Web Excursions 2021-10-15
What if Performance Advertising is Just an Analytics Scam? - SparkToro
The lesson is simple: advertise to those already primed to buy and you’ll see a phenomenal return on advertising investment without any sales lift.
So color me completely un-surprised that Google and Facebook can tell you with absolute certainty that
72% of people who purchased on your website saw the ads you ran on their networks 3.37X before conversion.
The trouble is whether those 3.37 views actually modified the purchase behavior of that 72%.
I think these networks
(Facebook, Google, and perhaps even more egregiously, the long tail of ad platforms)
know that the degree to which ads impact behavior is small,
but the degree to which ads can get credit for conversions is large.
Herein lies the scam.
I’m not saying “no one buys because of a retargeting/display/branded search ad.”
I’m saying, “somewhere between 60-99%* of the people exposed to those ads would have purchased anyway.“
The last few years, we’ve seen hundreds of stories about cutting off millions in ad spend with no discernable business impact.
Here’s the benefits of performance advertising’s undeniably beautiful attribution:
Ads are EASY to execute.
Ads make CMOs, VPs of Marketing, agencies, consultants, and performance marketers look good
Attribution is worth something, even by itself.
The platforms have immense incentives to deliver numbers proving their delivery of your ad was key to any and every conversion (or visit) for which they can possibly take credit.
Those same platforms have equally immense incentives
to squelch any organic channel data,
hence Facebook, Google, and the rest hiding referral strings, organic keywords
that send traffic, and putting loads of what could-and-should have attribution into the dark search/social buckets.
In the boardroom, no one with a growth target has any incentive to shut off ads and save money.
your competition is doing it, too.
My advice:
if you have the power to invest any percent of your digital ad spend in other, more serendipitous, hard-to-measure channels, take it.
If you have the ability to give your marketing team buy-in for that spend, approve it.
If you have the patience and discipline to focus on profitability over unprofitable growth, grab it.
comments
simonsarris:
The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would,
and then those companies would be above the Williams Sonoma organic placements.
The spend is necessary in a defensive way because Google creates a bidding war even for the hyper relevant.