> Wasn't there some regular company who decided to delete all adsense/ad networks from their sites for a quarter and at the end of the quarter found no difference in ordering/sales, etc.
> Online ads is snakeoil
No doubt in my mind. I helped start a webshop in 2009 and got to see it first hand:
We used a service called Kelkoo and according to their dashboard almost every customer we had came through them.
We were suspicious so we cut them out for a couple of weeks.
Turned out sales hardly dropped at all.
We had good luck with Google ads back then but I don't for a second think Google doesn't happily fleece advertisers:
As I've said a number of times before I have been targeted for scammy dating site ads for a decade, more specifically from around the time I started dating my wife and until our youngest was about a year old.
Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way, but has had no issues showing me these ads, probably because they pay most pr impression.
This was back when I felt I owed site owners to not enable adblock all the time so I tried a number of times to report the ads as irrelevant. Problem is, when I reported Polish girls as irrelevant, the next ads was for Ukrainian girls, then Thai girls, Chinese girls, Taiwanese girls, Filipino girls and I don't know what else until it went full circle and started on Polish girls again.
Not a bad word about people from those countries, but I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family
holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids.
Point is it seems that relevancy doesn't count anything now that advertisers pay for impressions instead of clicks.
>Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way...
>...I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids.
It's interesting you describe Google as "knowing" information about you. Google may have the data, but a human did not read it to develop some understanding of who you are as person. They just ran it through some software based on the targeting criteria they have.
I would guess that advertisers didn't set their ads to exclude married men who are Christian with children, just because that's a very specific profile to care about--they might just set it to target men of any age and be done with it. Or it's possible that married, Christian men with children are one of the most profitable targets for scammy dating sites, and either the site creator or the targeting software are going after them specifically.
Or it's possible someone else in his close circle was using a computer on his network that was looking for things that would trigger those types of ads. Cable DSL routers usually only have 1 dynamic IP.
It's just as likely that nobody was bidding for his target demographic, so the bottom feeding dating sites that take the cheapest of the cheap ad slots bought the top 20% of his screen for millipenny CPCs.
I have given it a thought, but it doesn't make sense to me:
Nobody wanted to target a well paid dev with small kids and holiday plans except the cheapest of the cheap?
The explanations I find more likely is either
- my account got grouped up with a demographic 14 years ago when I worked in an environment that certainly did have those kinds of signals and that signal was too strong.
- scammy dating sites like expensive credit cards pay extremely well and Googled fudged their data to make me fit the criteria.
Lived with my wife and 5 kids, not many visitors, protected metwork. This went on for a decade even despite me trying to trigger other alternatives (search for WordPress hosting).
Thats part of the snake oil. The dating site spent X dollars on ads and the expect people to see them no matter what. Google wants to pretend they have something better than simple TV/Radio mass advertisement campaigns but they don't.
The idea of targeted/effective/meaningful ads and taking as much as you can in advertising dollars from a customer are fundamentally at odds with each other.
I convinced my company with some custom dashboards I made to show with some adjustable slider reports (first react project I think i did) that even with favorable metrics the cost/value ratio just wasn't there. They ended up stopping the spending and of course no change in sales. Saved the company a couple million a year.
> Online ads is snakeoil
No doubt in my mind. I helped start a webshop in 2009 and got to see it first hand:
We used a service called Kelkoo and according to their dashboard almost every customer we had came through them.
We were suspicious so we cut them out for a couple of weeks.
Turned out sales hardly dropped at all.
We had good luck with Google ads back then but I don't for a second think Google doesn't happily fleece advertisers:
As I've said a number of times before I have been targeted for scammy dating site ads for a decade, more specifically from around the time I started dating my wife and until our youngest was about a year old.
Google knows fairly well I'm a conservative Christian who has had no problem getting a date the usual way, but has had no issues showing me these ads, probably because they pay most pr impression.
This was back when I felt I owed site owners to not enable adblock all the time so I tried a number of times to report the ads as irrelevant. Problem is, when I reported Polish girls as irrelevant, the next ads was for Ukrainian girls, then Thai girls, Chinese girls, Taiwanese girls, Filipino girls and I don't know what else until it went full circle and started on Polish girls again.
Not a bad word about people from those countries, but I was already married and Google know very well since I look for family holidays, toys and food ideas for families with kids.
Point is it seems that relevancy doesn't count anything now that advertisers pay for impressions instead of clicks.