[kbos87]

This article tackles one small and specific portion (bidding on branded keywords) of what paid search advertising is all about, so I think it’s fair to say that the title overstates the scope of the content.

Paid search advertising has been subject to hit pieces for the past 15 years, often authored by people who are resentful of Google for some reason and happy to cite a bunch of statistics that don’t actually prove their point.

Are there inept advertisers burning money on AdWords? Of course. Does that mean that major brands with entire departments filled with analysts running their paid search efforts can be debunked in a couple thousand words? Obviously not.

[sweezyjeezy]

> Does that mean that major brands with entire departments filled with analysts running their paid search efforts can be debunked in a couple thousand words

The old "all the successful companies are doing it, so it must be doing something" argument. Even within companies, incentives are skewed - do you really think a CMO would ever say, “maybe online ads don’t work, I don't need so many staff reporting to me anymore, take them away".

The onus is on the people claiming that it does something to prove it - I want direct, explicit evidence - where do I find it?

[RubyRidgeRandy]

You can talk to pretty much any ecommerce site or ppc specialist - open up linkedin and message away. I had clients triple their yearly revenue with well implemented ad campaigns.

Do you really think these things are implemented without any kind of tracking in place? We have people who only run ads with a targeted ROAS of 10x. That's not something you can do or track effectively with a magazine, billboard, or radio ad. There's a reason online search advertising makes Google so much money, because it's damn effective.

[sweezyjeezy]

Well that's pretty far from what I asked for, more appealing to authority and unpublished internal analyses (presumably run by marketing departments). I used to work for an ecommerce A/B testing company, and have seen first hand how untrue it can be. Google doesn't make money because it's damn effective, they make money because people believe it. There is published research that that show that it doesn't work as well as Google or internal marketing teams want people to believe it does (did you read the article, or just count how many words it was?)

[RubyRidgeRandy]

I suggested you get literal direct experience from people who have used ads in their marketing mix. I gave you my direct experience. This is not an appeal to authority.

You then immediately appeal to authority by your own definition by bringing up your experience. Working in an A/B testing company is a lot different than doing A/B testing. I create and implement digital marketing strategies for companies. We do A/B testing as well. So when a client is making over 6x return on their ad spend, how is that 'not working' when the baseline has already been well established?

[sweezyjeezy]

I'm just trying to say to you - yes I also have direct experience with this, so don't try and give me some anecdotes. We ran meta-analyses across hundreds of clients / experiments using advertising, both retargeting customers who abandoned their baskets, and consulted on more traditional experiments as an independent auditor. These were mostly in the fashion and travel verticals. The revenue uplifts we saw as a whole across the sectors were poor, expecially compared to other things that these sites were doing (social proof, scarcity etc.) I never once saw a value like 6x ROI. We could not publish this publicly unfortunately, as it more generally showed that stuff people were A/B testing doesn't really do much, which would have been bad for business.

This does not mean that search advertising is useless as a concept. But the idea that it 'just works' is also clearly false.

[ClumsyPilot]

So you entire argument is "I refuse to actualy engage with any of the presented facts and claims, big and rich institutions can't be wrong".

The author could have presented a cure for cancer and you woild have dismissed him just the same.

Before 2008 banks were handing multiple mortgages to strippers.

Does that mean that major banks with entire departments filled with analysts running their risk analysis and loans efforts can be debunked in a couple thousand words?

[kbos87]

My argument is based on having worked in performance based advertising for years and seen first hand that it works.

Anyone who has direct experience in the space has seen the never ending stream of the same pedestrian arguments from people who have no idea what they are talking about.

For most organizations with a professionalized paid acquisition team, the returns aren’t fuzzy or something that a CMO could justify if it wasn’t producing real returns. The campaigns I worked on drove millions of dollars in incremental revenue every month. Turn it off, the revenue stops. Not some obscure attribution question.

[dazc]

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

[kbos87]

Counterpoint - most of the arguments against paid acquisition from people who don’t have direct experience are a classic Dunning-Kruger example.

[dazc]

I find some people will accept there are some situations where paid acquisition results in cannibalisation of acquisition they were going to get anyway. Conversely, there will be examples that prove paid acquisition is the best money you could ever spend.

Then there are people who dismiss everyone as not knowing what they are talking about.