[fourtens]

Hi Jesse,

I saw a lot of youtube channels and reddit posts discussing how to optimize their ad spend (for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6feWOsbLs)

In the video the person starts a new online store and shows how he measures his return on advertising investment. It seems to be a pretty direct correlation between his ad spend and his increased sales.

How do you match up your thoughts on advertising with the prevalence of these kind of "advertising success stories"?

[Faark]

I don't think the article says advertising never works, but that people should be careful when measuring. Lets stick to the mentioned eBay example. I can totally imagine advertising for the keyword "ebay" not being worth a lot. Those people are likely to visit that site anyway. I was more surprised when "shoes" & co were mentioned. I would have expected bigger impact for those.

Hardly any of that applies to a small store with no brand awareness, since there is little/no of the "would have clicked anyway" mentioned in the article.

Another problem with measuring can be the competition. Building/Changes brand awareness (incl relative to competitors) takes time and seems unlikely to possibly be fully measured in a short experiment. Especially if the competitor currently doesn't run ads... but you not betting for them anymore might change the price and thus calculation for them.