Is online advertising a waste of time, or are you just bad at it?
I keep seeing articles like these by founders on sites like Hacker News, Reddit and so on. This article also was pretty popular a few days ago.
Which makes me wonder, is saying "online advertising was a waste of time" a cop out? I mean, 90%+ of indie hackers fails, so you could just throw the hat and say "indie hacking is a waste of time". What's been your experience with online ads? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Online advertising is just another tool, and on its own it is not a waste of time. However, I think whether or not a small business would benefit from them depends on various factors.
Has said business created a GOOD ad? Will it hook prospects and get them to click? We are all so constantly bombarded with ads, we tend to ignore them. So for an online ad to catch someone's attention, it's got to be exceptional.
There are so many types of online ads, have they been placed correctly? In other words, have they used data to target their ads?
An article on SmallBizGenius.net has some interesting statistics on online ad, and the following quotes back my initial thoughts:
I would not dismiss online advertising; I believe that it can and DOES drive plenty of traffic towards businesses.
Digital marketing (or online advertising, as you wish) is definitely not waste of time.
It helps to get a lot of clients even today, using paid channels (Facebook Ads, Google Ads and other Ads services), organic channels (Google Search Results, user generated content on different platforms) and so on.
If you did online advertising in the past and didn’t get any proper results, there are so many reasons: from the main question “did you understand your target audience right and launched your Ads exactly for them” to the content itself, key messages, website optimization and just a channel (maybe in this or another channels there is not your audience)
My agency and I could help you to understand the problem for your product and fix it:
https://spacetime.ooo
I worked at an e-commerce company that experimented with ad spend. Over a period of a few months, they set their ad spend at various price points and looked at the ad referral traffic and revenue that was generated. This allowed them to produce a marginal marketing return curve that could estimate the marginal return on additional advertising dollars.
This allowed them to reallocate some of their marketing budget to other efforts, but not as much as these pieces lead you to believe. They could reallocate some money that was previously being inefficiently spent, but they did get a measurable positive return from advertising.
This is probably industry-specific; in e-commerce, you're pitching to people who are already motivated to buy something, and there are often many vendors that can satisfy it. So doing everything possible to be the first vendor is crucial.