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0 pointsRetric5y ago0 comments

It was a question of ROI, and targeted ads are simply more difficult to use well.

Putting up a large sign outside convince store is going to target people in the area well enough. Giant companies like Disney can easily produce different ads to target individual slices of the population for similar results. But, how well can a small river rafting company for example leverage demographics data? Meanwhile because some companies find this data useful they suddenly need to pay a premium, which just doesn’t seem likely to pay off on average.

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manigandham5y ago· 2 in thread

Ads aren't magic. When and how you use them has a significant impact on actual ROI, just like anything else in business. Part of the value of these adtech companies is that they can do most of the heavy lifting for you, so even small businesses can target and optimize without a large team.

If you want to target river rafters then you can just target people with "river rafting, outdoors, adventurer, travel" interests, or followers of your page, or upload emails of existing customers. Then let Facebook find similar people automatically. It's that easy.

Everything else being equal, targeted ads still do better than non-targeted ads. I don't see how this is so controversial.

RetricOP5y ago

They could clearly target say “river rafters” but it’s less clear if such a group going to cost effectively bring in new customers. The risk is if you target people that are looking into river rafting your simply poaching current or future customers who would know about you either way.

That’s the thing, it’s very easy to advertise to existing customers, worse your competitors are likely to bid up any easy associations. So, the most common case ends up in failure. Perhaps you didn’t something that works you can double down on, but that’s in practice extremely rare these days. Far more common is to realize after the fact you just spent a lot of money on a negative return.

manigandham5y ago

I think you're arguing for the sake of argument here.

Targeting people who have obvious self-selected and data-driven interests in what you're selling is going to do better than generic ads with no specific audience. This is practically science at this point. However nothing is guaranteed and a specific campaign not providing results doesn't have anything to do with the concept of targeted advertising.

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