[zippergz]

I almost feel like there are two factions. I'm pretty similar to you. I have clicked on ads a handful of times, but it's very rare. However, I have worked in jobs where I had visibility into the metrics, and I have seen internet ads be EXTREMELY effective. Not in terms of clicks (which could easily be accidental or fraudulent), but in terms of people clicking and then purchasing. People aren't going to "accidentally" click and then give us money. And I've seen many campaigns where we were getting huge ROI in terms of actual dollars. So there are clearly lots of people out there who do click on ads and take action. I think the problem comes when you're using an intermediate metric like clicks or impressions to measure success. You have to measure the actual outcome you are trying to drive, like purchases or subscriptions. Of course, with CPG, that's a lot harder to do. And I'm not convinced that pure brand advertising is any easier to measure online than it is offline.

[pbiggar]

Not only are there definitely people who click ads, but there are people _like us_ who click ads.

All the dev tool companies run ads! CircleCI runs them, but the dozen or so other dev tool companies where I know the founders or early hires also run ads. You would think given comments like this on HN that they would be useless, but we all run the numbers. The numbers say that not only are they effective, but that usually we should run more of them.

It's like when people here say "oh I hate talking to salespeople". Yet, salespeople make the world go around.

[Terretta]

Buyers make the world go round. Salespeople make commissions.

[tjoff]

Or, they just don't have the slightest clue...

"Everyone is doing it, must be good."

I believe this summarizes the ad industry quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TysKyHXXtYQ

[pbiggar]

Did you not read my comment? If you did read my comment, why would you write this one?

[tjoff]

Thought it was pretty clear that I didn't buy into yours.

I guess you could rephrase your comment as this: People who run ads believe ads works.

As an outsider that is not very convincing.

[nkurz]

People who run ads believe ads works.

Even then, I think you are being too generous. The stricter criterion is something like: "People who run more ads believe they will personally benefit from running more ads."

Ideally (and occasionally) this means that ad buyer believes the company as a whole will benefit from the advertising. But even if this belief is real, if the influence or income of the decision maker correlates positively with increasing spending on ads (and decreases with cutbacks) it can be difficult to distinguish belief from reality.

[sundvor]

All this talk about "belief" like it's religion or something. It's reasonably feasible to get hard, scientific numbers that prove the effectiveness of advertising spend. Ie tracing click throughs vs conversion rate.

[lsc]

>I've seen many campaigns where we were getting huge ROI in terms of actual dollars. So there are clearly lots of people out there who do click on ads and take action.

That's the problem, though. You can tell me that the user clicked on the ad and then bought my product; but was the user going to scroll down to my organic search result, click on that and buy anyhow? The advertising sellers claim that they should be credited with the sale, when all they are providing is moving the last link up; at least in the industry I was in, a user, generally speaking, isn't going to sign up with a VPS provider they haven't heard of. Sure, sure, putting a special in front of them can move you from second or third place to first place, and there's value in that, but really some brand advertising needs to be done before you can sell at all, and as you pointed out, measuring the effectiveness of brand advertising is super hard.

I suppose there are some products where the user really is going to buy the product first linked; but I think there are a lot of products where the user doesn't make a buying decision for some time, and the last click... may not have a lot to do with what order the links are in.

I think this is the real problem with online advertising; tracking that last click into a purchase is fairly easy (though, as you point out, some people don't even do that) but figuring out how much of that purchase was because the link was first, and how much of that purchase was because the user had previous knowledge of you? that's hard - I understand that a lot of research is being expended in this direction, and that this is the value proposition that Facebook claims, but... it's a hard problem, and depending on the product, you could reasonably argue that the state of the art isn't as good as the people selling advertising say it is.

[tomrod]

But it is an open question of incrementality -- did you just cannibalize a sale from a different, possibly cheaper, channel? How much lift did you actually get?

That's the problem I've seen in the digital ad space -- lift is either hard to measure, or ignored completely. Causality to the sale is assumed on the ad.

[zippergz]

I think that's a great point, and definitely hard for a huge company like P&G. But for a small company, it can be easier, because when your volumes are low enough, it's often very easy to directly see sales uplift in your top line numbers when you run the ad. If I normally get 20 orders a day, I run an ad and get 40, then the ad budget runs out and I'm back to a steady 20, I'm not too worried about cannibalization.

[jacobush]

For a huge company it's even harder. I think the internet ads serve partly the same as news paper ads. There is no click through for them either. Actual paper ones.

[pointytrees]

We have a couple different phone numbers exclusively for advertising campaigns. We can note the line it came on when receiving the call. We're a small-mid business, so I assume larger businesses have budgets for a lot more ways to track printed media advertising that isn't too obtrusive.

[jacobush]

Of course, but think Coca Cola, BMW or something large. Often there is no phone number. They are just showing they arr still around

[eps]

What's "lift"?

[zaroth]

New customers or orders brought in by the ad which you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Lift is a basically unmeasurable quantity which directly relates to the ROI of the ad.

[tomrod]

Measurable via test design, with a control population establishing the baseline.

[jliptzin]

Mostly I've noticed that people click ads when they don't realize they're clicking an ad. For example, when my dad googles something, often he doesn't realize the results at the top are all advertisements (he's colorblind and has bad vision). When I point out to him that they're ads (whether relevant or not), he then avoids them and scrolls down to the organic results.

[rjbwork]

I agree. I think there's a big hump in the middle of people who are like "hmm, this is relevant to me, i'll click it", then 2 long tails of people who click a LOT and people who click rarely or not at all.

On the other hand, there is a not-insignificant number of bot networks and shady clickfarm sites out there. Though, you can usually avoid being taken in by them by not being a cheapskate - quality traffic is more expensive. If you're bidding <$1 CPM for most things, enjoy funding a click farm.