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- Hacker News
- If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would be salivating waiting for a call from Sam Altman.
- facebook ad targeting is also garbage. They have my entire history since 2004 and they still sometimes: think I'm a woman, think I need things for a newborn, think I'm in the market for "short men clothing" (I'm 6'0"), and so on. Sometimes I get ads for farm equipment (I am a lifelong city dweller).by efficax
- > ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic
Did they try bidding more? It's possible they are just only getting the dregs. (In which case the ads would be expensive instead of garbage)
by advisedwang - >Did they try bidding more?
OP here. No. The cheapest version of my PerfectTablePlan software is £19.95 + VAT, one time fee. So I would be insane to bid £2 per click.
>It's possible they are just only getting the dregs.
Bidding higher generally means more clicks, but the quality could be worse due to winning bids when your content is less relevant.
by hermitcrab - I have run many ad campaigns across various platforms, and I have come away with 2 main thoughts:
1. Click fraud is rampant, and the ad platforms seem to not care in the least as long as they can drain your budget.
2. The ad bidding process is completely opaque, and no auditing seems to be done, my inclination is that there is large scale fraud here too.
by symfrog - > ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic. However 0.46% is a shockingly low conversion rate.
I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.
by billyp-rva - Well I think your experiment more shows that while Open AI is trying to position this as a viable marketing platform, in reality folks with marketing dollars do spend aren’t buying what they’re selling so you’re able to win at pricing far below where they really want/need the market to be.by cmiles8
- >isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that?
No. Bidding low means less or no clicks, but should not affect traffic quality.
by hermitcrab - We can't use ChatGPT Ads because ChatGPT banned our company for ads for political content even though we are a CRM/Compliance tool for campaigns and the only ad we had was the autogenerated ChatGPT one they made. No chance at an appeal either. We had this issue with Bing Ads but microsoft fixed it and even personally called to apologize about the mixup.by jabart
- It's interesting the ChatGPT referrals conversions match Googles. Shows once they tune a few knobs, they could have a cashcow on their hands.
- Yes, ChatGPT ads are a heaping pile of garbage. I feel sorry for anyone that’s wasted perfectly good marketing spend on such nonsense.
Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money.
If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that.
But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste of money. Yes, I once searched a question about golf balls… no I don’t want to see “targeted ads” about golf balls following me all over the internet for the next three weeks.
by cmiles8 - presumably if this was true advertising spend would dry up in these useless cases. The fact that it hasnt and people intensely dislike spending money without getting anything for it, I suspect it must work on someone.by idiotsecant
- Amazon is garbage too. It keeps showing the same product that I already bought.by Maken
- I have no idea why anyone would click on any ad anywhere other than by accident, not knowing if the link might take them to some malware site these days.by nikole9696
- Sometimes (I especially notice this on the App Store, but sometimes Google), companies bid on their own name. So you'll search something like "Discord" and the first result will be an ad for Discord, and then below is the organic results which has them first anyways.by demibabs
- I clicked on a couple ads once because I was desperate - I needed a cheap flight with a tight deadline and my usual search engines didn't help. I thought "if these ads deliver what they promise, I'll never book anywhere else".
Believe it or not, they did not deliver.
- I would never click on the weird ads that the supposedly "brightest minds of our generation" have delivered to me via some nonsensical middleman auction system.
But I go to some blogs (philosophy, jazz, and men's clothing) that have ads that are literally just image links. The ads are actually relevant to the content, and because I go to the blog of my own volition, that means that more often than not the ads are at least somewhat relevant and usually worth a look, like the curated ones you see in a magazine. Most other ads online are so irrelevant it's almost comical, and I have no idea why people pay to use those services. All these tech giants who make enormous sums of money from advertising are emperors with no clothes - a hard look at the quality of their product reveals it's unanimously considered garbage by the public. Their promise of delivering hyper targeted advertisement was obviously a lie predicated on market capture and becoming the only middlemen in town.
- This will end in another 'adpocalypse' episode. Something like: ChatGPT generates recipes from the Anarchist Cookbook and adds Home Depot ads at the end, or inserts Amazon affiliate links for the Turner Diaries.by ok123456
- Speaking as a consumer, I’ve always found ad targeting to be way off for Google, YouTube or even facebook. The few times I got ads I ChatGPT it was also off. It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better. It makes you wonder what all those engineers are working on if not the main revenue driver.by jandhdhshhh
- >It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better.
I couldn't possibly be more par for course for OpenAI
- It may be that you just aren't a big spender.
My experience with performance adtech was that 95% of the energy went into targeting whales, with a focus on products that drive massive revenue (mobile gaming, gambling, crypto). It's truly insane what these whales are spending.
Sure, there's still a lot of money in the 5%, especially for a surface like ChatGPT where people are making retail decisions. But I'm not particularly shocked if they're a little behind.
- I understand why it's hard, but it's very funny to get ads for a product I've bought for weeks/months after completing the purchase.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
by MengerSponge - Everything with ads is garbage. All the time. It poses no benefit to humanity even a little bit.by ryanmcbride
- Except for socialising the entire internet age, giving poor people in 3rd world slums the same access to the same platforms as the richest 0.001%.
No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.
Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.
by WarmWash - The clear mark of someone who's never owned a business and had to find customers to sell their product.by imperio59
- Yes.
But then, is any and all public communication about a product or a service originating from a stakeholder of said product or feature basically an ad?
by sssilver - Maybe we should look at paid media as a honeypot.
Without paid media, marketing spend gets pushed to “organic” and “content marketing” aka blog spam and other crap.
by cj - I'd really like for some country to ban all ads, even if just for a while, so people could observe the quasi-experiment.
My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!
- Local advertisements can be nice. The advertisement section in the local newspaper was a thing people used to actually seek out, once upon a time. The real problem is the scaling of advertisement frameworks globally and algorithmically serving individuals or certain groups. It is strictly parasitic at that level.by Zambyte
- HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actually a good signal that you might buy another one, even if you don't want to believe it).
Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with.
Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.
by Anon1096