My understanding of Brand Advertising in an adwords style bidding environment is that its’ important to do when products are in high-competition/knife edge markets.
Note that this is not because your ad is going to make people more likely to know about your brand, its’ because if you don’t bid on your brand, your competitors will, so a search for you will actually cause brand awareness for THEM if you don’t outbid their spot. This amounts to a shakedown by google that they can do because they have an essential monopoly on search.
For eBay, this isn’t as important because network effects basically mean they don’t have any competitors who can actually compete with what they’re offering, which is a large market of buyers and sellers for auctions.
It’s possible that earlier in eBay’s history, these ads actually were effective in preventing a switch to competition but became less effective over time as they monopolized the online auction space.
All this to say:
1. Blindly following tactics like “optimize conversions” without understanding context will lead to goodharting.
2. This particular scenario doesn’t mean that online advertising is ineffective, just that you have to know what you’re doing.
My understanding of Brand Advertising in an adwords style bidding environment is that its’ important to do when products are in high-competition/knife edge markets.
Note that this is not because your ad is going to make people more likely to know about your brand, its’ because if you don’t bid on your brand, your competitors will, so a search for you will actually cause brand awareness for THEM if you don’t outbid their spot. This amounts to a shakedown by google that they can do because they have an essential monopoly on search.
For eBay, this isn’t as important because network effects basically mean they don’t have any competitors who can actually compete with what they’re offering, which is a large market of buyers and sellers for auctions.
It’s possible that earlier in eBay’s history, these ads actually were effective in preventing a switch to competition but became less effective over time as they monopolized the online auction space.
All this to say:
1. Blindly following tactics like “optimize conversions” without understanding context will lead to goodharting.
2. This particular scenario doesn’t mean that online advertising is ineffective, just that you have to know what you’re doing.