alt Hacker NewsGoogle ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
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We have a customer who's seeing ~30k in monthly revenue driven by their meta ads. So they can work. But they have a consult running the ads, and I assume they're doing filtering or something.
Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.
Spent a lot of money on meta ads and it worked well for a long time.
What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it.
It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.
It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them.
It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion.
I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta.
It is not to protect the children.
If one runs a small business, one has to pay Google/Meta; otherwise, their businesses will be bottom of the search. It is a tax now.
Eh, I think you're correct in most cases but they work relatively well for our property leasing office. There's a convergence of factors at work there though; small number of high priced products being offered to a relatively small number of people in a certain geo location.
Not limited to ads.
this is the only correct response.
idk, i’ve spent six figures on meta ads in the last few months and gotten tons of real users for my app. how is that a con?
This was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them).
Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.
If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs.
But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.