<story><title>Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble</title><url>https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online-advertising-bubble</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Udik</author><text>&amp;gt; Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for &amp;quot;buy nail varnish&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend money on gadgets, for example; but I&amp;#x27;m surprised nonetheless that with all this talk of &amp;quot;big data&amp;quot;, they can&amp;#x27;t do a better job at figuring out the things I&amp;#x27;m really interested in and instead keep bombarding me with ads related to any random search I&amp;#x27;ve made. That&amp;#x27;s silly and a big waste of money.</text></item><item><author>red_admiral</author><text>&amp;quot;Facebook on the other hand, has a better control of who is actually seeing its ads, and will benefit from the turmoil by gaining market share.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Did they pay you to write this?&lt;p&gt;Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for &amp;quot;buy nail varnish&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;This is also about the millionth post I&amp;#x27;ve read which assumes that companies simply throw money at advertising and don&amp;#x27;t run any statistics of their own. Simply, if you spend a lot on an ad campaign for a product and your sales don&amp;#x27;t go up, you notice that and rethink your next campaign. CPM and all that are at best proxy metrics for the thing you really care about, &amp;quot;are our profits&amp;#x2F;sales up&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>When a random person searches for a company, it&amp;#x27;s probably &amp;gt; 100:1 odds that they&amp;#x27;re interested in the company&amp;#x27;s product, not in a job at the company.  That&amp;#x27;s why companies put their products on the landing page and not their job openings.&lt;p&gt;You have to understand that whenever you do anything as a consumer in modern corporatism, you are part of a numbers game.  The company does not care about &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt;, they care about the aggregate &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; that represents the average of millions of consumers.  If 100x as many people search for a company hoping to buy its product, then it only becomes rational to spend engineering effort if the opportunity cost of losing the one customer who is job-searching is 100x greater the lift that can be achieved by fine-tuning the product-buying case.  Retargeting would have to be pretty tapped-out for that to be the case.&lt;p&gt;I face a similar problem - as an entrepreneur, when I Google a company, it&amp;#x27;s usually because it&amp;#x27;s a potential competitor that I want to learn about.  As a result, my YouTube &amp;amp; AdSense feeds are filled up with ads for competitors.  Which is kinda handy, in a way, but probably not why those competitors are buying ads.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google: End of the Online Advertising Bubble</title><url>https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online-advertising-bubble</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Udik</author><text>&amp;gt; Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for &amp;quot;buy nail varnish&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Yes, how dumb is that? A few weeks ago I googled for a company I was going to interview with. Since then the ad spaces in my web pages have been filled with ads of this company, which sells IT services for logistics.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a sort of atypical consumer - not very willing to spend money on gadgets, for example; but I&amp;#x27;m surprised nonetheless that with all this talk of &amp;quot;big data&amp;quot;, they can&amp;#x27;t do a better job at figuring out the things I&amp;#x27;m really interested in and instead keep bombarding me with ads related to any random search I&amp;#x27;ve made. That&amp;#x27;s silly and a big waste of money.</text></item><item><author>red_admiral</author><text>&amp;quot;Facebook on the other hand, has a better control of who is actually seeing its ads, and will benefit from the turmoil by gaining market share.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Did they pay you to write this?&lt;p&gt;Google ads in search will always be valuable because you can advertise nail varnish to people who have just searched for &amp;quot;buy nail varnish&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;This is also about the millionth post I&amp;#x27;ve read which assumes that companies simply throw money at advertising and don&amp;#x27;t run any statistics of their own. Simply, if you spend a lot on an ad campaign for a product and your sales don&amp;#x27;t go up, you notice that and rethink your next campaign. CPM and all that are at best proxy metrics for the thing you really care about, &amp;quot;are our profits&amp;#x2F;sales up&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssharp</author><text>A few comments on this:&lt;p&gt;1) The company might be better off capping their impressions to you.&lt;p&gt;2) The company might be better off focusing on setting their remarketing pixels further down the funnel (unless you entered their funnel as part of the process).&lt;p&gt;3) How do you reasonably expect the company to treat you differently than they do actual leads? I&amp;#x27;ll assume the majority of traffic that goes to their website is interested in their services and not researching for a job interview, so unless there is some way they could reasonably figure out you&amp;#x27;re not interested and exclude you, I don&amp;#x27;t think what&amp;#x27;s happening here is that wrong. Marketing to people who already visited your site is almost certainly going to be worth more money to advertisers who are prospecting based solely on your interests.</text></comment>