
Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless - somid3
https://youexec.com/dev/2017/1/14/google-facebook-ads-traffic-is-useless
======
rackforms
I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that
time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally
between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.

I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This
mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth
lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a monthly
income of just over $5000. Not bad for what started out as a side-project. I
took none of this for granted, and worked by butt off every day.

It's key to note from 2007 to 2011 a great consolidation was taking place,
with Google eating, for me at least, 90% of all search traffic.

Then the spammers hit. My site was targeted with millions of low quality
links, which lead to a Google penalty in 2012. I lost 90% of my traffic and
along with it, 90% of my revenue.

4 years on and I've never actually recovered from my penalty, with traffic
being manually limited to under 30 clicks on any particular day.

I've done my best to advertise, with Google capturing the lions share.
Unfortunately I too have very little luck with this channel, with only 1 $4
conversion after hundreds spent.

The real kicker here, and my reason for posting, is the difference between
what was my organic traffic then, and my ad traffic now, is nowhere near the
same in terms of quality and obviously, conversions.

I guess my point is the current situation, basically 2 companies controlling
so much traffic, seems, well, bad for small business in this country. I value
what they bring to the table and fully understand why they're so popular. But
is things keep on this way where does that lead the guys like me? Is this just
the way it has to be? Is the dream of the open Internet already dead?

~~~
cconcepts
The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or
SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why,
after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google
recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we
are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page
three.

It wasn't till we realised we had 10,000+ spammy links pointed at our site
that we wondered whether we had been the victim of some malicious attack. We
couldn't recover the penalty to the site no matter how hard we worked and have
had to rebuild at a new domain as a result.

For small businesses like us, is it really possible for a competitor to just
destroy our online credibility like that or am I just paranoid?

~~~
Taek
Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a
penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the
search results.

SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N
results.

~~~
cconcepts
So how do I combat against this? We're a small, honest company providing great
products and services for the companies that need them but we're getting
killed online because no one can find us.

I've forked out a lot (for us) on adwords and the return has been negligible
to say the least.

Does this mean that the democratizing power of the internet has been swallowed
up for small, lean companies like us who cant afford a mega adwords budget?

~~~
reefoctopus
You have to disavow the bad links.
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en)

~~~
ubernostrum
Why is it that someone else gaming Google's algorithm becomes my problem and
requires me to solve it rather than Google?

~~~
TeMPOraL
For the same reason when some fellow citizen acts against you, you may need to
sue them yourself - Google provides a platform with some set of rules, but
they can't proactively ensure nobody is doing something malicious to other
parties (especially if the malicious act is allowed by the rules), nor they
can codify and enforce "don't be an asshole" rule.

~~~
ubernostrum
Your analogy doesn't really hold up. This isn't another person coming after
you directly, it's the other person manipulating a third party to cause the
third party to come after you, and the third party saying "not my problem that
I'm easy to manipulate like that".

For a criminal-justice-system analogy, it's similar in concept (though not in
extremity) to SWATting. And I don't think we want governments to wash their
hands of that and say "not our fault our system is abusable that way, it's all
on _you_ to do something about it after the fact".

~~~
jdietrich
Identity theft is a perfectly reasonable analogy. If someone steals my
identity and ruins my credit rating, the onus is on me to inform the credit
reference agency. It'd be nice if Equifax could telepathically divine whether
a credit transaction was legitimate or not, but it simply isn't possible.
Google are similarly unable to distinguish between a blackhat SEO scheme and
this sort of weird SEO DDoS.

~~~
ubernostrum
Except there are a lot of people (myself included) who see the handling of
"identity theft" as banks and credit agencies trying to pass the buck for
their own poor approaches to security and verification.

~~~
samrift
Exactly - In my opinion there is no "identity theft". There is criminal fraud,
which the banks are a victim of. However, instead of dealing with that fraud
they just pass the costs on to an unrelated individual and then shrug and say
"you deal with it".

Google does something much like this - but without regulation or clear appeal
process.

------
abalashov
I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal,
even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche
audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I
come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single
conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on
paid ads. I learned a great deal about which keywords to target, and mimicked
the reputedly successful approaches of my competitors. Nada. Would have been
better off shoveling cash into an open pit.

The only customers I've gained through web marketing have been organic, coming
through bona fide referrals on other sites. The "hit rate" on that has been
pretty good, suggesting that the blame can't lie entirely with my crappy
sites...

~~~
dajohnson89
We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap
shoved in our faces, that we've learned over the years to ignore all ads.

Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I
would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I'm not
served ads.

~~~
victorhooi
What exactly is "dumb" amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for
authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority.

People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they're not
cheap, they would totally pay for content.

Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if
site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it's a
race to the bottom.

Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).

Many attempts have been made to monetise things (a la micropayments).

I believe Google did something before, where you paid cents, or fractions of a
cent to authors for article views. This was back in 2012:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407)

And recently Mozilla's Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin
micropayments. I'd love to see it gain traction, but I don't see it going
mainstream.

Look, I know some ad networks go too far - but IMHO, Google/FB ads are hardly
_that_ intrusive. (I personally hate pop-up/pop-under ads, and auto-playing
videos)

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ads - above opinions are purely my
own).

~~~
bumblebeard
I guess I'm cheap then. I have no interest in paying any amount of money to
read most of the things I read online. It seems to me that it's not so much
that people are demanding this content for free as it is that people don't
think it's worth paying for. It's not that I particularly wanted to see an
article about the usefulness of advertising as it is that it's something to
read on the bus. I would probably just look out the window instead if the
alternative weren't free.

Most articles/videos on sites like HN fall into this category - I wouldn't
have paid to read this article for example. To me, this comment thread is
worth much more than the article itself and I don't see anybody here upset
that they aren't getting paid to comment.

I guess that means that I would probably pay a subscription fee to a site like
HN but that I wouldn't generally pay for the content itself, which does seem a
little backwards. Still, that's what's valuable to me. Does anybody else feel
this way or am I weird?

~~~
maksimum
You're definitely not alone.

For some reason comments are often more interesting than the articles
themselves, and people never think of monetizing their comments. Somehow karma
is enough of a reward.

If I had to watch an ad for 30 seconds or pay $0.25, the proceeds of which
would be distributed to commentators by proportion of karma they earned in the
comment section ... I probably wouldn't bother.

It doesn't make much sense to me how I arrive at these utility valuations
though.

~~~
pjc50
Paying commentators would immediately destroy the quality of comments as
people tried to exploit the system.

------
Gustomaximus
I see these posts all the time of DIY Adwords/FB and then a claim it doesn't
work. This would be like me, a non-carpenter, trying to build a house, seeing
how bad it looks and then claiming building materials suck.

There is reason companies spend ~$70 billion on Adwords annually. So because
Adwords/FB didn't work for you doesn't mean their traffic is 90% useless. And
dont get me wrong, I completely acknowledge there is junk traffic on the
networks, but filtering this to a minimum is part of getting advertising
right. So to get 90% useless traffic, it means you set up campaigns without
proper targeting or content, not Adwords/FB is 90% useless.

~~~
WalterSear
At my last company, we worked with Google's in-house team to build adword
campaigns, eventually spending the better part of a million dollars over the
course of 9 months or so, with free assistance from them in the development of
campaigns and with their ongoing guidance and advice. From our meetings with
them, they were quite confident that our strategy was appropriate, that there
existed an audience that we could reach via our keyword choices, and that they
could drive the kind of traffic we needed to our site.

It was an abject failure, and a chief contributor to the downfall of the
company.

~~~
somedangedname
> ...we worked with Google's in-house team

I'm no expert but I don't think the incentives were aligned properly there.
Here's a Reddit thread that says it better than I can:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1nwzdy/what_do_your_go...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1nwzdy/what_do_your_google_account_reps_do_for_you/)

Maybe work with an agency next time?

~~~
WalterSear
Sage advice. I'm bookmarking that for the next time I need to talk about
marketing strategies with people.

------
blockchan
I did Adwords for 1 person mom shops and bigger companies in industries
ranging from tourism and general aviation to jewelry and software development.

It was all profitable. Ad agencies are borderline scammers - they measure
traffic and clicks as performance, which makes you to spend more money to
increase "performance" and pay more agency fees.

Sometimes I burned $15000 before first conversion, but ROI was always positive
in the end.

People launching ads without any experience, redirecting people to homepage
and loosing money are the same kind of people trying trade stock market and
loosing money, creating their own amateur e-commerce shop and loosing money
getting zero customers, hiring high-school nephew for company website etc etc.
You need experience, and before that - knowledge.

First, manage your ads in-house. Agencies have no reason to work for your
conversions, that's not their business model. Second, don't treat ads like
"we'll slap users with our ad and see what happens". Prepare user flow,
conversion funnel, dedicated landing pages, drip campaigns, remarketing etc.

Adwords and Facebook are fully-fledged promotion channels and they have to be
treated as such. It's a craft which consultants make huge money from - because
they know how to bring profits.

~~~
shostack
You are painting agencies with overly broad strokes. I used to help lead the
paid search group at a top search agency. Rest assured we did not try to pass
off clicks as anything but that. Occasionally we had clients with branding
goals and we worked with them to make sure we were adding incremental value,
but most were direct response (ie. "Show me the money or you're fired").

A percent of media model isn't perfect, but if a client isn't seeing results,
the relationship won't last long, and word gets around.

Now, there are scammy agencies out there, but it is hardly the norm. I loved
stealing business from them because it was shooting fish in a barrel with all
the problems on those accounts.

Be careful about making such broad, and highly inaccurate statements... They
really don't help paint you in the best light.

~~~
blockchan
> Be careful about making such broad, and highly inaccurate statements... They
> really don't help paint you in the best light.

What paints me in good light is my results and my results only. Also, I'm a
cool, likable guy :)

I had my share of dealing with agencies and nothing beats knowledge of
business goals, internal processes and clientbase and reports honesty while
working in-house.

Many agencies exist because it's cheaper to outsource. Just like Indian coders
- but quality of work is _often_ questionable.

I stand by my words and refuse all agency work - still, I have many recruiters
regularly saying "hi" on LinkedIn.

------
crablar
This is due to the ad fraud bubble. We have covered it extensively on Software
Engineering Daily:
[https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud)

~~~
ernestbro
Thank you! This makes perfect sense: "A huge percentage of online
advertisements are never seen by humans. They are viewed by bots–automated
scripts that are opening web pages in a browser and pretending to be a human.
Advertising scammers set up web pages, embed advertisements on those pages,
and then pay for bot traffic to come and view those advertisements."

[https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/12/20/ad-fraud-
res...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/12/20/ad-fraud-research-
with-augustine-fou/)

------
neya
I recently started writing a book on programming and set-up a landing page for
it, to do a pre-launch campaign and I set up some ads on Facebook.

Fortunately, I work in the Analytics industry, so I set-up scroll tracking on
my website using Google Tag Manager and started noticing the same patterns as
the author as well. Just so to add on to the author, I even excluded the top
fraud-prone countries (Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, etc.)

In effect, the only pre-orders I've gotten are from Amazon's own internal
organic advertising combined with my personal Social media posts. I tried
increasing the budget, but that didn't work out either.

Mind you, I track almost every important action on my site (click a button,
fill in a form, etc.). The behaviour of these "bots" are very strange and the
only thing I've gained in this gamble is an ultra high bounce rate (~90%, < 2
seconds session duration) like the author. Again, I feel it's too early for me
to conclude that these networks are useless as I keep reading posts from other
people saying Facebook works extraordinarily well for them.

~~~
j_s
Wouldn't 90%+ of your target market ad block your ad?

------
krmmalik
We've been doong FB for almost a year now and have learned alot in this space,
(with still alot to go).

Here are some things that might help you.

1\. The type of ad you run and the copy you use has a big impact on the user's
behaviour. Not all ads are created equal. Good copy that really taps i to why
someone should be clicking through and what value they can expect to attain
the other end makes a big difference. But this isnt an exact science. Its more
of an art.

2\. If you're targeting is off, you will also get undesired behaviour. People
might click through because they like the ad, but if they havent been targeted
correctly, it will cause issues. You may need to get more laser focused in
terms of targeting. Age range, custom audience (through email upload),
lookalike audiences, interests etc.

3\. People via email, trust you to some extent and have a relationship with
you. They're a warm audience. This is the real reason the organic approach is
working for you. You have a relationship with those people. Its not the same
with paid ads. You need to build that trust and warm them up. You might take a
layered/re-targeting approach by offering them some value and then re-
targeting the people that interact with your content with a second and third
round of ads. You might also grab their email and then target them both via
email and fb.

FB can work, but it take alot of iterations and time to get it right.

Alternatively you could just run an FB ad that does something to collect email
addresses, then run an email nurturing campaign, warm up the audience and then
target via email.

FB _can_ work, but it takes time.

~~~
somid3
This is true. What would be amazing is if there was a way to audit their
advertising algorithms to know it is fair. I tried their new Contact Form
tool, but the cost per lead is about $17/lead.

At the end of the day, if someone is advertising a product that is incredibly
good, they should be able to use CPM instead of CPC. The point I am trying to
make is that I believe the CPM model is dependent on making CPC & other more
costly services look like a better alternative.

~~~
geocar
Publishers want to get paid for the opportunity (CPM) but Advertisers want to
pay a portion of their revenue (PPA): PPL, PPV, PPC and PPM are all proxies
for that customer acquisition, so if you want to buy effectively, you need to
start by figuring out what _your_ costs per acquisition are. If you can't even
hypothetically afford anything close to $17/lead, you might not be able to
purchase customers yet, but if you can, then figuring out your lead-to-sales
ratio is a lot easier than working out everything between the impression and
the sales.

You might consider looking for an agency that specialises in PPL/PPA;
basically doing revshare, and letting them build appropriate site lists, and
user demographics, and copy testing and so on to help figure out what makes
your product sell -- they will put skin in the game because they can leverage
their expertise.

~~~
shostack
This. Not every business has the economics to make advertising work at certain
scales.

For many, $17/lead is fantastic because they have an AOV or LTV that supports
it. Not every business can do that, so other forms of marketing may make more
sense at that stage.

------
cconcepts
In the contract economy, imagine that all of us, with our small contracting
companies and associated specialities, are day labourers standing at the
dockside waiting to be hired.

The dock manager (Google) opens a gate to the strong looking fellows allowing
them into the dock company's holding area. If they are not in this area (front
page of appropriate SERPs) then they aren't considered by the task master who
later comes to the holding area, scans the candidates that the dock manager
has selected, and takes his pick to get the days work done - from which point
it is finally up to the individual and their abilities to prove their ongoing
worth.

Imagine if you needed to be an SEO, adwords and general internet marketing
guru just to get the dock manager to look at you so you could get paid....

EDIT: Clarity

~~~
erikpukinskis
In the contract economy every one of the dock workers has an agent whose job
it is to make sure they have the support they need to provide ongoing worth.

Right now most agents won't take someone who can't immediately bill invoices
in the high thousands of dollars. In a contract economy the agent services
market would have a low end. Tools will emerge to help agents take on large
volumes of low dollar value clients.

Double digit percentages of the entire unrepresented labor market are up for
grabs. The current setup is unstable.

Unions are different in that they represent a class not an individual and they
don't take a percentage of earnings.

------
soared
OP is simply doing it wrong. Advertising works, and the title's claim only
shows how inexperienced op is. I work at a digital ad agency. Ads work if you
do it correctly, but it's incredibly easy to waste money. People like op are
why google and Facebook make buying ads overly complicated - if it were easy
you wouldn't have to spend so much money.

If op is reading this, I'd be happy to hop on a phone call and help you out.

~~~
somid3
@Soared, aside from the self-marketing of your firm how about you put your
money where your mouth is. Let's use the same landing page - I'll make a
campaign, you make a campaign, we each spend $500 and we track conversions in
a specific period of time.

The one who converts more for less will owe the other $1000 - we can make the
accounts public so that (1) the world can see your "expertise" and (2) how
"confused" I am. Game?

~~~
forgetsusername
I would love to see this.

Every article about rampant ad fraud inevitably contains a comment thread
where ad consultants appear to make claims that other people "just can't do it
right". Let's see it done right, then.

~~~
somid3
I agree, @Soared - where you at?

------
dbg31415
90% useless is still better than most of the alternatives.

Seriously though, it's hard to track success.

If I'm showing an ad wanting people to rush out and buy sneakers... it's rare
that it will hit the right person at the right spot in their sneaker purchase
decision journey.

But what I want is to bombard them with information so that when they are
ready to buy sneakers, they think positively of the sneakers I am selling.

I don't care if they don't follow a perfect path on my site... if they click
around and click off... they most likely aren't going to click and buy on the
spot. I'm OK with this.

How do I know if my advertising is working? Well... tracking users is one way,
but just asking users is something a lot of stores don't bother with. A simple
"how did you hear about us?" or hit them up with a customer satisfaction
survey after the purchase with a few questions -- incentivized with a coupon.
You'll get some great metrics that will help you understand if you marketing
budget is being well-spent.

~~~
somid3
The case I am making is I believe Google & Facebook mix "active" and "non-
active" users to create an artificial stream of users such that paying by
impression is always worst than CPC.

~~~
soared
Sorry man, but you're not experienced enough to make these claims. Search,
display, and social are entirely different channels and have completely
different strategies. Display is for awareness, you shouldn't be trying to get
clicks.

You get charged for misclicks so maybe that's what you are seeing. But cpm
bidding generally isn't for driving traffic anyways. Cpc is usually more
expensive because it is way more targeted and is intent based.

~~~
somid3
Correct, this is not a statistical trial or anything official. In fact, my
data is not significant. After years of using Google and Facebook ads that I
have never seen CPM out beat CPC.

~~~
soared
Because cpm doesn't get measured with conversions. Cpm is almost strictly
awareness which is very difficult to measure.

------
sumoboy
This article is 99% useless. Adwords and Facebook are very complex and take
experience, time, and $ to get campaigns dialed in right. The targeting and
audience choices have become increasingly complex but you can create cost
efficient ad placements if you know what your doing and I think in this it's
not the case. Plenty of businesses rely upon these platforms to drive traffic,
leads, and sales, so your argument for leaving offers no compelling reason why
to leave these platforms.

~~~
somid3
I'm not suggesting we leave these platforms, but rather that we evaluate their
true offering, and perhaps audit the algorithms to make sure its fair for
everyone. So far, in this long thread it seems others have noticed the same.

------
oblib
I haven't use google ads in years but I did study my logs and watched them in
real time and came to the conclusion they were either hitting me with bots or
foreigners getting paid to click their ads. It was blatant theft in my
opinion.

~~~
somid3
Agreed.

~~~
ransom1538
A fun evening for me is getting a 6six pack and creating a website like "Bob's
BBQ", then running google ads for it. The access_log is hilarious. People from
Pakistan, people not requesting css (wtf?), on and on.

------
nkkollaw
I have definitely seen the same thing.

I would like to add that having done both, ads in foreign languages are
clicked on by bots many times less than ads in English.

Google Adwords seems to be almost a scam. If you don't disable them, most of
your clicks will come from Nigeria, Afghanistan, and other random countries,
with Google doing nothing about it.

I've had success with Facebook in Polish and Italian, ads in English seemed to
be mostly bots.

Pretty sad for people who spend thousands without knowing.

I guess content marketing is the way to go, most people know this. Write good
stuff that is useful to your audience, and share it on Reddit. I've done it in
the past, with great results.

------
kkt262
You're so right. FB & Google doesn't work at all. Stop advertising on those
sites, you're making my CPC go up.

~~~
somid3
Well said, except for the second sentence :)

------
bebop22
Agree with this post. Approximately 90% bots in our FB ad network
acquisitions. It's a total scam.

------
tyingq
There are some niches that are overflowing with stupid advertisers that are
bidding higher than the amount the referral is actually worth. In those cases,
there really isn't anything you can do. You can wait it out, but there are
rubes already lined up to replace the ones that go bankrupt and leave.

That's why you'll find people swearing both cases..."adsense is worthless" vs
"adsense is a goldmine". It really depends on the niche.

------
javitury
Was it a Search or a Display Campaign for Google? I could understand that
adsense webmasters used clickfarms. However finding out that google is using
clickfarms for Search campaigns would be uncovering the greatest scam of the
Internet.

~~~
beejiu
Interestingly the behavior is similar to what I have observed with Mouseflow
recordings for organic Google+ and Facebook posts. The page is opened, the
mouse never moves and the 'user' scrolls a couple of times. I wonder if these
records could just be the regular reviews that Google and Facebook do; their
visits do not show up on Google Analytics but Mouseflow is able to take
recordings.

~~~
PeterisP
Isn't that how legitimate mobile or even laptop trackpad users look ? If I
don't intend to click anywhere, the "mouse" cursor never moves - the page
loads, I scroll, and go back by keyboard.

With a mouse, you get slight movement even while scrolling or pressing
buttons, but with a trackpad or on a mobile device you don't, there's "mouse
movement" even if you explicitly do some aiming before a click.

------
rpedela
A bit off-topic, but how did you create those videos? It seems like a useful
tool to test/optimize design, find UI bugs, etc.

EDIT: They used FullStory ([https://fullstory.com](https://fullstory.com)). I
missed that when I read it the first time.

~~~
arbesfeld
There are quite a few of these screen-capture tools around (Inspectlet,
Mouseflow, Hotjar), most of them for UX optimization.

If you're looking for a more developer-focused product, you can also check out
LogRocket ([https://logrocket.com](https://logrocket.com)).

~~~
rpedela
LogRocket looks interesting and may be very helpful for debugging problems in
production or optimizing performance. But FullStory or something like it fits
my current needs better. I just want a video of real users interacting with
the site to see where they get confused. And I don't want to spend a lot of
time integrating code to get it to work. That is what FullStory is promising
but I haven't tried it yet.

------
scottmcleod
You just don't understand how to use the platforms. I'm generating millions of
dollars in revenue for startups from both these channels each month.

These posts pop-up every now and then, what OP doesn't consider is they just
aren't a good marketer.

------
harry8
People being paid by large advertising companies like google an facebook
should declare this in their responses.

------
yosefjaved
I'm making the assumption that the 90% is your bounce rate for traffic from
Facebook and Google Advertising.

I'm also assuming that you probably have left all channels (mobile, tablet,
desktop, various display channels, etc) on, and not using
remarketing/retargeting.

If all that is true, then what you're seeing is normal. Heck it can even be
higher than that in a lot of cases. Ideally, you need to be working on
reducing that useless traffic over time.

But this easier said than done especially if you have a a small budget that
will be completely gone within a few weeks.

PPC is such a hard thing to do because you need consistent funds for at least
1-4 months to truly test what works and what doesn't. If you don't have that,
then there is no point in doing it.

My word of advice is either stop doing PPC and focus on less costly things, or
if you're going to do it, then start by using only one ad network (doesn't
matter; just pick one) and working within a single channel of that network.

Once you feel comfortable within that one channel, then start adding another
channel and another channel over time within that ad network.

------
deedub
Hey there, can you tell us a little more about how you were targeting your
users and with what kind of content? There could be some bots in there but it
also looks like folks land, do a quick check of the content on the site and
bounce because it's not what they are looking for. I do this sometimes,
especially if I accidentally click on top level ad content on accident. I know
you said you did some super targeted ads - what does that mean? It kind of
looks like the people converting on your ads are not the ones you're looking
for. I'd look at the audience first and then ad content.

It's great to budget your spend where it makes the most sense and your
communities and earned ads/content should do great for you. Just watch your
spend there and lways budget some for experimentation and try NEW things. Just
because you have written off a gold mine doesn't mean there isn't gold there.
Maybe you were mining it incorrectly. However, If you feel there is gold all
over the ground I'd pick it up before I started digging for it.

------
reconx
As someone who spends a lot of money on ads for aBigCo. globally, I can tell
you GDN ads and Twitter prospecting ads are quite terrible.

Facebook has a tremendous amount of data about users, but for a B2B campaign,
its quite terrible and worthless. Be sure you completely disable all mobile
app "networks" placementd (esp facebook - audience network ) --unless you're
doing managed placements -- I've seen tens of thousands burned with these
networks, which show ads in worthless apps, designed to generate fraudulent
clicks.

That said, retargeting across these networks (esp Facebook) can drive
responses, although I can't say we've seen anything turn into a big
opportunity later in the funnel (big/complex sales cycles)...retargeting
requires traffic, so I'm constantly trying to pull in a variety of 3rd
party/behavioural data to improve front end traffic, to get the right people
to pages.

The ad model is unsustainable, I want BigCo to switch (they have the
resources), but it's not easy for a global company.

~~~
somid3
I know what you mean, my 9-5 is also at a BigCo, similar story.

------
chrischen
Well since the ad pricing is based on bids, it doesn't matter if 90% is
useless as long as some flush-with-VC-cash competitor isn't artificially
bidding up keywords on that 90% useless traffic.

------
Xyik
It's really easy to get ads wrong. The wrong placement, objective, bid amount,
bid strategy, targeting, creative, incorrect tracking, poor landing page, etc
can all waste your money.

But just from looking at the home page of the site you were advertising I'm
not surprised your ads had poor performance. At a glance, I can't tell what
exactly i'm 'Starting today' and I doubt your ad creative would be much
better, so most people who click are probably curious and have low intent. If
you want high CTRs its easy to 'optimize for clicks' and use a catchy ad copy
or image, but then obviously you'll have low conversion. Not to mention
'optimizing for clicks' on display networks obviously runs into issues with
bots.

------
altitudinous
Readers that come from your newsletter are already converted to you. Readers
that come from an advertisement do not know who you are and are evaluating
your website to see if they want to convert to you. It is reasonable to expect
that only 10% of these people want to convert to you. The other 90% after
scrolling down your website are not interested in converting to you. Your
website did not contain the hook to make them convert. You should improve your
website.

TL;DR The adverts performed 100% in bringing visitors to your website. That is
their job. Your website is not converting them to real users 90% of the time.
Your website failed.

------
WhitneyLand
So many people are saying "you're doing it wrong" but that doesn't explain
what seems like artificial users.

~~~
lingben
exactly, Veritasium covers this in meticulous detail in his two videos on
facebook fraud:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g)

------
ChuckMcM
Yup, pretty much. Probably 99% is closer to the truth. If you want to not give
your ad budget to crooks you need to buy 100% cost-per-action where you _only_
pay if the click converts. The other end of that spectrum, impressions, is
really like throwing bills out your 10th story window into the crowds below.

"Click fraud" is rampant and Yuuuuge. Because it is both easy and it doesn't
get the international police on your back like stealing CC's or user accounts
do. So it is a fun game for smart people who make anywhere from a few dollars
to a few thousand dollars a day just for writing clever code.

~~~
somid3
I'd love to hear more. I'll email you tmrw. Interesting background.

------
ckdarby
Why are the two gifs so vastly different? The times are fairly close to each
other just 10 seconds difference but the Facebook/Google looks to be altered
to give the impression of them doing nothing.

The replay shows them both at 1x but they're not the same at all, the second
gif is like 10x the speed of the first.

That behavior looks exactly correct for mobile traffic.

Flagged the story, looks like title click bait to probably hit front page;
There seems to be manipulation on the gifs to drive their point.

~~~
Jabbles
See the bottom-right of the GIF "Skip inactivity", which explains the
difference you're seeing.

~~~
somid3
Correct, thank you.

------
codedokode
Could it be a third party click fraud? For example, if you buy ads in Adwords
on thrid-party sites, their owners' income depends on how many clicks are made
so they might be motivated to add bots to real user traffic.

And even if you buy ads on Google's own sites (like Youtube), the channel
owners could hire bots to maximize their income.

Regarding Facebook, I don't know if there is any third party, maybe this is
just people who clicked on ads accidentaly?

------
tonyedgecombe
Adwords used to work really well for me, over the years the return declined
and the system got more complex until it wasn't worth the effort anymore.

There is a good post from Andy Brice on this:
[https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/05/26/the-declining-
prof...](https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/05/26/the-declining-
profitability-of-google-adwords/)

------
galfarragem
90% seems accurate:

\- Most times I click in ads, I do it only to help the content creators, I
have no interest at all in the ad I'm clicking.

\- The remaining clicks I often do it by mistake.

~~~
andai
I used to click only on ads I didn't like, to charge the creators money, until
I realized the networks were optimizing for showing me only ads I hated.

------
siddharthgdas
People coming from scroll-through-attend-nirvana kind of platforms like fb,
twitter etc are expected to behave that way.

Shouldn't you build a rather very specific landing pages for these click-
throughs and then compare their behavior? I personally feel that redirection
to very good article on your site would rather have them more interested than
sending them to a landing page.

------
incompatible
I wonder if it's a touch-screen vs mouse/keyboard difference.

------
Steve_Moneytis
It depends on what you want the new users to do. Ads mostly bring visitors who
don't know about your company. If you are in a business where branding or
trust is important, it's more difficult. If you are in a commodity business
where prices matter, I think it's easier.

That's normal they have a different behavior. Comparing Google Ads and
Facebook Ads is hard as there is a user behavior difference between them.

\- Visitors from Google Ads often have a purchase intent \- Visitors from
Facebook Ads are currently entertaining thanks to Facebook photos & videos.
(you need to create a need, a urgency to sign up / purchase)

-> my startup has experienced that. Google ads bring qualified users to Moneytis.com (comparison of money transfer options), whereas Facebook ads bring curious people to sign up on neomy.io (fun alerts about currency exchange rates)

------
Jabbles
Does the auction-style pricing already take this into account?

~~~
somid3
I don't believe it does. It seems from my data that CPM will always be more
costly than CPM. I am suggesting this is artificial.

~~~
robryan
You set your bid though. What you mean is that the going rate for CPM is
higher?

------
jivers70
In-house email will always outperform paid media, so the fact that you record
a higher degree of site interaction from people who arrive via email should be
of no surprise.

With regard to the advertising on Facebook and Google, what audience targeting
was tested and applied? What ad formats were used? How many ad concepts were
tested? What testing was done on the landing pages to improve performance?
What was the "ROI" of the advertising investment, and what was the +/\- on
these results relative to the goals ascribed to the investment at the outset?

If you have no answers to these questions, or cannot back up your response
with data from the type of testing I refer to here (which is part and parcel
to running online advertising), then your article is completely pointless.

------
swalsh
I recently ran a campaign to validate an idea. Ultimately I dropped the idea,
but out of 300 impressions, i got 10 clicks.. and 6 of those clicks left their
email address. Not bad.

I then clicked the "optimize my campaign" button. Suddenly my clicks went up,
and my impressions went up... but no one left their email. I think the trick
to advertising on Google is to target niches, and scale up "manually". I also
think there's something to targeting the long tail keywords rather than the
fat popular keywords. "Sofa" might get 50k clicks, but the people searching
for "Black modern leather sofa" will probably be a better match.

------
blackice
There are many traffic exchange sites that use automated software to click or
view ads. Most of them run on server ips or they're using a proxy.
[http://getIPIntel.net](http://getIPIntel.net) is a free and useful service to
combat bad / low quality traffic. Though to save you money, your advertiser
needs to not bill you for automated traffic. It's unlikely that'll happen
because the more views and clicks, the more money they'll get. You can still
use GetIPIntel's api to help you pick which advertising company gives you
legitimate traffic.

------
eli
Isn't this just Sturgeon's law in action?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law)

------
robot
Google worked better for me since people search with intent whereas on
facebook you rely on serendipity. They are there for something else and you
hope they will have interest in your service.

All in all are you sure you use the right keywords in google so you get the
people with right intent?

Facebook's strength is audience targeting. Are you sure the audience you
target is the right one on Facebook?

------
chimpnuggets
Start by making a landing page dedicated to your google campaign traffic. Pay
attention to the results and try to make changes to improve conversion rate.

Some of those will be changes to the LP, some of it will be narrowing the
targeting of your ads to exclude unprofitable segments.

Is easy really, to get something from ads. You just need to stop half-assing
it.

------
somid3
One of the visitors to this thread shared this link with me via email:
[https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=ad+fraud)
\- might help others researching the topic.

------
jitbit
"Facebook fraud" is a video anyone who considers paid ads MUST watch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

------
gumby
Is it common that people move the mouse cursor around while reading a page?
What on earth for? Unless it's mindless fidgeting with the physical mouse,
wouldn't it slow their reading down?

~~~
marcosdumay
Most people do not take their hands away from the mouse, and will scroll with
the mouse wheel. People are unable to do those things without moving the mouse
in some way.

------
pryelluw
@OP: What's the product? I get that its a newsletter but I can't figure out
the content from the copy. Why dont you test putting sample content on the
landing page? :)

------
hamfisted
14 Year PPC guy here. I have built businesses using PPC traffic.

With Google - Turn off search partners and content network and try running the
numbers again.

------
jasonlotito
> This visitor is very different - it feels like it has ADD, or its a paid
> slave boy somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence.

I'm happy to see you associate someone with ADD with slaves or a non-
intelligent bot.

"Each week receive hand-picked insights to help you develop your career & get
promoted faster" by learning how to randomly insult people and equate them
with slavery.

"BE GREAT AT WHAT YOU DO", like insulting people you've never met.

Do your testimonials come from people who learned how to insult people?

------
novaleaf
does anyone know if the OP is talking about search ads, or display ads? I stay
away from display ads because it's chock full of fraudulent activity, but even
search ads I see about 90% lower conversions than organic search. so wondering
if this is the same problem....

------
autokad
i dont know if anyone's behavior matches mine, but when i click a fb add, i
usually just vertically scroll to the bottom (quickly) looking for anything
compelling me to stop.

------
rcar1046
...Google and Facebook ad traffic useless to 90%

------
balls187
So a 10% conversion rate? Seems normal.

~~~
somid3
10% of the entering traffic, acts normal. The other 90% is garbage. So if your
initial organic conversion rate is X%, this article suggests your Google Ad,
or Facebook ad conversion rate will be 10% * X%. That said, its not an
extensive study or anything scientific.

~~~
scottmcleod
This is on you. Build a better audience.

------
accountface
"but yeah, that 10% though"

------
known
So Adblock is 90% effective

~~~
somid3
No, of the entering traffic, after they click on the ad, its as if 90% of them
are not your typical organic visitor.

------
elastic_church
I wonder how snapchat ads are converting

Its pretty covert because so many people are dismissing it as something their
daughters use to do frivolous things

But I bet they didn't even know about the election ads, or the short form
stuff thats decent at getting the point across quickly, or the location filter
ads

------
goldfishcaura
@somid3 I would like to invite you to our analytics community:
[http://www.innerjoins.org](http://www.innerjoins.org)

and to @vivekd's request for data on this topic:
[https://my.caura.co/investigating-fraudulent-clicks-in-
googl...](https://my.caura.co/investigating-fraudulent-clicks-in-google-
adwords-f3c42da0ad62)

\- plenty of data here. Happy to provide a SQL interface for it if you can
prove that you've got the chops

~~~
somid3
love the analysis

------
kapauldo
I have found that all display ad clicks and all mobile ad clicks are worthless
for our business with adwords. You have to blow a thousand bucks to learn that
lesson. Once you eliminate that traffic, its not bad. Makes me wonder if
google is one ftc lawsuit away from halving in value (tinfoil hat).

