[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Well that's pretty far from what I asked for, more appealing to authority and unpublished internal analyses (presumably run by marketing departments).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.