PRODUCTEA with Leah, Growth & Senior Leadership

72: Rand Fishkin - Why paid advertising sucks in 2024

15 snips

Aug 25, 2024

Rand Fishkin, a marketing expert and advocate for organic strategies, tackles the pitfalls of paid advertising in 2024. He reveals how major ad platforms exploit marketers and why many ads reach audiences that would have converted anyway. The conversation delves into the importance of genuine audience research and challenges the reliability of paid ad metrics. Fishkin encourages marketers to rethink effectiveness, emphasizing organic engagement over clickbait tactics while sharing insights on the future of digital marketing strategies.

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INSIGHT

Digital Advertising's Accountability Issue

Digital advertising has a problem with accountability due to the vast sums of money involved.
This creates incentives for exploitation within the digital marketing ecosystem.

INSIGHT

Product Visibility Challenge

Getting people to see a product is now harder than creating the product itself.
Paid advertising helps test and gain market traction.

ANECDOTE

Shifting Burden of Invalid Traffic

Meta and Google previously refunded invalid ad traffic (spam, bots, competitor clicks).
Now, they only refund if manually contested, shifting the burden to advertisers.

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If you spend money on paid ads, chances are that you’re being taken advantage of. The biggest providers do it to you because they can and they optimize their systems more and more towards it.

Rand Fishkin and me discuss the challenges and limitations of paid advertising, the role of AI in marketing, the importance of organic initiatives and why you can’t skip good quality audience research.

Takeaways

Many marketers spend money on ads that are shown to people who would have converted anyway.
The best marketing channels are often the hardest to measure. Paid advertising can be limited and may not always provide the desired results because you don’t see how they really perform.

Sound Bites

"There's lots of people being taken advantage of in the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem today."
"There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars that flow into that ecosystem that don't necessarily have careful accounting."
"We're going to need to do these sketchy things that essentially take credit for sales that would have already happened, show people more ad results, reduce the quality of the organic results, make it harder to identify ads, force people to scroll down further, lazy load the organic stuff and quick load the paid stuff."
"Treat digital advertising the way Coca-Cola treated billboards in 1965. Test different messages and campaigns in specific markets and analyze the lift in same-store sales to determine effectiveness."

Chapters

06:30 The Issues with Digital Advertising

10:22 Taking Advantage of the Digital Marketing Ecosystem

13:14 The Challenge of Proper Accounting and Attribution

18:29 The Misleading Nature of Digital Metrics

23:03 The Difficulty of Measuring the Best Marketing Channels

23:59 The Limitations of Paid Advertising and the Need for Innovation

25:27 The Impact of AI on Marketing and the Changing Web

28:10 The Value of Organic Initiatives in Marketing

29:31 Testing and Experimentation in Marketing

34:13 The Importance of Working with Competent Experts

41:26 The Significance of Qualitative Metrics in Marketing

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