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FeedSource: [HackerNews]

Time: 2017-01-16 12:56:52 UTC

Original URL: https://youexec.com/dev/2017/1/14/google-facebook-ads-traffic-is-useless [youexec.com] using UTF-8 encoding.

Title: Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

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Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [youexec.com]:

Regular visitors from an email that I send out, or from a mailing list, reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to digest. Though the clip is 3X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense.

This visitor is very different - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Mobile users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave.

As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.

The videos above have been speed-up 3X so you can get the picture quickly. After watching 100s of sessions, I have to admit, about one out of 10 visitors from Google & Facebook seem legit.

Due to the nature of You Exec's service - we have a very specific click-through and conversion rates. For example, when I use a professional mailing list to advertise You Exec, I get about X% CTR from all open emails, and Y% conversion. When I use either Google or Facebook I get much lower numbers - about 80% to 90% worst - almost an entire order of magnitude worst. Even when I request impressions for a super targeted audience or keyword set. I'm not a conspiracist, but overall I feel they present my ads to "active" and "non-active" users in such a way that the combined outcome of clicks is still the industry standard. Meaning they track and separate their most active users and make it such that using CPC is always slightly better than cost per impression - even if you're giving away free diamonds away CPC will always be better than paying for impressions.

I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook relative to other organic means?

Weekly insights to get promoted faster.

                Tagged: dev [soylentnews.org], marketing [soylentnews.org]
           

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