Tl;DR: If you're a coder, running a marketing experiment is harder and more expensive than coding.
Wish I'd just used Facebook Ads instead...
Wish I'd just used Facebook Ads instead...
Google seems to be insistent on making it as hard as possible for people to utilize their products.
The easiest shortcut to expand one's mind is to see how everyone could commit fraud. So for advertisement, the click could be fraudulent, the website owner could be fraudulent, the ad buyer could be malicious, and the ad network could be misrepresenting reality to any/all comers. It gets even better when you consider the intermediaries between most merchant and placing ads, as they tend to talk to different ad people to help make the ads, place the ads, and have an ad strategy: None of those extra steps are clean of fraud or incompetence.
Now design a working system that is remotely resistant to the different sources of fraud that every party could be committing, all with minimal human-to-human contact, as many of the steps involve interactions where at least one side is completely uninterested in talking to a human on the other side, as that would cut profits.
The end result is probably not going to be all that much cleaner than the current situation, which is optimized for nobody. It's just a little less unoptimized for Google and Facebook, because they are a bigger player than anyone else mentioned.Still they also have to start from the perspective that every interaction they might have with a smaller player could involve fraud.
I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business.
I have similar views. Large companies with marketing/advertising budgets have to spend that money. If you're in that department, you have to be able to show people how effective you are. Digital ads make that super easy with all of the nice little graphs and charts. The only problem is, their is no way of actually knowing their accuracy. They just look impressive. The fact that we have brand awareness campaigns vs promoting specific products just shows that the only metric they really care about is how much money they can spend while FB/Googs gladly take it all.
I think the impression counts are calculated using a finger to the air...
Like, there are so many portals. Ad stuff in facebook itself, the adsmanager web page, the facebook business page. And they all look different based on if you're acting on behalf of yourself or your "page". And some things you can only do on one of those three sites, and only if acting as the correct user. And you have to constantly switch between them to get anything done. Add a spending account on your private profile (for some reason..), then verify as your page, then submit ID as yourself, then create the ad as your page, then have it not be verified but only show in one of the three sites the button on how to fix it etc etc.
Just insane. If I weren't technical and stubborn I would never have figured it out. No idea how small businesses can give them money and not outright be scammed.