What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?(sparktoro.com) |
What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?(sparktoro.com) |
When you start using these tools, they almost seem to replace what would have been an organic acquisition with a paid acquisition.
As the article notes, why isn't this obvious for most large advertisers on these platforms?
Likely due to:
- Their spend is so large that it hides the fact that they would have gotten a large % of it for free anyway
- Large advertisers rarely stop all advertising for a period of time to notice the % of truely organic traffic (that isn't just opportunistically attributed to the platforms)
- They have been doing it for so long that big spends on these platforms are considered mandatory and not even questioned
So the idea it is a scam is stupid.
Some years ago, I treated myself to some nice Sophia Webster shoes.
I'm a tall man, my feet don't fit in any of her shoes, but a colleague had pointed out that er, they're for looking at, and if they're on my feet it's actually harder for me to look at them, so, why not buy them and put them on a display shelf like I would a nice sculpture. That made good sense. I bought an arbitrary size that was available - it's way easier to get the shoes you want if they don't need to fit.
Now of course as a tall man, even though it's not unknown for me to buy heels (in a size I can actually wear) it's rare, and I don't buy skirts, have no use for a bra and so on. But still, advertising isn't very smart, so it's not a huge surprise that after buying those shoes I got considerably more adverts for stereotypically female clothing and accessories even on platforms that explicitly know my gender and previous purchasing habits.
What did surprise me is how many adverts I got for the exact pair of shoes I had just bought. Not similar shoes from other designers. Not other shoes Sophia Webster has designed - the exact identical pair of shoes, often from the exact vendor who just sold them to me.
And my theory as to why is pretty simple. Advertising doesn't understand time's arrow. If you only ask whether these adverts are associated with my buying the shoes that's true. They showed adverts to me, I bought the shoes. The only problem is that causality is reversed, I bought the shoes and then they showed me the adverts.
This was confirmed to me by adverts the grocery delivery company I sometimes use ran at that time. The adverts specified the exact goods I buy from them, perishable goods which I had already booked a delivery of, saying hey, why not buy these from us. Well, I already did, duh? But so long as nobody remembers to analyse whether my actual purchase decision (not the delivery) was before or after the advert these adverts probably look like they have amazingly high conversion rates and you couldn't have targeted a traditional advert so narrowly, it must be worth it...
https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.htm...
https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/14/adtech-sucks-thi...
[1] or black hat SEO for that matter.
I'm constantly bombarded by ads for stuff I've already decided to buy (or more usually that I already bought last week). This stuff has zero value. The point of advertising has always (until now) been about taking your product to people who didn't know it was there. Targeted advertising would be a funny joke if so many people didn't take it seriously.
The results are filled with those scummy compare sites comparing e.g. a DBaaS to e.g. mailchimp. They are not even the same type of product!
The most common source of inflation in Google/FB self reported performance numbers is multiple ad channels taking credit for the same order. If a customer clicks a Google ad then clicks a Facebook Ad then makes a purchase, each ad channel will claim credit for that purchase. In reality each ad platform only has claim to ~50% of the purchase (depending on what attribution algorithm you want to use).
In terms of knowing that real value is produced from these ad channels, I see it every day in many of our customers data. Clients will increase or decrease ad spend and there will be a correlated increase/decrease in sales.
tldr; Google/Facebook ads over report their numbers but do ultimately drive sales according to the data I have first hand access to.
Performance marketing = Distribution. Without performance marketing your competitors take the sale instead.
It sounds “deep state” but it’s actually plainly documented in government files and written about by reliable sources.
Remember we’re still emerging from an era of whispering the same old story of morality and obligation to each other.
I am not at all interested in helping someone build a fertilizer empire or pillow brand. Politically my hands are tied to doing so if I want a life.
Poor people effectively live a life of quota and state sanctioned limits on their access to material support by cutting social programs with public support.
Advertising America as anything but a sanctimonious police state is a scam.
> [picture of that search term and williams sonoma ads with shopping links]
The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would, and then those companies would be above the Williams Sonoma organic placements.
The spend is necessary in a defensive way because Google creates a bidding war even for the hyper relevant.
edit: I just checked and if you search "williams sonoma skillet", if WS was not paying for [green] then the very first "result" (ad) would be Food52 [red] https://imgur.com/a/9Nnxs6h
I just tried "airbnb paris" and the first result is, somewhat predictably, an ad that is not airbnb. But the second one is also an ad, this time from airbnb. So they clearly didn't keep their spend dialed down to zero, and are aware of the need to advertise on their own keyword.
This is what is known as "on brand" Search ads. I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not been there.
I've seen way too many companies look at their analytics and say "see we get 20x ROAS on on brand! why would we turn it off?!?". Because silly, people are already going to go to your site without you paying for the traffic. I wouldn't be surprised if 25% of Google's ad search revenues come from this.
Isn't this just the usual problem with advertising? You have to do it because the other players are doing it. If nobody did it, it would still be the same cake to be shared.
This case is more on the nose, but only because of some fairness assumption that "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" _ought_ to be traffic for Williams Sonoma.
But this line of reasoning begs the question. If this system wasn't in place, then Google search would not exist as it does and the search traffic would not necessarily exist in the same way, no?
But if you are implying that brands should not invest in on-brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad advice. It's a known fact that targeting your competitors' branded terms is ROI positive, which definitionally means that the affected brand is unable to capture all the customers who were initially searching for it.
Any other medium would theoretically have the same problem: if Ovaltine doesn’t sponsor kids’ radio shows in the 1950s and someone thinks they can deploy capital to grow a competitor, that someone will buy that slot. People couldn’t do this because there were human processes and relationships slowing this marketplace down. The thing that Google did was make it possible to test this at small scale.
So I click on the Toyota ad cause it’s on top, and buy a Toyota? Which is taking business from Ford ?
What is the answer, no ads hmm that’s not happening on a free search engine.
Mark the ad as an ad hmm done
Don’t show other results for any brand related keyword search, when all keywords are blocked probably nothing left to show
What should the ideal free search engine show when I search for “intel vs AMD”, should intel complain the first result is for a tech site.
I do genuinely wonder if the conclusion that the brand company lost money is valid, I do wonder if those searches are like ppl putting cnn in a search bar or generic searches
imagine you are driving to a specific restaurant see a billboard ad for another restaurant so change directions and go there, would you dislike the bus/building with the sign
I want a WS skillet, and the first X results are for lodge... I don't need a lodge, I don't want a lodge, i want a WS, and google is not showing me what I want.
It's the fundamental contradiction in Google's search ads model. If Google delivers users the thing they want, ads by definition have to be things users don't want.
Where I worked before, Google could get $4 for ever $1 we made. And we actually delivered the service, and people googled our name. Pretty crazy...
Bidding on a competitor's brand name keyword should be banned. But Google can't resist double-dipping.
Branded search terms are almost always less incremental than non-branded (ie: "lodge logic" vs. "cast iron skillet"), but the actual incrementality of the terms is something every advertiser should be testing continuously.
Opening google in incognito mode:
If I search for "Toyota RAV4", the first (ad) result is "Hyundai Tuscon". If I search for "AWS Cert", my first (ad) result is "Microsoft Learn". Et cetera et cetera :|
This is the real price of a constant threat to Net Neutrality, and allowing one monopolistic company to dominate mobile devices, web browsers, search results, and the largest video service on the entire Internet.
Their plan to corner and manipulate what everyone's freedom of choice and to secure their funnel of permanent revenue is considered cute to investors, but no one realizes how bad this will get in 5 more years.
Of course the numbers are fudged when you consider how they've turned analytics on their once very useful platform into a confusing mess, and when they announced that they were going to retire the system after it has killed off competition, because they can simply gather any analytical report they want privately from their web browser.
Public front-end statics are no longer trust worthy because they can be manipulated to drive platform revenue and engagement. The best and most accurate stats are provided only internally, to executive leadership that owns platforms.
Because we now use them for email, video views, browsing, phones, etc, they have key insight that can even be used for corporate espionage, your ideas can literally be beaten to market because your virtual assistant caught you mentioning keywords then reported you applying for your patent and corporate loan.
Most people have no idea about how bad this all can get. We'll find out soon enough though.
When ad revenue drops on platforms, the platforms simply reduce organic visibility which drives the need for regular ad spending for companies in order to remain visible on social platforms... AirBNB is riding a wave of prior popularity and name recognition, I guarantee they will go back to a certain point of obscurity at some point because they reduced their ad spend, and then be forced to promote heavily as they did once before.
It's all creates a new cycle of financial deception and manipulation on platforms. For very profitable companies, advertising is usually manageable, but for startups, for small business, and for independent creators, this practice is devastating financially, and fruitless on top of the financial loss of paying for promotion. These platforms also made promises to woo users based on free organic growth, which somehow conveniently disappeared due to covert and convenient EULA updates over time.
One could argue that no advertising is hard for the challengers, but in today's situation they are outspent anyway, so what do they have to lose?
The conclusion is that both incumbents and challengers would be better off in a world where no advertising exists.
When you put it that way this sounds like racketeering.
Personally I resist the idea that a brand owns my attention because I used a keyword, but that's one of my many personal quirks.
- review sites like Yelp (interestingly one of Google's loudest antitrust critics)
- domain names (arguably the entire ICANN generic top level domains sell-off)^1; US trademark grantees who fail to take action against confusingly similar domain names risk losing trademark protection
1. The gTLD application alone as $185,000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtld)
In the case of Google and Yelp, the tech company can manipulate the alleged "algorithm" (read: no humans involve so you cant sue us, haha) behind the scenes and determine the "visibility" of the ad/review.
Ads are the perfect "business model" for tech companies because there is so little scrutiny of the ad services delivered. It is like philanthropy. When we make a donation, we generally do not track what happens to the money afterwards. We get a warm fuzzy feeling from making the donation as it is "doing the right thing". Then we leave the recipient to do as they please. How many companies buy ads on Google because they feel it is "the right thing to do". How many feel their donation was unwarranted after the ads fail to produce results.
Defensive ad purchases, defensive domain name registrations and even defensive gTLD purchases are one side of the coin. Another is the "winner take all" line-of-thinking (80/20, network effects, etc.) that tech companies worship that they in turn project onto customers. Competing for visibility on a fully searchable web of enormous capacity presupposes (artifically) that visible space is scarce. Ad auctions for the purpose of placing an ad on page one of hundreds of thousands of pages of results. The truth is that many people used to read newspapers from beginning to end. The whole paper, not just page one.
In a physical newspaper, there are ads on many pages. Often there are in fact no ads on page one. How many Google customers are encouraged to purchase ads that will appear on SERP #2 (do they even have ads on SERP #2). Imagine if newspapers tried to create a bidding war for page one of the physical newspaper. With the online versions, it seems that is exactly what happens. Do not blame the newspapers, do not blame Williams-Sonoma, blame the "tech" companies. This only reflects the pathetic "tech" company psychology, not the thinking of the businesses who give them money for online ad services.
And wouldn't any users who end up buying a Lodge pan have been legitimately converted by effective lodge advertising? I don't think anyone who's only interested in Williams Sonoma will just go ahead and buy a Lodge pan. Unless you're suggesting that simply because the user entered "Williams Sonoma" in the search bar that page somehow "belongs" to them, which seems a bit absurd.
If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this specific product. The results of other brands might be annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results are still displayed on the first page.
And beside that a lot of people routinely misclick or click on ads not understanding that they are ads even when they are marked as such.
If you've never heard of Product Y, you might be intrigued and click. Maybe you want something less smelly!
I've noticed the quality of google search decrease drastically over the last 15+ years or so. I don't think that's directly tied to ad buys though.
At this point, Google's first page is so bad that I can almost build an anti search engine. Search for a term, and then exclude all the sites on the first page from ever showing up permanently ever again.
runnaroo showed things could be done better. The problem is that doing better doesn't seem to convert to profit.
People will typically write their intent on the search engine even when they could simply directly to the website.
Case in point: The top 10 bing searches are for websites, including FB, Google, Youtube [1]. This traffic is highly competitive and should (as in all competitive markets) be bid among competitors.
And if they were not above organically they would simply buy the advertising space that William Sonoma purchased. It's one of the slimiest things Google does - allows competitors to purchase advertising space on a query specifically crafted to find a particular source. It's nothing more than a shakedown.
Except they won't click those competitor links, because they are already specifically looking for Williams Sonoma
But after reading this article, it finally dawned on me. He makes imperfect conclusions in everything he touches, it's just that in some fields those conclusions can be more easily proved to be wrong than in others. SEO is the perfect field where a polished presenter can get away with imperfect conclusions for years - trust me, I know, I made a living for years in this field, and I am very familiar with the nature of this work. Most of the time, you have no idea what the black box really does, and instead you're just trying to guess what might have happened. Most importantly, there are many ways to skin a cat in SEO, and just because your approach is net positive doesn't mean that you truly are delivering the global maximum (or that the net positive gain was ROI positive). In short, it's impossible to know who's right and who's wrong, and Rand's videos convinced me that he's right, but I am no longer sure. I just rewatched one of them, and can easily see how his conclusions are just... opinions.
While we may or may never find out if his SEO opinions were the global maximum, we can quantifiably demonstrate that his opinions on content marketing are not solid. This whole essay he wrote can be replaced with "hey performance marketers, don't trust the platform numbers and instead do your incrementality studies." Platforms like Facebook will give you those for free if you reach a certain spend level, and you can also get them from 3rd party providers like measured.com. In other words, if you're a performance marketer and you're not conducting incrementality studies, then you're very early in your career and are not following the best practices. Simple as that - no need to extrapolate from there and reach all sorts of additional conclusions (which is obviously a pattern in Rand's behavior) - calling into question a perfectly investable marketing channel, conflating the needs of a public company with everyone else's needs, using words like scam, etc.
I am really disappointed to have to write this, but you would have been better off not reading this article. If Rand is really advocating that the majority of entrepreneurs should follow his advice and focus on PR instead of performance marketing, then perhaps an honest thing to ask would be - how is that working out for his own company? AFAIK, SparkToro is nowhere close to replicating the growth of his previous company, which is honestly disappointing for someone with such a huge reach and name recognition.
#1 - Eliminated all paid search other than some limited branded search terms and shifted all the money to affiliates who were way better at making profits on the keywords we were competing on
#2 - Eliminated all display advertising after running numerous experiments showing it provided almost not incremental conversions, even though the platforms happily took credit for them.
Those two things drove our blended CAC down substantially and by building better affiliate relationships, sales actually increased.
The lesson here is that you need to try a lot of things out and you should be continuously questioning what you're doing and running specific experiments to gut check effectiveness of any ad platform that is slapping cookies on wide groups of users and claiming conversions.
My suspicion is that this is near impossible at any large organization, even one as new as Airbnb. I can just imagine someone walking into a team of 20+ performance marketers and suggesting they need to experiment to determine if any of it is remotely effective. COVID forced them into this but it's something that they should have already been doing.
I also suspect that the top line focus/obsession of most VC-backed companies make this type of exercise seem almost counterintuitive. Don't mess with or question the momentum.
We're already seeing that. The quality of Google products continue to decay. Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly both becoming shallower advertising hustles (LinkedIn just this week turned off post notification for events to force people to buy LinkedIn ads). As other apps and websites get snapped up by these FAANGs, we'll start to pine for the Internet that was 2008. The decay is already well under way.
What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray?
Meanwhile, it's a marketing cliche that "half the budget is wasted, but we don't know which." It's also true that google or FB provided analytics, using default settings often grossly overestimate ad effectiveness. All true. A journalist somewhere is writing a version of this article at any given time.
But... From the merchant's perspective, the existence-proofs for advertising's effectiveness are undeniable. Launch a site. No visitors. Advertise. Now there are visitors. People subscribed to something or bought something. The ROI may or may not work, but the principle isn't in question.
For a blank slate, newly launched business performance marketing is easy to measure precisely and you can have a reliable ROI. For BMW, GoPro or geico insurance... the world is more complex, ROIs are more theoretical and "half the budget is wasted, give or take 50%" applies.
The same was true for TV. A mattress store run ads with a crazy guy screaming "Sale!" and the next day a lot of mattresses get sold. The fact that ads made people come buy mattresses is trivially true, from the merchant's POV.
It didn’t make sense to me that it could be so attractive to brands to promote coupons there. People have already decided they want to buy the product; why would you want them to go hunting for a big discount after they’re already sold?
He told me that the people who like it are the advertising staff and consultants, so they can generate evidence for their bosses/clients that their campaigns are working.
I get that it can be partially effective. Sometimes I’ll think “I’ll buy this product if I can find a coupon that gets the price under X”.
It’s just a funny old world when an advertising professional is motivated to spend money with a third party to give their customer a big discount on a product they’ve already decided they want, in order for the advertising professional to justify their existence.
For me it just made me think, well I'm doing something right because Facebook mostly offers me shitty white label stuff that's being sold using fraud (I've made complaints to Advertising Standards [UK] a few times about Facebook ads) and that I would never buy.
One additional thing people don't call out is that a lot of the budgets spent on these platforms are "learning" budgets. Agencies play this card really well. They'll tell you, "oh, you need to increase your budget, and test all these different combinations of ads/targeting/landing pages/etc so that you can learn what works (or the AI behind the platform can learn what works)". And obviously, in "learning" mode, you're ignoring the ROI.
I've seen people spend substantial amounts of money in "learning mode", and the platforms are kind of incentivized to make the learning less efficient so it takes longer and more spend for you to get to ROI positive (or to learn that you will never get there).
Any successful platform is not, because by definition they have enough ads, and so want to focus on driving conversions for advertisers so that demand, and hence revenue, increases.
Agencies are often super shady though, on that we agree.
My ads were working reasonabilly well considering the low investment I was making, with a fair amount of prospects filling my contact form on a low but steady rate. I was satisfied with the return I was getting.
However, the pandemic caused a significant drop on my product's demand. I thought I was going to get little to no contacts from the moment the lockdown was announced on, but:
1) I kept getting clicks at basically the same rate -- therefore my budget kept being depleted as it used to be;
2) Bounce rates increased A LOT;
3) The few actual people who got in touch were not actually looking for the product I announced, but similar ones (which I didn't announce nor sell);
So, according to my experience, I can't say adwords totally doesn't work.. but I'd say their algorithms are optimized to spend your money regardless of the results you're going to obtain.
1. Geo-Targeting - no matter what geographic setting you create they will run your ads all over the world unless you know how to change settings they have intentionally hidden.
2. Keyword Selection - No matter how much effort you put into selecting the best keywords they pretty much run your ads on whatever keywords they want. They make it extremely difficult these days to control what keywords trigger your ads to show up.
3. Campaign Caps - A cap is a limit you can set on how much a campaign will spend each day. Except google will spend up to 2x your cap. So you would think you should just set the cap at half of what you really want but they have complicated algorithms in place to screw up your campaign if you do that.
This is a real problem with Adwords and it needs regulation. Google increasingly push people to give us your money and trust us, but as you say their optimisation recommendations both automated and account 'experts' suit their agenda more than yours.
Adwords is probably still the most effective channel for a typical business but make sure when being run it's by someone that knows what they are doing.
I once even had a marketing department shut down with analytical proof. I got tired of the marketing department with probably 50x the IT department budget constantly jumping down our throats about how "IF ONLY IT HAD DELIVERED X BY X we could have had 100,000,000,000x /s sales this month"
I made a dynamic report dashboard in my first react project to analyze market spending and prove that even if you wanted to move around metrics to be comically generous the marketing was doing basically nothing to drive sales. MGMT got rid of them and literally nothing changed except everyone had better budgets.
No one clapped the 4 people in marketing were not happy to lose their jobs. Marketing got moved to an accounting process where the handful of advertising things that seemed to work were kept on a monthly set budget.
This was a smallish family owned rather dysfunctional company as I grew to learn. I was able to have a meeting about this directly with the owners, by a meeting I mean drinks a bar/pub till 2am. Yeah 50x was probably an exaggeration as I don't know to the penny but several times is still a lot for a useless department.(also doesn't include salaries which IT had much more of) This was pretty much the only positive thing that happened there after that it was all downhill and the owners got bored with nerds that could no longer produce outsize ROI on their usefulness and we got laid off as well.
Its actually kind of sad that someone called it "obviously false" not all of us are basement dwelling introverts afraid to challenge the status quo.
Also to the other sarcastic jerk, SaleForce calls their report page "Einstein" Insights or something close.
> Reliably someone comes along every few months to question [performance marketing]. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof.
> Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their ad dollars. Facebook, Google and others make these tests possible in their platforms, while other software suites such as Impact Altitude and VisualIQ allow you to do this kind of analysis and testing as well.
> In the end, most of it proves out to be incremental. There are notable exceptions of course, but when are there not?
Any specific tips/links on how to do this with Google/Youtube retargeting?
This is really the sweet spot for digital advertising. The cost is low, both because you don't need that many new users to make a huge difference, and because the volume is so low that the targeting works really, really well, and conversion rates are really high. For a more established business, sure, you're getting people that would have bought anyway. But in this case, you're getting people that would have bought if they knew you existed, which they don't.
"Rental stays in XYZ city" will bring up an airbnb result all day, probably in the top five results. Therefore, paying $3 a click to be placed above your own search result is probably silly.
I happen to have a small side project and advertise it with a very low budget on facebook, google, and bing. It works. I don't rank very high because my SEO skills are poor, but google ads absolutely drive real and interested people to my site.
(If you have a near-monopoly on planners, of course, such an ad would indeed have been a waste. The author would have come to you by default once he decided to get a planner. )
Hard not to see this as a clumsy sales pitch for his company, especially when it starts with such a disingenuous example/quote (of course AirBnb didn't have to spend on performance marketing during a global pandemic where everybody was suddenly looking for a getaway...)
I mean I guess he would know from personal experience? He hadn't been the CEO for a year or two at the time, but he was still very much the public face of Moz when they "asked 28% of Mozzers to leave"[1], who worked on products complementing SEO. They used various euphemisms, but ultimately it's because they made no money[2].
[1] https://moz.com/blog/moz-is-doubling-down-on-search [2] https://twitter.com/randfish/status/765973082611781633
So if you’re buying or even just evaluating performance ads without considering the bigger picture you might come to erroneous conclusions.
Take the Lego Movie example from the article. The $65 million movie is no doubt an awareness play. Could you make the case that you should also increase your performance budget to help capture more of the demand you just generated with the movie? Or should you just hope that people go from the movie theater to buy Lego unprompted? Is it worth it for Lego to advertise to people who walk out of the theater and search for “Lego Batman set” or whatever? I think so, even though evaluating such branded search campaigns individually might make them seem inefficient.
It seems very easy to dismiss the performance advertising as a scam when you evaluate it in a vacuum. As noted in the article it’s important (and very difficult) to understand the incremental outcome of any channel or campaign. That incrementality includes awareness campaigns.
After more than a decade in advertising and marketing I am now more than ever unwilling to accept simple or definitive answers to highly complicated questions. At best I hope that we can unwind some of the overall complexity so we can have a chance to trust some of those definitive answers.
So it's only natural that after some time organic traffic exceeds paid traffic.
However, every advertising platform will take your money if you give it to them, so buyer beware.
True incrementally is a challenging measurement issue and therefore even more challenging to predict for delivery via ML. It's real, though, just hard.
Buyer beware. When buying ads, think the stock market. If you hear stories about 20x ROI from random people, do what you when you hear 20x ROI on stock picks: nothing.
Yes, you do have a challanging problem of attribution. But the spend and revenue figures are what matters at the end of the day. And neither of them has any area for scamming (let's ignore edge cases).
Disclosure: only skimmed through the article and my arguments above are just directed towards the headline. However credible and opinion leader the author - Rand Fishkin - is, the article itself at the first glance did not inspired me personally as a worthy my attentive reading time.
C'mon, this ain't reddit. Don't comment without reading.
I think this is overall a waste of resources and I'd like to see a more virtuous system, but I fail to imagine one.
I’ve been in growth for years and while I dislike PPC and find it boring and obfuscatory (FB and Google will both happily claim credit for the same purchase), there’s no denying that in many cases it works. I’ve been at early stage ecomm co’s where we’d pause the spend to see what happened and — what do ya know? — sales would plummet. Brands relying on it for discovery often benefit substantially.
I’d argue that most of the benefits of PPC accrue to smaller businesses (and the platforms, obv). The error in our collective framing is to hate on advertising because we think of it as coming from big brands. But these days it enables vastly more entrepreneurship and competition than I think many on here realize.
And to everyone cheering on Apple’s recent changes that make FB ad tracking impossible — who do you think suffers as a result? Big brands like LEGO can just redirect funds to a Hollywood film or some other high-visibility activation, because they already have their customers’ attention. It’s the small brands paying the price.
The whole point of _performance_ advertising is that it's effect is _measurable_. If AirBnB spent $500m+ on performance advertising, they should be able to trace that back to an exact amount of revenue. If you are a brand in this scenario, you can conduct split tests by sampling the conversion rate of users from advertising vs non-advertising. Again, it should be simple to see if the conversion rate for users targeted via advertising has increased or is unchanged.
In the branded search examples, again, as an advertiser, you can see what searches are associated with your leads. While you do have to compete for attention on your own branded search (to compete against competitors taking the slot), you should also be able to recognize unbranded terms which drive conversions for you. Again, assuming this is actually _performance_ marketing, you would be able to look at the cost of these placements and the ROI, and the impact would be measurable.
The rest of the article is largely composed of straw-man arguments that imply the results are not measurable, when in fact they are (if done right).
disclaimer: I'm the CTO of a performance marketing platform. The vast majority of conversions on our platform happen same-session. There's a very easy way to measure this effect -> pause your campaigns and immediately see conversions fall.
As you mentioned: The most important test (that you should be doing every now and then) is to actually pause the ad and see if revenue falls. Anything else is just an approximation and should be treated as such.
On the other hand, while I do indeed believe that the "ROI" from Performance Advertising is something between just false and deliberately misleading, the bigger picture that I'm interested in is marketshare. Because when looking at market share, it's not a question of incrementality anymore, but whether you're growing slower/faster than your competitors, and your cost of doing that, and at what point you're OK to 'buy' marketshare, in the sense of losing money in the pursuit of growth, and how much. And then, OK, let's talk about ROI on that basis - most of the time, achieving this will indeed require tools from the Performance Adversiting toolbox, which allow you to conveniently track the amount of marketshare (i.e. sales) you bought.
Any article that says "Don't buy X buy Y" loses a lot of credibility when it's written buy a guy who sells Y.
- Calling performance marketing platforms a scam (repeatedly, both in the title and in the narrative) doesn't explain how those same performance marketing platforms are carrying the majority of traffic acquisition in most of the B2C companies that went public this year (and practically all of the DTC ones). Calling into question the accuracy of measurement is one thing. Calling it a scam is wrong and designed to rank on HN rather than to be reflective of the true value of those platforms.
- As I pointed out in my original post, all you have to do is use incrementality studies and 98% of the criticism instantly goes away. Rand implies that you have to do your own studies (by eg, following Avinash Kaushik's methodology) which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you if you reach a certain spend limit, or 3rd parties will as well with no spend limits. Also, from experience, this really becomes an issue once you spend meaningful amounts on two platforms at the same time. His rant on this subject has an iota of truth and a whole lot of sensationalism mixed together, and overall leads to wrong conslusions.
- He conflates "paid search" with "all performance marketing platforms", including "paid social." It would have been helpful to point out that the challenges with branded terms are entirely isolated to paid search and have nothing to do with paid social.
- My favorite sensationalist tactic: frame a strong accusation as a question. This way you get the clicks, but you can still cover your ass by linking to resources that with enough research would allow the reader to answer the question with a "No." But in lieu of that research, the implication is that the answer is a "Yes." You'll see this tactic used by less reputative media sources, and I was disappointed to see Rand do the same.
I could go on but hopefully this will suffice.
Unsurprisingly, those people are wrong and marketing works.
I do think things are better in some sense today. But it is a hungry beast, marketing. Oh, and lies and statistics.
You would have these very complete theories of how search engine ranking worked - completely disconnected from reality and unburdened by any actual knowledge. If there was ever a cargo cult, SEO was it.
I still cringe when people say that they have "done SEO" on their site while I'm in the room. It is kind of like telling their mechanic they've sacrificed a goat so their car will get better mileage.
Content strategy, keyword research, Search Console integration, site speed improvements, local search business profiles -- all of these contribute to SEO. It's unwieldy to talk about them all, so sometimes people can use a shorthand.
Interesting article
1. "industry" is moving away from last touch attribution (pretty much what Rand complains about)
2. "Incrementality strives to identify the causal event of a conversion,"
The way to identify the causal action seems to be :
errr ... that's difficult
This is all just my opinion and I'm sure there are better marketers than me that make this work, but this is what I've seen happen in too many VC-funded/backed companies. And it gets even harder when we're at the super levels of funding that we're now seeing. So if I'm a relatively small company (funded to $50m) that is spending $5m a year on marketing, and I'm competing against a company with $500m in funding and, say $100m on marketing, then it's even worse.
But, as you said, the incentives point towards terrible outcomes, so this keeps happening.
So, it's great for your business that this worked, but I personally don't see any strategy that leans on affiliates to be worth celebrating.
That said, I’ve worked at brands where paid search and paid social are incredibly valuable channels.
I think this sounds deeper than it actually is.
What you're describing is just capitalism. A consequence of capitalism is that sometimes people figure out how to make addicting products and then capitalize on it (cigarettes, drugs, social media). Eventually we figure out the harm and work hard to stop the damage as much as we can. Cigarette usage is down to historic lows in the US, for example. Sometimes it takes a while and takes a lot of fighting.
Another consequence is massive incentives to advance society. You can't deny that the vast majority of technology advances over the last 20 (or 40 or 60 or 80) years have been incredibly beneficial to society. And the advances wouldn't have happened if we didn't also risk the occasional bad actor coming up.
We're still figuring it all out as a society. We've weathered worse and will come out of it stronger.
When something is killing you and all life on the planet, it doesn't matter if it's killing you softly.
That's an entirely different advertising model and market.
If I search for my bank's app, the top results on Apple's app store are apps for competing banks, which are pretty explicitly not what I want.
It's a surprise to see a vendor have a clear explanation on their site however - and it's worth quoting i think
>>> Incrementality testing creates an experiment that systematically withholds media channel exposure to a representative subset of users (the control group) while maintaining normal media channel exposure to the broader user set (the test group). If the control group is both sizable enough to be statistically significant and selected at random such that they are broadly representative of the user base, then the media channel’s incremental contribution can be determined by the difference in business outcome (conversion, revenue, profitability, etc.) between the test and control groups.
I'd always give the same advice. Don't try to outsmart the search engine, focus on quality and consistency over time. That will always reward you in the long run. Try to game the search engine and you will find yourself in a weapons race you can't sustain over time. If you find exploitable tactics to get better ranking than you deserve, sooner or later you'll probably be pushed down the ranking. And this is really important if you're successful enough to have something to lose.
Some of what people label SEO is just "make good web sites", and that indeed works. But some of it is just pure rubbish. And making a good website isn't just "doing SEO" - it is making a good website. And a lot of people don't.
Which is why I can't take people seriously when they present it as some singular task they have completed.
I'll be more explicit - you should test the difference. I usually recommend companies do a blackout month where they turn off all programmatic ads and then do a like-for-like comparison.
To further emphasis my point before, I've seen ad ops agencies say "hey you've got an overall 15x ROAS" and then find out that 80% of their ad spend is on-brand (give them 25x or whatever) and the off-brand (which is 20% of the spend) is giving them 5x. So their ROAS is inappropriately distributed to try to reach an overall ROAS goal.
Small business people in my area of UK have always done this, type in the box in the middle (usually Google, occasionally Bing or some other service). But my pretty tech-literate kids do it too, even when I show them how they 'should' do it and that is faster, and they don't need the extra click to get where they're going ... mad!
On Chrome on Win10 as I use at work though, typing in the address bar, with my settings, I get auto-fill of addresses (the history search is noticeably missing vs Firefox) including the option to use 'tab to search' on a domain.
I struggle to think of a meat world analogy. It would be something like if I dialed my girlfriend up on the phone and, instead of routing me straight to her, I had to navigate through a switchboard asking me "How about talking to these sexy singles in your area instead?" And in order to prevent this, my girlfriend would then have to pay the company to route my call straight to her.
Of course this isn't a perfect metaphor because there's a lot of different ways people use a search bar, especially now that search bars are merged into URL bars. But that sort of gets at what it is about this that feels sleazy.
I think it also exposes the core problem. The metaphor rests on knowing intent with certainty. It's perhaps possible that certain clarity and pretty much inferring might not always be the same, especially with how search and URL bars have merged.
But I understand completely. If you genuinely feel like you know that person's intent with certainty, someone else having a crack at their attention along the way feels like a violation of your relationship.
What kind of keyword are you referring to here? Because brands do own certain keywords, they're called trademarks. If you don't want a brand to feel entitled to your attention, don't include registered trademarks in your search query.
(Yes, I know, trademarks are limited to a specific market segment. Doesn't invalidate the basic premise of searching on trademarks though).
So much this on phones. I think I missclicked adds like 10 times in a year, before realizing there where adblockers on Firefox mobile. Zero legitimate clicks. Never happens me on desktop, unless there is a screen jump scam.
But my main point was that the brand may not be all that important in the first place even though it was included as part of the search term. The person making the search could’ve seen an ad and been intrigued by the product, but upon landing on a competitor site they may choose to buy a similar product from them instead.
If you are deeply into the kind of thing you are buying, you will make a lot of research to find the best one. But there are a lot of things we buy that we don’t care as deeply about, and where we may choose the first one that fits the bill sufficiently well.
Doesn't that just make for effective advertising? I'm failing to see the harm here.
The problem is that this is subjective and would need to be automated somehow. I think Google's original sin here is making the ads look so much like organic search results. Someone placing an ad against a competitors brand name would not be a huge issue if organic results were still front and centre like in the "good old days" of early 2000s Google.
More generally though, if you paid for an advertisement and the natural search result has you first anyway, then you should not be charged for any clicks to this advertisement.
Or Google, one of the wealthiest companies on the face of the planet, could hire some staff to handle this.
Of course Google wouldn't give that data out as then many companies wouldn't need to advertise at all to get top billing.
The simple solution is that your paid advertisements are free if it gets clicked when you're the top result anyway. That way it doesn't cost the brand any money to bid on advertisements for their own brand.
Not quite: OP's point is about searches that specifically include your brand name. The "usual problem" with advertising in the zero-sum sense you propose is for eyeballs in general (billboards etc). The google tax here is more invidious, being specifically about searches that include your brand.
I think the important thing here is that companies don't decide to increase total advertising budget just because of the existence of a new channel. They have a budget of X. They have to decide how to break it up. Google, with brand targeting in search, is making a play for money that would've otherwise gone to Fox or ClearChannel or whoever. The brands redirect some budget to this new channel, as it shows its effectiveness.
Many of them still spend some on traditional channels, to get that first appeal and be the "Williams Sonoma" in "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet." Many of those people aren't just going to click through to Lodge ads instead. But less than they did when traditional channels were the only game in town.
Same dilemma, though:
If nobody advertised in Google Search or non-Google channels, people would just buy whatever skillets they found in whatever stores they found, or what their friends told them about.
If one brand advertised in offline media, more of those people would buy that brand.
So all brands advertise in offline media. And then it comes down to effectiveness of the campaigns + the same criteria that it would've otherwise - availability/placement, word of mouth, etc.
Then, if only one brand advertised in search targeting other brand names too, more of those people would buy that brand.
So all brands advertise on their brand keywords in search.
But ultimately it's the same game in both places. With the same net, Google just captures some spend that what would've gone to non-Google places previously.
"Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet"
and
"Cast Iron Skillet"
Now, if you searched on the generic ‘cola’ or ‘soda pop’ then yes you expect to see those who bid higher to be at the top and at the bottom those who bid nothing unless organically somehow they ended elsewhere.
yes and no. Google search didn't have as intrusive and competitive ads as it did before and the search function was effectively the same. Nowadays, if you search "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" you get 5~6 ads and 2-3 scrolls to get to the real organic results. 6~8 years it was like 1 ad and you could see the first result.
Another reason why ads for "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" exist are not just to combat Williams Sonoma competitors but also scummy SEO search engine spam, I mean what if you don't pay to have your stuff in the first results and some hustle comes along that makes fake product review sites off of scraped results and engineers getting their stuff all among the first results, since UX research shows people not finding a relevant hit in the first few results do not go to the next page in results it implies that ads are required to give the correct research for something obvious like this because otherwise you have to take a chance with the present day subpar google results.
Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your competition.
This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their competitors to be there.
It will get worse, to the point where to get auto-completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not even sure if that isn't already the case!
It's called Quality score (soon to be discontinued) and has 3 components. Only one of which is landing page related. And nothing prevents competitors from building "more relevant" landing pages than the original brand.
"I need a lawyer in ___ right now". That lead can be worth a lot.
"Looking to buy a new car today", etc.
If I convince 10 people to do this with me for a day, we could cost them $100,000. We might be able to cost them $1M in a week.
I mostly click on ads as chaff (mostly I block them but sometimes unblock them just do do some random clicking in the hope of confounding some profiles being compiled on me)
If I search for a Dell computer, no way will I buy Apple.
Likewise if I use Bing to search for Chrome, no way will I download edge except for user error.
I do wish there were some regulation such that if a user is searching for a trademarked or copyrighted term, that the best organic search result for that term should be required to show up first. I'm fine with showing competitor ads, but I don't think they should be able to show up above the trademark owner's ads.
I realise that would probably be an impossible argument to win under current law (IANAL), but it _feels_ so very close.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
"Dominos" might be one where people wouldn't mind ordering from Pizza Hut as they're using it as a generic term for pizza.
Not that that's the best option, but we could consider some new ideas.
Need to build consent for a war with <Country>? Give me access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be done.
most of all there is no public value for it when the government can legislate operators
Very, very sophisticated systems exist to prevent spoofed identities from counting as ad clicks.
Edit: I mostly want to stress that there’s a huge body of (largely proprietary) work on this topic. Thousands of skilled people have been full-time employed for decades thinking about exclusively this topic, on both the offensive and defensive side, in a continuously escalating arms race. Anyone just getting started on this topic has a couple of decades of literature review to catch up on before they should imagine that their proposals are novel. I don’t mean to discourage you if it’s a topic you find interesting, but you should bear in mind that the answer to “But has anyone thought of XYZ?” is “Yes” for basically all values of XYZ. There’s a lot of money at stake if the answer is no.
There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.
If ads are no longer profitable, then this should sink both the online advertising market as well as Google.
Ben Evans has a tweet something like "half of facebook devs are working out how to code the algorithm to serve you just what you want to see, the other half are working out how to get the algorithm to serve you what advertisers want you to see. "
We are doing something wrong
No, this is the outcome of all interest targeting based models. You're interested in X, and they either don't show you X (to get X to pay) or they show you Y (which you aren't interested in) because Y paid.
Whereas with demographic targeting, hey I'm in demographic X and wasn't looking for a Y now, but sure, I'll remember it for when I'm in the market for one later.
Google's original values were the ability to provide better search (common answer) and be fast (less common answer) - both of which were a complete contrast to the Alta Vista and other search engines. I could easily see Google facing disruption from a new player - but I don't think it will be another search engine. Probably a paradigm/systemic shift.
Now you could argue that the search engine should show organic results to help the consumer get the best deal, and I would agree with you.
I do actually think you have a good point.
If you really like Skillet X, and I ask you which skillet I should buy, and you tell me, "Skillet X," then it is not an ad.
If you really like Skillet X, then somebody gives you $5 to recommend it if anybody asks you what skillet to buy, and then when I ask, you tell me, "Skillet X...I mean you should know that somebody gave me $5 to say that to you but honestly I was going to say that anyway" then is it an ad?
It kinda intuitively feels to me like if it doesn't alter the result, it's not an ad, it's just somebody taking advantage of another person's willingness to hand them money and doing nothing in return.
The definition: "If Google [meaning Google's organic results] delivers users the thing they want"
The consequence: "ads have to be things users don't want" because advertisers whose product is wanted will be included whether they pay or not.
Now, you could widen it to say, look Google is still delivering the thing users want, they just sometimes do it by organic results and sometimes do it by ads, but that's a very convoluted reading of the definition, which clearly is using Google as a stand in for "Google's organic results".
The problem with my argument isn't that it failed to be a tautology. It's that the definition is questionable, and that's the profitable angle of attack: "users don't know what they want" "there can be multiple equally good options" etc. But saying it's not by definition is just silly. The definition is the whole thing up for debate!
In reality, Google is not perfect and you can argue that ads do provide value by promoting relevant content, even if its gameable by our capitalist system.
It's the entire business model of aggregators and intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half the world's working population.
Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver?
Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment?
Is Google's search results advertising bidding system ethically equivalent to this?
What Google is doing is more like taking your destination, then asking "hey, you might like this other steakhouse more, want to give that a try instead?" before driving. Potentially annoying if the answer is always no, but... the answer isn't always no.
How much is Google charging you for your searches? I get them for free. Sure, sometimes it's a pain to scroll down past the ad results when they're not relevant but it only costs me time and attention.
That’s what the ad does. It adds a bit of cognitive load where you have to view and then ignore the non-William Sonoma ad but ultimately, and without much fuss, let’s you go off to WS.
> ethically equivalent
No. Google ads are fine when seen this way. The can driver’s behavior is more egregious if their decision to take a detour isn’t communicated to you AND runs up your fare by enough to materially affect you, whatever that level may be.
Disclosure - I’m actively trying to un-Google my life so definitely not a fanboy.
If the cab ride was free sure, but you are explicitly paying for a cab to take you to your intended route.
HUGE difference.
All too often the middleman is milking both sides.
Google has value due to the search engine capabilities. But people realising they are being milked changes the value proposition.
I think Google is safe for now, though I don't think that is a good thing.
By definition a middleman is milking both sides. Were a middleman not there, it would definitionally be better for both parties. The only case where this is not true is the one where the middleman makes no money
Especially with government websites. Lots of shady companies use ads above the actual search results to drive people to their site. Charge people for a service that is free.
Defensive branded search is generally only a fraction of budget anyway. I don’t find this practice the least bit onerous or extractive from Google — they’re just allowing for competition, as they should.
But in marketing, it's somehow fair game?
Lemme guess, you’re in ads?
Compare: https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/profit_margin
Of course, manufacturing companies have a lot less: https://ycharts.com/companies/GM/profit_margin
For example, do you buy off Amazon or NewEgg, Best Buy, etc or do you just use Craigslist, Ebay, the local paper, or even the local flea/market swap meet for electronics? You can probably find stuff for half as much or even less at some of those locations, but it might cost you a lot in research time or lost money in the end...
To rephrase, all too often middlemen are there because of legislative/financial props from government or other incumbent advantages and - as you say - both sides would be better without them.
In this case - as in many middlemen cases - Google provides value - their search services. This "value" is the hook for their place in the transaction.
If Google provided a useless list of random results for every search term then it is obvious they would lose their place.
But where is the crossover point? Where Google doesn't provide enough perceived value compared to their perceived cost such that the market abandons them?
Peoples growing dislike of ads and - from this article - advertisers changing perception of ad value will change the cost vs value equation.
But I still think Google is safe for now.
That sounds like it only works if my time that they wasted for selfish gain is valued at $0, which is obviously true as far as they are concerned, but certainly isn't true to me.
(Also, I did not intend to imply you were supporting or defending dark patterns — my apologies.)
As a Google search user, why wouldn’t I value these? If Google doesn’t serve them and another search engine does, I’d be inclined to switch to the other one.
But why would those sites not have the "organic search SEO juice"? If those sites are actually good places to buy that kind of thing, a good search engine should direct a user searching for that thing there.
What wouldn't show up is lmm-cookware.com, launched early October 2021, who is trying to establish themselves as a new destination for cooking enthusiasts. That domain is new, the business is new, no Google reviews, but they've got the pan in stock, are willing to sell it for $30 shipped, and have an advertising budget to reach customers.
As a consumer, I want to be able to learn about that offer, make my own decision where to buy the pan, and I'm happy to use a search engine who will show me that offer. lmm-cookware, I, and the search engine all win from this outcome. I don't care whether lmm-cookware has been a good place to buy pans such as these for the last 180 days; I care whether they're a good place to buy it right now.
My experience is exactly the opposite. The larger the budget, the less real hard analysis is done. This is especially true with the rise of attribution modeling which allows marketers to essentially motion blur the data.
Your other points I think relate to scale. No advice can be universal, and if you read the article as absolutist, your take makes sense. If you read it as "hey, your mix is likely wrong", a lot of the criticism fades.
I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing. The Lego movie example is a really good one. I think it is probably good this happened, as a lot of creativity was performative (how do I win an ad award/impress my peers) and not about increasing sales, but we've perhaps shifted the balance too far, and there is likely some areas with good ROS that are now better bets.
Ecommerce example: every year the CPMs go up and your paid margin goes down. But every year you have a larger email list, so the balance of paid to unpaid shifts.
General example: every year you get more of the late-stage employees who care less and less about your company. But every year you can afford to pay for more layers of management, which will keep an eye on the underperformers.
This list goes on and on... The headwinds are driven by external forces, whereas the tailwinds end up working out based on your specific execution of the opportunities that present themselves to you. This is where an experienced operational team can make a huge difference.
> I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing.
You absolutely cannot rely on performance marketing forever. It's a shot in the arm until you have reached enough [fill in whatever you wnat] so that you can leverage that momentum to reach the escape velocity. So it's not good forever, but it's a great catalyst.
So FB, who earns on my spending, offers me to measure for me whether my spending makes sense for me. Why would FB ever tell me to spend less? Don't they like money?
There's literally a team at Facebook (Marketing Science), part of who's job is to tell advertisers what actually works and often, this can lead to them telling advertisers to spend less.
And this is an incredibly smart business strategy in that FB know (from experiments et al) that their platform works, and if they can show incrementality, then advertisers will invest more in the platform.
In game theory terms, it's a good strategy for a repeated game, which advertising definitely is.
Facebook does like money. Do you think lying to the biggest advertisers in the world is the best long-term strategy, or do you think instead it might be better to report out the most accurate results possible?
Long-term strategy? https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-allowed-fraud-hacke...
That's not really an argument. You wish that a responsible/public company wouldn't do that but we have seen much dumber behavior.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
"Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms" (8/2017)
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/04/goog-a04.html
"Google admits to censoring the World Socialist Web Site" (11/2020)
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
"In a statement before a Senate hearing on October 28, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted that the dominant online search company has censored the World Socialist Web Site.
At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, when asked by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah to provide the name of one left-wing “high profile person or entity” that has been censored by Google, Pichai named the WSWS."
"Google refines its search results to curb fake news" (4/2017)
https://www.engadget.com/2017-04-25-google-tweaks-search-to-...
(the comments below this article are funny because it's full of liberal-aligned comments on the disproven Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that is still given life in mainstream outlets)
I trust that a multi-national serving multiple markets is going to give me less nationally biased information than the government of a superpower (with political ambitions that span the globe.)
It's why I generally don't turn to the Voice of America for news.
You think Google search doesn't adjust its search results based on your geography? It absolutely does, and that's just one of hundreds of inputs into its completely inscrutable machine-learning driven tangle of a ranking algorithm. Your trust is very badly misplaced if you think that Google can't be/isn't already corrupted by the corrupt governments it must deal with to do daily business.
Why? How websites are ranked "organically" is somethine that is up to the search engine. A user-focused search engine would have no problem including factors like price (for shopping sites) that the user cares about. An even better one might provide the user with options to refine the ranking criteria for each search.
Meanwhile you keep assuming that somehow the site willing to give you the best deal will also be the one winning the advertising bid. That makes no sense as they are also the site spending the most on advertisement which they have to recoup somehow.
> As a consumer, I want to be able to learn about that offer, make my own decision where to buy the pan.
You seem to be under the impression that you would be missing out on an offer without ads. But if you only look at a finite set of links you are always missing some offers - ads only change which offers you see. And they do that not based on any judgment of wheter it would be a good offer for you but only by how much those sites paid.
In terms of winning the SERP paid ad bid, I don’t care if the search engine shows me the ad that’s best for them, because that will still give the newer business the chance to win the bid. If they choose not to, well, in that case I don’t see their ad. If the search engine doesn’t have ads, then in all cases I don’t see their ad.
If they go completely insanely rogue (like showing me a paid mesothelioma ad regardless of my search term), they either lose my future search traffic (“foosearch never has what I’m looking for”) or they lose the advertiser (“mesothelioma ads convert well for us on barsearch but not on foosearch; I need to lower or pull my bids on foosearch”)
> What wouldn't show up is lmm-cookware.com, launched early October 2021, who is trying to establish themselves as a new destination for cooking enthusiasts.
If a new site is what users are probably looking for, then it should be top of the organic results. Google and other search engines already use signals like when the site was updated, whether it has a social media "buzz", or what price it's selling something at. It's highly unlikely that spending advertising money is a good signal; yes, promising new companies do spend advertising money, but so do established companies and out-and-out scammers.
Helping the user discover new sites is maybe part of what a search engine should be doing. But mixing ads into the search results is too intrusive and anti-user a way to achieve that (if it even does). Maybe there's a time and a place for advertising, but it should be clearly separated from organic results; Google used to be good at that (indeed they were famous for having advertising that was less intrusive than their competitors), but they've been getting steadily worse.
The reason this happens is because the Google result shows my words in the excerpt, but when I click in, there's zero percent of the content to be found. That feels like a bait-and-switch akin to the taxi analogy.
My relevant results now either don't exist, or is in an absolute sea of mind-bogglingly bad results that it wears me out such that I would rather have had no results to begin with.
In this sense, I feel like Google is absolutely purposefully showing me results that I didn't want to go to.
This happens in real life all the time. Cab drivers get kick backs from specific places they have relationships with if they deliver people there, so you have to wonder whether they're actually recommending a better place for you or a better place for them, just like you do with Google.
And yes, I've been referred to a place by a cab driver when asking for a recommendation and found it didn't actually serve my needs at all, and in retrospect it was obvious from the conversation I was steered there without care for what I really wanted.
Google is more like the following.
"Hi, I would like to go to Morton's meats"
"Sure, I can take you to Shelly's"
"No, I said Morton's"
"Oh, the steak house downtown. Sure, I can take you to Billy's"
"What? No! Morton, you hear me"
"Ah, yeah, Morton, here you go.... by the way, the other places paid for ads"
Much less transparent, much more obnoxious.
I’ve seen this too, but I’ve always assumed it has to do with meta tags or something.
1. P&G didn't turn off that spend, it shifted it to other marketing platforms.
2. Chase didn't change its marketing spend, it just concentrated it from 400k sites to 5k sites.
3. Uber found out that their agency was committing fraud and AFAIK the case is still being litigated.
I hate being that guy, but check the links. Those reporters really must have an agenda or something (or are just struggling to get the clicks, so they need to make a story out of nothing).
However, if you are a new entrant/small business this is not the case, because nobody has ever heard of you.
As an example, look at TikTok. They spent insane amounts of money on FB ads to get as many installs as possible, but I'd suspect that they don't do this anymore because they've got enough brand equity that it doesn't make as much financial sense.
Nobody forced you in that free taxi, you got in on your own. Use another service if you don't like the cost of "free" (ads).
So if the User Agent is Google, the website produces relevant-sounding content with no JavaScript spam? I never realized GPT-3 could be used for this. The next time I see a bait-and-switch website in my search, I'll try changing my User Agent to Google.
I believe the signals from the safe browsing service are used to affect search result ranking, but I have no idea if they look for different content being served to the Google crawler.