I worked in a heavily regulated industry with some of the Top 10 most expensive keywords and we spent about $150 million a year on advertising with a solid 1/4 of it going to digital (almost exclusively Google) and it was worth it. Digital spend got customer acquisition costs way way down and we spent significant effort into trying to _reduce_ our call center operations (mostly via automation).
It's important to invest in people to crunch the numbers and get your targeting right.
TV was still king though.
When people cold call me to sell me investment advice I hang up.
When I get a betterment / personal capital / fidelity advert in my feed talking about their new whatever, I'm at least mildly interested and sometimes click through.
Do people really fall for the boiler room stuff still - it's VERY hard to believe that beats google / facebook / instagram (for product sales) etc
Account-based selling has a few reps focused on a few key decision makers within an organization. It works exceptionally well for mid-market and enterprise software.
Like calling an existing business partner and offering them an additional service. At least that's what I hope he means, rather than telemarketing.
B2B telemarketing will almost always be better because the purchase decision makers are few, well known, and easier to get a hold of. Non-branded keywords for B2B products are also saturated by the competition, meaning you'd need to be on top of your game to the search ads on them to work.
I presume the profit (LTV compared to your $100k) dropped below some expected return for your fixed investments?
Was that due to competition, or some other factor?
I am guessing that it isn't actually due to Google, but due to the advertising marketplace?
And it shows it by quarter, so is this a rolling window?
Then:
> As long as Google can keep growing the blue line -- growth of paid clicks faster than the red line its ad click deflation -- then it is golden.
> Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%.
NO! The blue line, from the 68% value, was their growth in click quantity. And the direct comparison between CPC and clicks isn’t valid: GOOG could have the less clicks but increase its CPC revenue if it targets poorly. Total revenue is what we should look at.
Other than all this, this seems to be much ado about nothing. If GOOG can better target ads, they’ll get more clicks. And when an ad pays well, publishers create content that will show that ad, driving down rates but increasing clicks.
And GOOG’s ad growth is international. Where GDP is lower; as CPC rates will go lower. And international increasingly favours CPM in my opinion. A fast food chain or a brand of soap doesn’t need clickthroughs.
{rant: This- this right here- sums up my frustration with the evolution of the web. Getting ready to launch a new site, I looked around a bit at "SEO." The push was exactly backwards. It was, "given that you have some keywords you want to "optimize" for, here's the web content you need."
That's exactly backwards, and leads to people producing junk just to get clicks because certain keywords "perform well."
What we need is, "write something authentic, then find the keywords that will lead people to see it." Sure, make sure you put the keywords in the right places like headings and such, but the focus should be on writing something authentic, not noise. }
When I first started writing, I discovered what was popular versus not. Authentic content that nobody read didn’t seem like a good use of time.
Writing about how shitty my current credit card was and which I found to be better was very profitable. Reviewing a keyboard was not.
But having said that, some of the most valuable content was useful, but flew under the radar of other writers. E.g. how to navigate a particular government office’s procedures.
Google did a lot to help your case when they targeted ads based on the user and not the content. IE: showing you finance ads on non-finance websites. That really helped out publishers in otherwise not-too-profitable topics.
There may also be disproportionate growth in branded CPCs, which have a significantly lower CPC (but higher CPM due to high CTRs) than commodity terms.
But again, from a shareholder point of view, nobody cares how any proportion changes as long as profit goes up, unless it’s at the expense of future revenue or at increased cost.
I feel like in the early days of digital advertising everyone was used to broadcast where there's a phenomenal amount of waste (you have to buy commercials at times and on channels when there's no listeners to get pricing down. Also a significant amount of the ad you're buying doesn't actually run and you have to employ people/services to verify your ads ran and get rebates).
The amount of data for digital got an entire generation of marketers savvy on cost optimization from the razor thin budgets for staffing and digital campaigns with a much higher velocity (short 2 weeks campaign vs 3-6 month TV campaigns).
Now just having reach isn't enough. Google got a lot of years of band-aiding the problem with PageRank and marketers still want to do better. Now Google is facing competition for spend by the very companies they partnered with for add-on services.
Instead of "get eyeballs to my site and charge me" it's "improve the interaction with my brand and charge me"
And the important thing is the trend, not the actually quarterly numbers anyway. Which I assume would be the same even if we took a look at the conversions.
It's one-step removed and more filtered, but it's still effective advertising.
This isn't a new thing. People have believed that for the entire existence of advertising, and it has never been true.
Perhaps even a minority of shareholders (say 30%) should be allowed to enforce data publication rules.
Why should the management decide on which data is disclosed and which is not? It should rather be entirely decided by the management's supervisors, this is the shareholders or the regulators. Makes no sense to me otherwise.
"Yes, it's all your money that we manage here, but you can't look at it. You can only look at what we allow you to look at. Now go model our company and figure out what our stock should be worth without whatever it is that we don't give you."
And I doubt they have enough bandwidth to monitor the thousands of publicly traded companies, so would make much more sense to just legislate a standard way of a shareholder mechanism for explicit control of the non-GAAP metrics.
