I saw an ad on instagram a couple of days ago, clicked the link, viewed the product, found the physical store location and moved on with my day. I'm now really peeved on the store's behalf because Google is showing me their ads everywhere. Even here, I'll see their ad in the popup at the bottom and in all 3 ads inserted into the page. I'd prefer to see competitors, places selling alternatives of what I've already shown an interest in. The same goes for ads in videos and in apps. The same advertiser over and over. It's boring and I can't believe anyone feels more warmly towards the advertiser. How is that good for their advertisers? Is that experience normal? And how has it changed how you advertise?
It's some of the dumbest stuff and it's everywhere. On Facebook Reels, TikTok, X: you pause for a second to watch someone playing guitar and their algo decides you want to see nothing but guitar players for the rest of your life. What the heck? Speaking of Google, back in the early 2000s I used to get tons of quality leads and sales from AdWords. These days, no matter how much effort I put in, the traffic is almost completely useless.
I also agree. Seems like its completely depend on Google mood .... Someday got good response (over than expectation) and someday nothing while clicks and investment is about same.
We do ok on google search ads but they appear to be frustrated that we don't trust their ai. Maybe it'll improve, their tools like pomelli seem reliable. Even simple things like their example images that they suggest we add into our ads are so far off what we do that it's insulting. In the meantime, my experience as a consumer has put me off being a buyer of these ad spaces.
They are hitting you with retargetting ads because you clicked on it originally. It sucks but it is what it is. By showing you more ads they're hoping to turn you into a buyer.
Yeah, this is exactly the problem with a lot of modern retargeting. The idea behind it makes sense on paper — someone visits your site, shows interest, so you remind them about the product later. But the execution has become completely broken. As a user, seeing the same company’s ad 20 times a day doesn’t make me more likely to buy. It actually does the opposite. It starts feeling like the advertiser is following me around, and after a while I associate that brand with annoyance rather than a useful product. What’s funny is that advertisers are basically paying for this negative impression. They think they are increasing touch points, but there’s a point where additional impressions have diminishing returns and can even hurt the brand. If someone already checked your product, maybe show them something useful — a different product, a review, a special offer, a comparison, some content that helps them decide. Don’t just keep showing the exact same banner forever. The other issue is frequency control. Google and other platforms have so much data that there’s no excuse for showing me the same ad on every single website I visit. If I looked at a pair of shoes yesterday, I shouldn’t still be seeing that same pair of shoes for the next three weeks. That doesn’t feel like smart advertising, it feels like the system is just trying to squeeze as many paid impressions as possible. I also think this is why a lot of people have become more skeptical of display ads in general. When advertisers complain about poor ROI, part of the reason might be that the platforms optimized for volume and automation instead of actual user experience. Good retargeting should feel helpful, almost like a reminder. Bad retargeting feels like someone is chasing you around the internet. Unfortunately, most of what I see nowadays falls into the second category.
I recently searched for and bought a product from a niche website. Now, I see constant ads for the same product from the same niche website. I bought it, already! I will likely never buy it again, but the ads keep coming. They really should learn to close the loop on sales.
Do you have any thoughts as to what has happened to AdWords over the past 20+ years? I jump from company to company every few years, so I never really see trends over a long period. It is hard to compare AdWords campaigns of apples and then oranges, and then blueberries, and then pineapples, etc., especially in the B2B start-up world. I do see the clicks getting more and more competitive (i.e., expensive) but even that is hard to compare because each company has totally different products, messaging and keywords.
You can research this further, but the death of exact keyword match is what killed campaign precision. Also, it used to be primarily search based. Now, the display network does the heavy lifting. You think you're getting quality traffic, but it’s actually junk, just people clicking because they have nothing better to do. And as you mentioned, your budget gets eaten up so fast that getting any real results is just a pipe dream. You can tweak your campaigns to basically disable everything except exact keyword match, like [classified ads website], but "exact" doesn't mean exact anymore.