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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