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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.