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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

"I don't think you appreciate how numerical modern marketing is"

Maybe for the Fortune 500 / tech startup crowd, but I work for small / medium businesses and there is still a ton of ad dollars being spent with no attribution / tracking.

I will routinely setup clients with tracking tools, which then discourages them as they finally see what their digital ads actually generate in terms of revenue. Many stop their digital campaigns and increase their traditional tv/radio/print budgets or, fall back to running digital campaigns with no tracking.

AKA "Brand Awareness".

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What is your perspective on the ROI of FB/google/targeted ads vs the traditional mediums? Is the targeting worth the premium?

Targeting is def worth the premium for the right categories

Not for things like cars and toothpaste but for things like online services/games, fashion, homeware, etc

When I last worked in a consumer tech startup, our best ROI by far was paying tech youtubers or doing targeted ads to tech categories on youtube. Being in a startup I was vaguely aware of marketing efforts but I was never involved directly, so I can't say why or how that was discovered. All I know is my coworkers dealing with marketing said the roi and conversion rates specifically for youtube far outstripped traditional targeted tech ads through google or facebook. Of course this may have been because we weren't great at advertising, so your mileage may vary.

Did you guys try paid YouTube ads? Or simply behind the scenes sponsored content marketing?

I suspect it was probably because of trust. An openly gifted reviewer gives more trustworthiness than just video ads or underhanded shills.

Given that you were probably smaller and not commodity priced to move I guess that sort of "honesty" helped move it better if people could closer to try before they buy.

The power and effectiveness of digital targeting is often overblown for small businesses.

Many of my small business owner clients hear anecdotes where a business was able to use targeting to create a veritable "money machine". The problem is these scnerios are fleetingly rare, complete bullshit or only apply to a specific niche.

The anecdote often glazes over the thousands of wasted dollars spent trying to perfect the model and a hundred other details that factored into the success.

The good thing for most is that digital advertising is no less effective than traditional advertising. Even if there's little to no targeting, or no tracking in place it's not any worse than tv/radio/print.

I can count on one hand the number of clients in my 20 years of web work that have created a model where they dump money in the top, and are able to extract more out the bottom. In all cases it didn't last more than a couple years at most.

For any small business considering hiring an ad agency that claims to have mastered this model ask yourself this: Why aren't they doing it themselves?

Small companies probably see the biggest bang for the buck on SEO and maybe blog posts. I feel like most small companies have niche offerings, since most things that can be big, are big by now. When people/business have issues with their sewage system, they go searching online for someone to help. So the difference in ranking between Walters Waste Water Warriors and Steve's Sewage System Saviors comes down who has the nicest, most informative site.

I do a lot of Facebook and most of my clients target CAC earnback in 7-9 months. I once was able to do arbitrage for my product and made a non-infinitely scalable positive ROI within one week with targeted Facebook ads but it was 2012. Not nowadays, the CPGs finally jumped in and the CPMs/CPCs are too competitive.

I think now the move is to go after territories that the major brands/agencies are afraid of. Tik Tok? I don't know, but I would trust doing DIY and examining the real numbers, I used to sell agency services, I'd say anything to win business. And 30% of the time we actually overdelivered on my absurd promises.

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