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Not accusing, but it's still worth considering - could it just have been that your targeting was bad?

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.




I get the feeling that you are both right. ROI is heavily industry specific.


I'm inclined to agree.


Facebook is killing it. It's harder than ever to justify spending a lot of money on Google.


This is the same Facebook that inflated view numbers?

We ran Facebook ads when I was there and they just didn't convert at all. It was pissing money away. We got better engagement from posting on Twitter for free.


Just a little anecdote. I've never purchased anything I've seen in an online ad except Facebook and Instagram.

Their targeting is so good that I almost don't mind seeing the ads.


Interesting. For me it's almost the opposite: if I see it on FB/Instagram, my first thought is it's a scam (and I'm often right).


If you click those scammy ads to see if they're a scam, Facebooks AI will see you are interested in them, and show you more scammy ads.


You don't even have to click it. Watch a Instagram ad to the end and they know you're interested and will show more of it.


Yes you're right


> Their targeting is so good that I almost don't mind seeing the ads.

Wouldn’t that make you more apprehensive of their ads? As it’d be more likely to lead to you parting ways with your money.


Parting ways with money is good. Money is the intermediary. You create value to get money. You part ways with money to realise other types of value on the other end.

If you accumulate a lot of money it means you have created lots of value but you haven't been able to use this intermediary to realise other types of value in exchange for the value that you created.


>This is the same Facebook that inflated view numbers?

You can't inflate conversions. View numbers are not that important if you're getting real sales results. Facebook is much better bang for buck in general. We run the same ads on both platforms all the time and it's not even close.


Our conversions from Facebook were also garbage. People would click through our ad and fill out a form even though the ad had nothing to do with them.


Not sure I would agree with you FB adds and audience seem to be low quality and your not targeting direct buyer intent here.

By that I mean people don't directly search for products like they do on search engines and say amazon.


This might be a silly question but how did you measure the effectiveness of the TV ads?


You can analyse traffic to provide a probabilistic view of web or app hits and conversions driven by TV. This works by identifying spikes of traffic within a 5 minute window following a TV ad.

Source: https://tvsquared.com/




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