

Ask HN: In My Country, People Still Use Hits To Describe Websites... - majani

I live in Kenya, and our internet adoption is blowing up right now, especially on mobile. I run an ad-based startup which I've been diligently building up to 140,000 users. I thought this was great work, considering the total addressable market for my website consists of just over 2 million people. But shock on me, when I embarked on sales, I've found that some of the biggest 'must-buy' websites still quote their hit count when pitching ads, and the ad agencies are buying it. Even Google Kenya has an ad campaign out for their local business directory where they quote that one small business owner is getting '12,000 hits per day' on her page. All of a sudden, my 140,000 users looks like spit in a hurricane. I heard this was also a problem in the earlier days for the more developed internet economies, so how did people get around it?
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jiaaro
I believe google adwords got around it by adding an option to optimize ad
impressions by conversion value rather than click through rate or raw traffic.

i.e., instead of showing ads more and more when their click-through rate goes
up. They show the ads more and more as the ROI (return on investment) goes up.

the ROI is determined by dividing the aggregate conversion value for that ad
by the cost of running those ads

so $1000 in total sales to users who clicked a given ad that cost $200 in
total to run (for those same users) would be:

1000 / 200 = 5.0

where another ad that you also spent $200 on but only resulted in $600 in
conversions would be…

600/200 = 3.0

so the ROI is $5 (income) per $1 of ads in the first case and $3 per $1 spent
on ads in the second case.

If you enable that feature, the first ad would be run _much_ more than the
second one, in order to maximize ROI of the ad spending

