Comment by ksajadi
3 hours ago
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them).
Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.
If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs.
But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.
Effectiveness can vary a bunch but the majority of the time bad results are correlated to the setup quality.
There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.
One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.
One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.
I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam.
So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
My elderly parents regularly click the sponsored links in Google search results.
I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times).
Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual end customers/humans (i.e. not bot farms or paid for actors) who click are not clicking on purpose. I've seen so many bad Android apps that have performance issues where content is still rendering and by the time you've tapped on where you go an add banner/link loaded up and registered you clicking on that. Zero purchase ever done but numerous 'ad clicks' generated