone provides content doesn't mean it's good enough to make a living. If people leave site A because they charge for site B that's free but of less value, it may mean that site A doesn't provide enough value for the price they want to charge.Personally, I don't care how intrusive you think they are, I'm not going to view them. Why would you want me to, I'm not going to click anyway. I do pay for several sites via subscription (FT, WSJ, NYT, and others) and I pay for my email service(s) and I pay for Amazon and Netflix and Mubi and Hulu. Oh, I also pay for my broadband connection. If you think that anyone who puts content online should be compensated by default, that's the weirdest contention I've ever heard.
The issue isn't so much you not viewing the site - but rather ad-blocking.
Not having readership is one thing - but people who still want your content, but refuse to pay, or view the ads, well that's another.
I respect people who don't view sites like say, the NYT, or WSJ or The Economist etc. because those sites show ads. Or that won't buy the hardcopy magazines because there is ad space.
What I can't respect is people still trying to view those sites and defeat their anti-ad-blocks.
Or who complain about how link-baity the articles on HN are, or why there are fluff pieces here - but don't think, hey, good content costs money
I suppose if those sites went the way of intrusive, pop-under/pop-over ads, I might chance my tune - but on the whole, I've found the text/small image ads so far on them a reasonable exchange.
Most people do pay dumb amounts of money for content. They pay their carrier for the bandwidth to download the ads. That's in the ballpark of a nickel per page [0].
You can't say that micropayments doesn't work when ads ARE micropayments. They're just micropayments with a particular set of properties.
The only question remaining is which of those properties are necessary. Is it actually necessary that your nickel causes an ad to be displayed, or is it just easier and the way we've organized things so far?
And yet, when I turn on ad-block for a month, my cable internet bill does not go down.
So, no, it is by no means a micropayment. And even if I were charged for overage, and I were over my monthly limit, I wouldn't be charged at a rate of $1 for 20 MB.
> Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free.
Web users are not cheap. They expect stuff to be free because this is what the web has been designed to: sharing knowledge for free between people. But truth is it is not free, we are paying through privacy invasion and the reason for both of these is google. Google provides whatever you want with no immediate price to pay, though we actually pay in the end, and you can compete with google especially since google has established dominance.
The reason I say we pay in the end is not obvious but self-evident when you think of it, google gathers personal profiling data, exploits it to sell ads paid by advertisers, advertisers include the price of advertising in the product, we buy the product thus paying for the content in the end. The trick is we may have bought the product anyways though now we pay a bit more to pay the advertising costs. That's how we pay google to provide us with seemingly gratis stuff.
> Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).
You're starting with a bad assumption. There is a model that worked for years even before this assumption became rampant: do not expect revenue by having a website or webpage that is not an online shop. example: www.debian.org
Then if your content is good enough your audience will pay for you to make more, see the dice tower getting its funding on kickstarter [1], or the webcomics with patreon, and so on. The point being, there are models that work to get a revenue from publishing online outside of ads, but you need a sizeable audience first.
Brave's bitcoin integration is under the hood, only exposed in beta but it'll be hidden. Our long-term play is to build the anti-Google, your personal data platform.
Ad networks have not "gone too far" -- the whole system is broken, with malware entering 3rd party ad exchanges and fake users browsing fake publisher sites to steal ad revenue (https://whiteops.com/methbot). Google facilitates and profits from all of this.
Don't be distracted by intrusiveness, however bad and block-worthy. Tracking required by ads whether intrusive or not is the higher priority. It enriches a few and loots user data, if not exposing them to malware then abusing them with retargeting, online to offline breaches, and the like. Third party ads and tracking form a system that is stiffing publishers year over year, leading to eventual ruin.
Brave is 3-6x faster than Chrome on Android and not just by blocking ads: blocking trackers is required and those scripts and the "programmatic waterfall" or "header bidder wrappers" or other such junk are to blame.
BrendanEich claiming ad networks are stiffing publishers while his product robs them entirely is really fucking rich. Go fuck yourself you ass clown. I'd say you're nothing more than a petty thief, but the numbers show that's not even close to true. The real money you're keeping out of the pockets of hard working publishers for the product they provide is in the millions. And you plan on circumventing with your own revenue model. All under the guise of speed. You're a snake oil salesman of the highest order, selling someone else's product as if it's your own. Then again, even snake oil salesmen bought their own snake oil to sell. You just steal it. There is no apt analogy as everyone else who has done what you're trying to do has ended up in jail. May the same fait befall you.
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.
I like the irony at that. For a long time you were exactly right and "the consumer wants it this way" was a convenient argument that ad-supported sites could make.
Now ad-blocking gets more and more mainstream - and many sites (especially news sites apparently) start to panic, pleading users to disable their ad-blockers or putting up ad-blocker-blockers...
News sites don't get it. There is no story I'm interested in reading in the WSJ or NYT that I can't find on a dozen other free news sites. Sure they do investigative pieces, but if they are really noteworthy they'll get reported on elsewhere within hours. I would never consider paying for a news site.
News sites absolutely get that people like you exist and are quite common; you're the reason why free-to-readers, clickbait headlined sites where content is either paid for by heavy advertisement or interested parties sponsoring content are so dominant -- no reader-focussed business model can be built around users with those preferences.
I don't know if you've actually thought your logic through to completion.
You claim that you would "never consider paying for a news site", because it'll just get re-posted somewhere else.
I urge you to think and reflect on what you've just claimed.
Investigative journalism costs money. Going out and interviewing people, or taking photographs costs money. Digging through old archives, or filing Freedom of Information requests to your local government body costs money.
If everybody stops doing that - what exactly are you going to re-post? Kim Kardashian's selfie feed? Cute photos of cats?
WSJ and NYT do journalism - you may not agree with everything they write, but let's be honest, they do real, honest-to-goodness journalistic work. I have a lot of respect for their craft - they're what keeps companies and politicians honest as well, so I see them as essentially to a functional democracy.
Or let's put it closer to home - we techies complain that a lot of news content is just PR puff-pieces from hardware/software companies.
Well, sites like IDW, Anandtech, Phoronix, Engadget, Artstechnica - they do actual reporting, they go out and buy components and test them etc. That costs money.
By your argument, you refuse to pay because somebody will just re-post it - yeah, but somebody has to do the original work. So you are basically spiting the hand that feeds you
> If everybody stops doing that - what exactly are you going to re-post?
An issue is that for a high quality investigative story, say the Boston Globe's story about how the catholic church covered up abuse by priests for years, is that although it is expensive to produce, and interesting, it is difficult for me to quantify how I should value it. I'm neither from Boston, nor catholic, so in a sense that story is completely irrelevant to me. It's going to be the same with most stories, i.e. they're highly likely to be irrelevant to an individual.
The bigger issue is that the conclusion to your argument is that we should be obliged to pay for investigative journalism. I would argue that if society as a whole benefits from something, but an individual doesn't, then it should be the government's responsibility to support it. The BBC seems to work well, and maybe something like that could work on a state-level in the US.
Would you be comfortable with the only investigative journalism being carried out by the government?
Sure, the BBC (British) or ABC (Australia) model seems to work well - but there's been funding spats in the past.
It's not that hard to imagine a world where the Prime Minister thinks "These silly ivory-tower journalists are just using their rag to rail on me! Why the heck am I signing off on more funding. Cutbacks!".
That and there's many countries where I'd rather an independent journalistic service.
I think that the 'for a long time' part makes it somewhat less ironic.
Things change, and it's perfectly normal that this can cause turmoil and turn winners into losers (and vice versa) until everything stabilizes again... for a while.
There are those natural steps you always take when you set a new machine up (either for yourself or for someone else): Install the OS, install any updates, remove vendor-provided crap-ware, install antivirus, etc. "Install ad blocker" has turned into one of those steps for me. I now do it without even thinking about it. If you have tried to browse the web without one recently, you know why you need to: the current ad-encumbered web browsing experience is totally ridiculous.
This is definitely a more technical solution than the average user might use, but I've had some great success with network wide adblocking via the Pi-hole package for Raspberry Pi, and setting my DHCP server to point to it as the primary DNS.
It runs a local DNS cache that blacklists ad domains (so basically how uBlock Origin works but utilizing DNS instead of just dropping the elements on the page).
There are a few sites I've had to whitelist but in general I don't even think about it running anymore, but all devices on my local newtork are ad free.
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).
Curious, how does your behavior around perfectly elastic goods play out? Two products, same price, arguably indistinguishable (eg. Coke and Pepsi).
I like to think I fall into the same category, where ads don't prompt me to spend money I wasn't going to spend before, but I think all else being equal I stick to brands I've heard of (via ads).
Out of my head, these kinds of products appealed to me as a kid, and I sticked to those I liked more. Pepsi lacked something. I can't be sure how psychological this is (branding, logo, color .. amount of marketing in my country versus the US). I still think I could probably distinguish them blind.
Early on I was fond of both brands, but later, if you offered pepsi half the price I'd still pick out a can of coke.
Yeah sorry, I got caught in my own head. I think more than brand, it's shelves that drive the decision for such commodities. Whatever is close and in good supply I'll take without too much attention paid to the brand. Or brand reputation when I'm feel picky. But never advertising itself.
My consumerism seems to be restricted to a few kind of products for which I feel about for very specific reasons.
I'm still subject to influence, because I have eyes, but it's mostly negatively, advertising is a cheap trick void of information to me. I can't buy something because a handsome male pretended to use it in a video.
Even those with informations are often lying to put a spin on their product. Health products with a new molecule. Green vehicles. etc
Plus if you know a bit about production you know brands are often using the same materials with a few superficially differenciating details; so in the end.. same product.
I still have a technical mind, and it's my main mode of functionning. Influence can still be there but I'd bet 10$ it's barely significant.
I would bet the influence is not significant to you — you would get the same product for the same cost either way in most cases, but it is significant for the brand you end up arbitrarily choosing.
I simply mean that it makes no difference to you whether you buy your gas at Shell or Chevron because it costs the same and you get the same product. But it makes a difference to Shell if you buy your gas at Shell.
Since it is inconsequential to you, you don't care or notice the impact.
- "meh it's all bs ..."
- "hmm I'd like that! can't wait to go to the mall and get one"
- "oh I didn't know this, it could help me <there>"
?
I recall feeling 3) once in my life, it surprised me because that was my first deep positive reaction to an ad. Even though I've seen similar products all my life.
Does marketing count on negative bias in their theory ? "he may dislike the add but we have a foot in the door now, he'll buy our shit later"
That's the interesting part. Individually, people declare their aversion/immunity to advertising. As a whole, marketers measure the lift and attribute revenue to efforts across a segment with high statistical confidence.
Either there are enough highly susceptible people to offset the ad-immune crowd, or marketing works in much more sophisticated ways than we realize.
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.
I'm with you - totally unable to remember the contents of the last lightbox popup I dismissed, and I'd challenge anyone to honestly recall theirs if it wasn't within the last few minutes.
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.
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
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.
I know your product and space well - you'd be better off with getting people on an email list via a content giveaway to start your marketing. You need a lot more top of funnel and long term engagement marketing to convince your prospects to buy.
That is undoubtedly true, though I lack the expertise and time to properly implement and manage that sort of thing. All I can do is to try to be a prominent and useful member of the ecosystem in our corner of the FOSS VoIP world and attract enquiries on that basis.
I don't see sales to be my problem, but rather marketing. I'm content with the ease with which prospects are persuaded to buy when they come through the door, but there are just far too few opportunities to have those conversations.
Well that's very possibly an attribution issue. Those clicks led to traffic, and if the sales cycle is long those clicks will take months to convert. Unless you are tracking sessions back to their source months after the fact, you can't really know if those ads led to conversions or not.
No, not with definitive certainty. However, the traffic volumes involved are low enough that I have a pretty good idea of how people that buy came to know about the product or came to visit the site for the first time. A high percentage of the time, they tell me.
Never, ever have I heard, "Saw your ad on Google".
Yeah, I hear you. I would never rely on someone telling you. If you integrate adwords with salesforce you can truly track the customer from the first click to conversion, even months later. Could be worth looking into if you want to optimize your marketing spend.
Not saying you're wrong but the goal of advertising is not necessarily a direct, short term effect of increase in sales. It could be brand recognition, which can be activated via subliminal messaging. E.g. "I heard of you before but I don't quite remember where". I'd also say that's good. If a customer found a product from a review site, that means the customer is an informed subject who is convinced they're buying the right product. Discussion fora is more of a toss up as quality and premises of discussion can be anything really.
Re: article. The screencast (that's how that's called, right?) shows 'this visitor scrolls different' and claims that is how a mobile user scrolls. But that is also how a trackpad (laptop) user who skims through the content scrolls. Basically, its how one 'scans'. Scanning is useful to determine if content is interesting.
Anyway. Its also possible we are talking bots here. Is this possibly the effect of Ad Nauseam [1]?
Have you ever heard that they saw you on Google at all? I feel like a lot of people fail to remember the distinction between ad results and search results.
To me this immediately stood out to me as the real issue. Even for smallish products I click on an ad and rarely buy on the first visit. But I remember the name and come back to look for the product later on.
This is why tracking is so important. @Parent what is a conversion to you? Maybe you should add something light that the user can do that gives you a sense of their interest other than a purchase.
Usually, that latter function is served by the contact form. The intent of the site is to give them just enough info that they are motivated to contact us to learn more, after which they go in our CRM (Close.io, following @patio11's recommendation of it) and get extensive follow-up over what is, as you correctly surmised, often a very protracted evaluation and sales cycle. It's not uncommon for the subsequent back-and-forth to take months or, in some cases, even years, before (if) there is any real traction.
My organic traffic behaves about as I expect; they often fill out the contact form and we end up having a productive chat. Paid ad traffic, however, unfailingly bounces.
The problem is in your approach. Try switching from asking to giving in exchange for email. Then nurture the lead through email and you'll see much better results. The money is in the lists.
Thanks for the tip. But how do you suggest, within the logic of the site and my product, that I give in exchange for email? What should I offer? I can't just wall off all information behind a demand for contact info. If they have no inkling of what's behind the wall, there's no reason for them to provide it.
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.
Anecdotally, I never click ads (they're all blocked with years) but I do respond to "deals" site in my local market. If it's something I vaguely though I'd like, seeing it recommended on a deal site is sometimes enough to make me buy it. Something worth noting for those selling to a HN type demographic.
haven't ads disappeared from the web 10 years ago ?
It is always a harsh return to a sad web experience when I have to use someone else computer who don't know about ad blockers. Almost unbearable, to the point that I first grant them the magic of ublock orgin before anything else. They thank me profusely and never go back to the ad riddled experience of the web.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
ublock origin has anti-tracker lists, and to use fullstory you add fs.js to the <head>. I could see it being blocked (like I just did in my custom list).
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.
Every IP address has to be registed to an ISP, VPN servers are pretty trivial to detect as you'll see that the registration info from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc. comes up as "HideMyAss" or "Amazon".
There are companies out there that provide paid anonymous, reliable (not hacked) proxy servers that run on consumer internet connections though, and those would be very hard to detect as vpn / proxy connections.
Another way is through capabilities where you have a computer that identifies itself as a macOS device but has the TCP/IP stack of a windows device – that's a proxy ! I would recommend the source code of p0f or the book silence on the wire to learn more about the topic.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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!
A lot of times, nobody reads these white papers, but there is a huge credibility boost from having them. It says that there's something substantive here. "Sounds like good stuff."
I have seen a lot of companies do this and it's terrible. You get SEO mostly from long form in depth articles and dumping it into a PDF will tank something that would be page 1 to page 5. Google will prefer a well setup blog over a file download ten times out of ten. Unless your whitepaper is a unicorn the search results will go to someone else
LOL I have a site that is totally and exclusively devoted to Study Skills. My quality score for the keyword "study skills?" 1/10
Now, I understand what's happening. I haven't loaded up the <h1> tags and stuff. I'm appealing to the people who might be looking for something like this. It's very different from selling umbrellas, but we are forced to fit the same mold.
I think the general conclusion is sound: Having such a dominant company that suffers no ill consequences of its mistakes is bad for small business.
In large it doesn't matter what you're selling anymore for the most part. People are used to thumbing through search results and every company competing in the space is at their fingertips with a single click. It's not like you're the only study site they found, they probably have ten open right now.
You need to have the most appealing intros or people will simply hit X on the tab and move on to someone that does. In short, make absolutely sure it's abundantly clear to a five year old that they've reached the right place within ten seconds or people will go somewhere else.
Also, everyone will be 1/10 qs for study skills. The keyword is far too broad for more than 1% of your ads to be targeted properly. Unless you have thousands of negative keywords I wouldn't go near that one. Google wants ads to be relevant so users will continue to click them. You will be punished severely every time your ad shows up and it's not what the user was looking for
another tip is that if you don't sell a product Adwords is not for you. Pure content sites will be vaporized by the cost vs the revenue you get from people seeing ads on your site :)
In my experience people through AdWords are not technical. Usually how it goes is that the people actually using the software, so the poor saps working in the call center, will get so frustrated with their existing system that they will google "call center software" and let their manager/coworkers know about any good looking alternatives they find.
Once management and IT know about the problem there's usually already a shortlist of software to check out and management makes the final decision.
Indeed it is probably self selection of our markets to a large extent :) but it worked for us. In my current and last company new tools and hardware have been exclusively pushed from below. If management doesn't know there's a problem they won't change anything, and most managers hate being told about problems without solutions in hand
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?)
The nature of the organic audience is such that if they found their way to the site in the first place, they are very likely highly specialised in IP telephony and know the answers to these questions. They are typically looking for more details, not a gentle layman's introduction. When they contact me, 90%+ of the time they have highly specific questions, and there is no need to convey what the product is or what it does in broad terms.
There is a market segment of relative laypeople who do not know what this product is, yet could benefit from it nevertheless. However, it is very small and does not represent the most desired customer base. Imagine selling an industrial control mechanism used in water treatment plants. You probably aren't looking to target the product page to people who don't already work in one.
By the same token, a successful ad campaign in this case would be one that effectively targets the search terms used by people that by and large already know what they are looking for, and steering them in my direction.
On the other hand, you both have a point. I am probably underestimating the number of managers looking at the site who, despite working in the VoIP service provider industry, find this all to be Greek. And it's probably equally true that I am reasoning backward from a self-selecting group of customers--the ones to whom I do manage to sell. In other words, survivorship bias, where the survivors are those not spooked by my esoteric content.
Detailed content is great for SEO and will get you extremely well targeted visits. At least from what I've seen the majority of business comes from people that want to be told what to do and not those that already know. Chances are somebody with detailed knowledge already knows all the players in the field and are just weighing their options s. There's a whole pile of people trying to setup a phone system or call center for their existing product/company that don't know their ass from a hole in the ground :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Pricing depends not just on price paid but on the quality of your content(as Google sees it) so it is definitely possible that there are people using that keyword and getting 400 clicks a day at $0.50/click.
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.
That's not an unfair conclusion. However, our retention rate after the first order was spectacular, and we slowly gathered a core group of users who were using our services exclusively. Unfortunately, despite providing a ubiquitous business service, we couldn't gather customers fast enough to float the boat.
Would need to see the product, but right off the bat seems like fb is the completelty wrong platform to be advertising. Marketing department should have been fired after 5 figures spent?
That's why failing early and quickly is important. It frees up resources and allows for us tk recalibrate. If I had a dollar for every person Ive talked to that was "waiting for the chance to hit it big". People dont realize that success is a by-product of failure.
Wasn't my job to manage ad spends, but I believe that somebody got in a great deal of trouble over the majority of that.
On the whole, IMHO, the business people weren't being entirely foolish, or foolhardy with our money - ultimately advertising costs a lot, and some adwords are expensive, and there aren't that many choices if you trying to get leads from a specific type of user.
"but I believe that somebody got in a great deal of trouble over the majority of that."
1M is a pretty big ad-spend for even a medium sized company. If it was a total failure than the leadership had absolutely no clue what was going on. The CEO is to blame.
If you're trying to get 'customer acquisition' then there's no reason that ads could not have been tested - you should have been able to resolve the unknown one for under $50K.
Granted - every situation is different and I understand it's not always so clean - but still - 1M is a lot especially if it affected the company. Sounds really bad.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
Disagree. You called out a pattern that has characteristics, but ads don't match the characteristics. There is a superset of characteristics that this pattern falls into as well, but now you are making a misleading analogy.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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."
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.
381 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadSeriously 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.
For me that means I am paying 100X more than what I had expected.
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.
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.
This is horrifying. It's so weird to me that people think this is normal, ethical behavior that it's okay to admit to.
For the latter: I worked on Global Network Navigator [1] from 1993-1995. GNN was the first commercial website, published by O'Reilly & Associates. I was the technical director of GNN. We experimented with various types of financial support, including what today would call sponsored content. My first gig at GNN in October 1993 was coding the HTML for the the initial sponsored content article (for a Bay area law firm). Around the same time, Wired (as HotWired) invented banner ads -- I lay no claim to that! ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Network_Navigator
For the former: I think systems like FullStory are incredibly intrusive. Why would I want my personal scrolling & clicking actions captured, played back, and analyzed? How have we come to accept this as normal? I realize most people don't think about this, but that's because they don't realize the level of information that is accrued. I know when I've tried to explain how much information is gathered, my non-techie friends are horrified themselves. Sure, it might be anonymized (or might not); regardless, it's just fucking creepy.
Reading this thread made me double-check my ad-blocker/anti-tracker settings, clear all my cookies, and think again about just disabling Javascript entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For many, $17/lead is fantastic because they have an AOV or LTV that supports it. Not every business can do that, so other forms of marketing may make more sense at that stage.
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...
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.
The topic is that the traffic the ads bought were bots or click farms.
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).
Let's do a run down of my monthly online spend.
Netflix: ~$9.99
Hulu premium: $11.99
HBO now (or is it HBO go?): ~$12.99
Sling TV: ~$50
Google play (includes YouTube red): ~$13
Amazon prime (also used for the Amazon TV shows): ~$9
Spotify: $10
A random Twitch show that I patronize: $6.66
Wikipedia: I donate $10/year, so let's say $1.
So, roughly, ~$125/month.
I use Tumblr heavily and the ads piss me off, but the moment they offer a premium ad-free option they can shut up and take my money.
The problems with ad networks are too big to go on for very long. Poor user experience, Ad fraud, malware, the indiscriminate gathering and selling of user information. It's just a matter of time 'till everyone has a adblocker.
The ad networks are just waiting for premium content (eg ESPN) to go programmatic. The cable networks who own that content are slowly wearing down. Once those floodgates open there will be a whole new arms race.
Most articles/videos on sites like HN fall into this category - I wouldn't have paid to read this article for example. To me, this comment thread is worth much more than the article itself and I don't see anybody here upset that they aren't getting paid to comment.
I guess that means that I would probably pay a subscription fee to a site like HN but that I wouldn't generally pay for the content itself, which does seem a little backwards. Still, that's what's valuable to me. Does anybody else feel this way or am I weird?
For some reason comments are often more interesting than the articles themselves, and people never think of monetizing their comments. Somehow karma is enough of a reward.
If I had to watch an ad for 30 seconds or pay $0.25, the proceeds of which would be distributed to commentators by proportion of karma they earned in the comment section ... I probably wouldn't bother.
It doesn't make much sense to me how I arrive at these utility valuations though.
Let's be honest - many websites are after monetizing whatever they can. They want content cheap to produce. And if readers don't want to buy it, they'll sell your attention and your privacy to advertisers, until eventually it's a race to the bottom."
I'll readily buy the ad-free version if it's any good, and I have the track record to prove it.
I've completely given up trying to control the torrent of spammy apps (games) on my son's IPad. His next device will be an Android.
So.. to me, the opposite holds true. If lets say I was interested in reviews on some technical product I wanted to buy - I would definitely prefer to have a lengthy article that goes over all the details rather than a comment thread which might detail one tiny slice of their experience with the product. So maybe if enough people comment, I can waste some time reading them all and cobble together a larger slice in my head, but again, its tedious, its just easier to go to a single source that has already done it.
Maybe what we really need is better curation than the current voting model.
There's some really valuable info on the net: medical research, good product recommendations, educational materials regarding hobbies and work, etc. I wouldn't mind paying for them(and i do buy some books), but most of these are free, or availble via places like sci-hub.
As for the rest, which is basically enterntainment - i can't imagine no good free alternatives for those - hey, there are many blogs from people who aren't professional writers who offer much better content than the pro media.
I wish there was a search engine focused on the best of those - i feel it would improve the internet by so much.
There are 3 problems with this statement.
1) There is a lot of free content, easily found, and content gets more rapidly out of date nowadays. Paid content must deal with this (newsworthy, in depth competition).
2) Your view is US centric; the vast majority (read: not all) of internet users from other countries generally have less money to spend.
3) The cost of loss of privacy is indirect, therefore hidden, and US companies generally get away with it. This is why data mining is currently profitable.
In order to solve #3 shit must first hit the fan, to increase awareness. #1 is solved by collectively putting the high quality content behind paywall. #2 can in theory be solved by globalisation in long-term. Short-term, dynamic price makes sense, but it makes #1 & #3 worse.
Let me quote the rest of your statement:
> [...] 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.
Agreed, except for example for (local) newspapers who also provide online access as part of their sub. Global newspapers have more competition. Especially given the widespread English language.
> Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).
For Google, yes. For privacy, no. In apps on an unrooted Android device, yes. On recent iOS and desktops, no (the latter 2 due to ad blockers).
Also, streaming media such as Spotify proves a subscription in a new market (not newspapers) can work. Netflix proves it for video.
> 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.
Not yet a final, stable non developer version released AFAIK. Also, Eich is no longer part of Mozilla.
1. There is a lot of free content - yeah, the internet is full of free content, but much of is click-bait garbage, or re-posted a billion times. Let's be honest - true, honest-to-goodness original journalism costs money. Good writing costs money. Investigating journalism costs money. Getting people to actually go out into the real world, and interview people, or write about stuff costs money. Who's going to pay for that?
Pick up an article from the New Statesman, or The Economist, or The New York Times - compare that to the offal you get on Buzzfeed, or one of the billion other click-bait sites.
When all those actual journalists go out of business - you'll get everybody coming out of the woodwork complaining that they can't get news, or it's all just PR puff-pieces from companies, or sound-bites from political spokespersons. And people on the internet will whine that <insert random politician> is corrupt and only got elected because nobody could be bothered reporting on politics. Or that everything they read is beholden to corporate or political interests.
2. Your view is US centric - I'm not from the US, so I'm not really sure how to respond to this. Or are you just assuming, because you're not from the US, and it's convenient to erect a strawman?
Or are you saying there's poor people on the internet? Sure, I'm certain there are. In fact, there's poor people without access to access to computers, or the internet either. I suspect those people probably don't care (yet) to read articles from The Economist, or New Statesman either.
I'm specifically addressing people who access these sites, and still want to access them by blocking ads, or circumventing their anti-ad-block. So please don't erect some strawman, or turn this into a "Oh, but I'm poor! Please, give me free stuff!" plea. Poor people have do have problems and deserve compassion - but being able to get free articles from Forbes, or Wired probably isn't their main concern.
3. Cost of privacy is indirect - I see this as market forces. As in, if people don't want to do a normal "I pay a dollar, you give me a newspaper to read", then newspapers need to find other ways to monetise. I do have issues about that - but I certainly don't see either side as particularly clean in this fight.
But the actual point you were arguing was: Is it legitimate to block ads and/or circumvent paywalls? What about the poor? or non-Americans?
The latter two aren't actually new situations for publishers – they have actually always operated in 0-marginal-cost environments, and have therefore developed strategies to capture any "consumer surplus" they can get. For those cases, there has always been country-specific pricing as well as discount schemes. Most common are probably student discounts, but you can also do price discrimination by making people jump through hoops to get discounts, essentially trading time for money. That's the principle behind supermarket coupons.
Regarding your technical scenarios: You're trying to do some legalistic hair-splitting, in a discussion that isn't even about legality but morality. I hope we'll get to the point where people realise the importance of professional, traditional print outlets, and see that they can obviously not continue to exist without our willingness to spend some money. I'm rather pessimistic on the former ("yeah I browse the NYT on the loo but it's not worth anything and 15 years ago they were wrong about Iraq WMD and I rather read bloggers from all sides of the spectrum and do the synthesis myself and even learn about Pizzagate and no I don't have a problem with run-on sentences").
The media still has to do its part, as well. I regularly do a shallow read of 10 to 15 publications. I'll happily spend 200$ per year for the privilege, but I haven't found anyone willing to take my money. I'm not going to pay that amount for a single publication as my parents have done over decades.
I'm spending 10$/mo on music now. Before, I had bought maybe two CDs in my entire life. But so far, publishing is blocking "streaming" to protect "CD sales".
Investigative journalism is in its death throes, and it's not because of lack of money. It's because of lack of interest from audiences.
Nowadays, journalism is all about who breaks the story first. This is why people are saying (only half-jokingly) that we live in a "post-facto" world: investigating leads and verifying facts take a lot of time, during which your rivals might publish the story and get all the eyeballs and therefore ad money. And if they get the facts wrong, or the entire story ends up being incorrect? No one really cares, because by then everyone has moved on to the next thing that is demanding their attention.
>>Pick up an article from the New Statesman, or The Economist, or The New York Times - compare that to the offal you get on Buzzfeed, or one of the billion other click-bait sites.
Buzzfeed is known for clickbaits, but it has some honest-to-god excellent long-form articles. Here is an example: https://www.buzzfeed.com/suzannecope/up-in-the-air-with-caro...
How do you explain the success of vice?
From what i gather so far, they're doing a wonderful job and expanding rapidly without losing money. I think there's plenty room for initiatives like that in specific niches as well.
My impression of NYT and The Economist and such is that while they're trying, they're still way too tethered to an older model which, among other things, requires more money for (relatively) more crap. And while on behalf of good journalism I lament the period of turmoil as they fight their fight but eventually disappear, I think it's necessary for more targeted, leaner journalism to take over.
That said on the matter of independent (read no advertising) investigative journalism publishing online the number of available spots are limited and the first to move will seize the better place on the market. Look at how mediapart.fr established itself in France and how many stories they get out compared to the other newspapers. They are a success established on initial funding giving no power to the funder and now entirely paid by the readers.
Lesson here is there are people willing to pay and support a truly independent online newspaper, the demand is here and the old newspaper who are dependent on ads and controlled by who has the most shares are not fulfilling it.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaD8y-CGhMw
It would be interesting to try an ad-blocking program that has an exception: if this article has been written by the journalist who did all the work(or something close to that) , he can show me ads.
This way, it provides site owners with an incentive to remove their advertisements when they see they could be earning a higher amount from user donations. Also, users are more likely to donate, because their donations are encouraging site owners to drop their advertisements, and their payments only go to those that share their vision, and remove advertising.
Not having readership is one thing - but people who still want your content, but refuse to pay, or view the ads, well that's another.
I respect people who don't view sites like say, the NYT, or WSJ or The Economist etc. because those sites show ads. Or that won't buy the hardcopy magazines because there is ad space.
What I can't respect is people still trying to view those sites and defeat their anti-ad-blocks.
Or who complain about how link-baity the articles on HN are, or why there are fluff pieces here - but don't think, hey, good content costs money
I suppose if those sites went the way of intrusive, pop-under/pop-over ads, I might chance my tune - but on the whole, I've found the text/small image ads so far on them a reasonable exchange.
You can't say that micropayments doesn't work when ads ARE micropayments. They're just micropayments with a particular set of properties.
The only question remaining is which of those properties are necessary. Is it actually necessary that your nickel causes an ad to be displayed, or is it just easier and the way we've organized things so far?
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...
So, no, it is by no means a micropayment. And even if I were charged for overage, and I were over my monthly limit, I wouldn't be charged at a rate of $1 for 20 MB.
Web users are not cheap. They expect stuff to be free because this is what the web has been designed to: sharing knowledge for free between people. But truth is it is not free, we are paying through privacy invasion and the reason for both of these is google. Google provides whatever you want with no immediate price to pay, though we actually pay in the end, and you can compete with google especially since google has established dominance.
The reason I say we pay in the end is not obvious but self-evident when you think of it, google gathers personal profiling data, exploits it to sell ads paid by advertisers, advertisers include the price of advertising in the product, we buy the product thus paying for the content in the end. The trick is we may have bought the product anyways though now we pay a bit more to pay the advertising costs. That's how we pay google to provide us with seemingly gratis stuff.
> Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far). You're starting with a bad assumption. There is a model that worked for years even before this assumption became rampant: do not expect revenue by having a website or webpage that is not an online shop. example: www.debian.org
Then if your content is good enough your audience will pay for you to make more, see the dice tower getting its funding on kickstarter [1], or the webcomics with patreon, and so on. The point being, there are models that work to get a revenue from publishing online outside of ads, but you need a sizeable audience first.
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomvasel/the-dice-tower...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomvasel/the-dice-tower...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomvasel/the-dice-tower...
Ad networks have not "gone too far" -- the whole system is broken, with malware entering 3rd party ad exchanges and fake users browsing fake publisher sites to steal ad revenue (https://whiteops.com/methbot). Google facilitates and profits from all of this.
Don't be distracted by intrusiveness, however bad and block-worthy. Tracking required by ads whether intrusive or not is the higher priority. It enriches a few and loots user data, if not exposing them to malware then abusing them with retargeting, online to offline breaches, and the like. Third party ads and tracking form a system that is stiffing publishers year over year, leading to eventual ruin.
Brave is 3-6x faster than Chrome on Android and not just by blocking ads: blocking trackers is required and those scripts and the "programmatic waterfall" or "header bidder wrappers" or other such junk are to blame.
TMZ Brave Shield results: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/820166880778256384
Brave vs. Chrome on Android: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/820082887194120193
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.
Now ad-blocking gets more and more mainstream - and many sites (especially news sites apparently) start to panic, pleading users to disable their ad-blockers or putting up ad-blocker-blockers...
You claim that you would "never consider paying for a news site", because it'll just get re-posted somewhere else.
I urge you to think and reflect on what you've just claimed.
Investigative journalism costs money. Going out and interviewing people, or taking photographs costs money. Digging through old archives, or filing Freedom of Information requests to your local government body costs money.
If everybody stops doing that - what exactly are you going to re-post? Kim Kardashian's selfie feed? Cute photos of cats?
WSJ and NYT do journalism - you may not agree with everything they write, but let's be honest, they do real, honest-to-goodness journalistic work. I have a lot of respect for their craft - they're what keeps companies and politicians honest as well, so I see them as essentially to a functional democracy.
Or let's put it closer to home - we techies complain that a lot of news content is just PR puff-pieces from hardware/software companies.
Well, sites like IDW, Anandtech, Phoronix, Engadget, Artstechnica - they do actual reporting, they go out and buy components and test them etc. That costs money.
By your argument, you refuse to pay because somebody will just re-post it - yeah, but somebody has to do the original work. So you are basically spiting the hand that feeds you
An issue is that for a high quality investigative story, say the Boston Globe's story about how the catholic church covered up abuse by priests for years, is that although it is expensive to produce, and interesting, it is difficult for me to quantify how I should value it. I'm neither from Boston, nor catholic, so in a sense that story is completely irrelevant to me. It's going to be the same with most stories, i.e. they're highly likely to be irrelevant to an individual.
The bigger issue is that the conclusion to your argument is that we should be obliged to pay for investigative journalism. I would argue that if society as a whole benefits from something, but an individual doesn't, then it should be the government's responsibility to support it. The BBC seems to work well, and maybe something like that could work on a state-level in the US.
Sure, the BBC (British) or ABC (Australia) model seems to work well - but there's been funding spats in the past.
It's not that hard to imagine a world where the Prime Minister thinks "These silly ivory-tower journalists are just using their rag to rail on me! Why the heck am I signing off on more funding. Cutbacks!".
That and there's many countries where I'd rather an independent journalistic service.
Things change, and it's perfectly normal that this can cause turmoil and turn winners into losers (and vice versa) until everything stabilizes again... for a while.
It runs a local DNS cache that blacklists ad domains (so basically how uBlock Origin works but utilizing DNS instead of just dropping the elements on the page).
There are a few sites I've had to whitelist but in general I don't even think about it running anymore, but all devices on my local newtork are ad free.
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).
I like to think I fall into the same category, where ads don't prompt me to spend money I wasn't going to spend before, but I think all else being equal I stick to brands I've heard of (via ads).
Early on I was fond of both brands, but later, if you offered pepsi half the price I'd still pick out a can of coke.
Now I don't drink anything but water so ..
I'm still subject to influence, because I have eyes, but it's mostly negatively, advertising is a cheap trick void of information to me. I can't buy something because a handsome male pretended to use it in a video.
Even those with informations are often lying to put a spin on their product. Health products with a new molecule. Green vehicles. etc
Plus if you know a bit about production you know brands are often using the same materials with a few superficially differenciating details; so in the end.. same product.
I still have a technical mind, and it's my main mode of functionning. Influence can still be there but I'd bet 10$ it's barely significant.
I don't really understand your point but I'm not educated in the subject either so ..
Since it is inconsequential to you, you don't care or notice the impact.
Do they think
?I recall feeling 3) once in my life, it surprised me because that was my first deep positive reaction to an ad. Even though I've seen similar products all my life.
Does marketing count on negative bias in their theory ? "he may dislike the add but we have a foot in the door now, he'll buy our shit later"
Either there are enough highly susceptible people to offset the ad-immune crowd, or marketing works in much more sophisticated ways than we realize.
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.
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.
I don't see sales to be my problem, but rather marketing. I'm content with the ease with which prospects are persuaded to buy when they come through the door, but there are just far too few opportunities to have those conversations.
Never, ever have I heard, "Saw your ad on Google".
Re: article. The screencast (that's how that's called, right?) shows 'this visitor scrolls different' and claims that is how a mobile user scrolls. But that is also how a trackpad (laptop) user who skims through the content scrolls. Basically, its how one 'scans'. Scanning is useful to determine if content is interesting.
Anyway. Its also possible we are talking bots here. Is this possibly the effect of Ad Nauseam [1]?
[1] https://adnauseam.io
Nevertheless, some proceeds in the latter sphere must eventually be realised from the former, by means however diffuse...
This is why tracking is so important. @Parent what is a conversion to you? Maybe you should add something light that the user can do that gives you a sense of their interest other than a purchase.
My organic traffic behaves about as I expect; they often fill out the contact form and we end up having a productive chat. Paid ad traffic, however, unfailingly bounces.
However, I ran 2-day flash-sale and it went unexpectedly good. I never thought devs and tech-savvy people visit websites like that.
It is always a harsh return to a sad web experience when I have to use someone else computer who don't know about ad blockers. Almost unbearable, to the point that I first grant them the magic of ublock orgin before anything else. They thank me profusely and never go back to the ad riddled experience of the web.
Though your point is well taken, we need to find a better approach. People are sensitive about the topic.
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.
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."
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.
If the % is high, then there is a case to be made that most of the clicks are from abroad VPNing into the US.
There are companies out there that provide paid anonymous, reliable (not hacked) proxy servers that run on consumer internet connections though, and those would be very hard to detect as vpn / proxy connections.
Another way is through capabilities where you have a computer that identifies itself as a macOS device but has the TCP/IP stack of a windows device – that's a proxy ! I would recommend the source code of p0f or the book silence on the wire to learn more about the topic.
Bangladesh didn't make the cut. :-)
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
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 :)
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!
Now, I understand what's happening. I haven't loaded up the <h1> tags and stuff. I'm appealing to the people who might be looking for something like this. It's very different from selling umbrellas, but we are forced to fit the same mold.
I think the general conclusion is sound: Having such a dominant company that suffers no ill consequences of its mistakes is bad for small business.
You need to have the most appealing intros or people will simply hit X on the tab and move on to someone that does. In short, make absolutely sure it's abundantly clear to a five year old that they've reached the right place within ten seconds or people will go somewhere else.
Also, everyone will be 1/10 qs for study skills. The keyword is far too broad for more than 1% of your ads to be targeted properly. Unless you have thousands of negative keywords I wouldn't go near that one. Google wants ads to be relevant so users will continue to click them. You will be punished severely every time your ad shows up and it's not what the user was looking for
Once management and IT know about the problem there's usually already a shortlist of software to check out and management makes the final decision.
Indeed it is probably self selection of our markets to a large extent :) but it worked for us. In my current and last company new tools and hardware have been exclusively pushed from below. If management doesn't know there's a problem they won't change anything, and most managers hate being told about problems without solutions in hand
There is a market segment of relative laypeople who do not know what this product is, yet could benefit from it nevertheless. However, it is very small and does not represent the most desired customer base. Imagine selling an industrial control mechanism used in water treatment plants. You probably aren't looking to target the product page to people who don't already work in one.
By the same token, a successful ad campaign in this case would be one that effectively targets the search terms used by people that by and large already know what they are looking for, and steering them in my direction.
On the other hand, you both have a point. I am probably underestimating the number of managers looking at the site who, despite working in the VoIP service provider industry, find this all to be Greek. And it's probably equally true that I am reasoning backward from a self-selecting group of customers--the ones to whom I do manage to sell. In other words, survivorship bias, where the survivors are those not spooked by my esoteric content.
So, fair points!
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.
My main point is the CPM versus CPC audience-mix.
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
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.
It was an abject failure, and a chief contributor to the downfall of the company.
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?
Did you not test your ads to grasp the conversion rate before spending the money?
On the whole, IMHO, the business people weren't being entirely foolish, or foolhardy with our money - ultimately advertising costs a lot, and some adwords are expensive, and there aren't that many choices if you trying to get leads from a specific type of user.
1M is a pretty big ad-spend for even a medium sized company. If it was a total failure than the leadership had absolutely no clue what was going on. The CEO is to blame.
If you're trying to get 'customer acquisition' then there's no reason that ads could not have been tested - you should have been able to resolve the unknown one for under $50K.
Granted - every situation is different and I understand it's not always so clean - but still - 1M is a lot especially if it affected the company. Sounds really bad.
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.
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.
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?
Ironic because you pointed out the similarity after deciding to write about the dissimilarities.
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.
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.
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.
If op is reading this, I'd be happy to hop on a phone call and help you out.
It doesn't matter if you're only converting 1% of advertising traffic if that 1% is profitable.
Buying ads is literally one of the easiest things I've ever done on Facebook.
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?
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.
EDIT: They used FullStory (https://fullstory.com). I missed that when I read it the first time.
If you're looking for a more developer-focused product, you can also check out LogRocket (https://logrocket.com).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
That's why you'll find people swearing both cases..."adsense is worthless" vs "adsense is a goldmine". It really depends on the niche.
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.
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
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?
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.
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)
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.
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/12/20/ad-fraud-res...
Sure you might have attribution questions, but a bot likely won't spend like a person would.