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For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specia

For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads. Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.

baxtr 4d ago
Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.
- chadgpt3 4d ago
  They are working meaning people keep buying them. This has nothing to do with ROAS. This developer gave Google $220 of revenue.
  - bcrl 4d ago
    $220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense. Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
- malfist 4d ago
  Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?
aorloff 4d ago
Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else. ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard

baxtr 4d ago

Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.

chadgpt3 4d ago
They are working meaning people keep buying them. This has nothing to do with ROAS. This developer gave Google $220 of revenue.
- bcrl 4d ago
  $220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense. Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
malfist 4d ago
Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?

aorloff 4d ago

Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else. ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard