[absoluteharam]

I've seen how the VMware and Softlayer group operates inside IBM. They did not know what they were doing, but were given massive buckets of $ each month to spend. The entire cloud business is a joke.

IBM would spends 100s of thousands of dollars per Q buying the keyword "VMware" and send people to a page that did nothing.

One of the most expensive keywords in the company was VPS, which was a broadmatch term. There wasn't even conversion tracking in place and they spent millions per quarter in PPC with terrible results.

I've seen many instances where they spent more than my annual salary on keywords over 1 week with no results to show for it.

This was despite having about 10 people on the IBM side to "manage" stuff (excluding multiple layers of management) and several people on the ad agency side to "execute", with more focused on "strategy" and others focused on,"analytics".

[dannyw]

A startup I work for spends a lot of $ a month bidding on a common typo which is also the name of a different and unrelated product. We are bidding against their branded ad.

It doesn’t convert.

[absoluteharam]

Most teams simply didn't have conversion tracking at all for many many years from waht I recall..everyone would look at spend and clicks as success KPIs, making the client relationships jobs lucrative.

I've seen teams that spend most of their (7 figure per Q) ad budgets on branded keywords (vs unbranded) despite having top organic rankings, because no one knew any better.

The agency makes commissions on ad budget spent, so there was no incentive for efficiency.

The inefficiently was incredibly painful and no one gave a damn on either side..those that knew what they were doing didn't last or were pushed out.

(this is not a unique issue, from a PwC study last week 50% of ad spend is taken by middlemen rather than the publisher... the entire ecosystem thrives on inefficiency)