As I see it, it is like gambling. If you pay for keywords of a rival brand and you get conversions from it to make it worth your while then you can keep paying for those keywords. So yes, it is a data driven decision.
However, it is also faith based. In e-commerce the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team. Same goes for their organic SEO counterparts. Their metrics rarely include the metric that matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.
I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.
In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.
Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.
> If you pay for keywords of a rival brand… it is a data driven decision
Right, I think this is easier to quantify. The hard case is advertising on _your own_ name, defensively (to stop others from doing so). I think it is hard to make a truly data driven decision in this case, since you don’t see the clicks you lose. I think you’d have to do a careful A/B test if you want to tease this apart.
> the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team
lol, surprise! I run marketing for a small business, I am the guy buying the ads haha. I’m not offended at all, but am a bit surprised the engineer-vs-sales feud is still alive. Fwiw I also do product design! Can’t we all get along?
To be honest, I am not the greatest programmer that ever lived and I don't get the gigs with the top tier teams.
The friction comes primarily due to different goals, or rather different timespans, since there is only one goal, to make money. The marketing guys need results now because the sales guys need results now. Meanwhile, I only care about the long term plan. To me there is a lot more involved in that, for example the customer service.
You can discount everything and get the numbers up, to clear stock, get cash flow and more sales for the month. However, these are 'bottom feeders' that only shop on price. They are not brand loyal and, for the following month you need even more discounting, with it becoming a race to the bottom.
If you want repeat customers then there is more to it than price. You need customer service, efficient delivery, a speedy website and much else assuming the products are not that innovative.
As a developer you have tested the shopping cart and checkout a thousand times so you have some idea how to make it slick. However, too often there is a designer that does not know HTML that just does drawings in Photoshop that are non functional mockups, however, due to the process, these designs get signed off by the client and cast in stone. The better way would be to get it all working first then have someone that uses CSS and SVG rather than Photoshop to get it pretty.
So why the beef with the guys that by the ads? Too often I have found that they struggle with spelling, lack product knowledge and assume programmers are to be kept in a dimly lit basement to be whipped into cranking out the code.
Maybe it is just bad luck. If I upped my developer game I could get on better teams where the web development wasn't managed by a marketing guy that is clueless about the core capability that is code.
However, it is also faith based. In e-commerce the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team. Same goes for their organic SEO counterparts. Their metrics rarely include the metric that matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.
I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.
In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.
Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.