***Please note that Integromat evolved into Make in February 2022. All content for Integromat is also valid for Make.***

In Advertising since 2013

I had been in online advertising since 2013 and I’ve recently decided to change the field and accepted a new full time job outside digital marketing. I now work as Solutions Architect for Integromat (a leading no-code platform) where I build solutions integrating services which don’t speak to each other by default.

I now want to take a step back and share a few thoughts about the state of today’s online advertising. Spoiler alert: I don’t think the future is bright (but you got that from the headline). While I don’t doubt Google and Facebook will continue to grow their revenues in the long run, the jobs in digital marketing won’t be as sexy as they used to be. Read a few reasons why.

Feel free to disagree in the comment section below the article!

Stricter Advertising Policies

I can’t help it but there seems to be a policy nearly for every product vertical by now. Do you sell real estate? Do you sell software? Do you legal CBD products? Do you provide legal services? There is just a policy for everything a new policies are being introduced every month. It’s hard to even keep up. Despite all the policies, obvious non-senses are let to run their ads (for example fake comparison sites in Google where rankings are based on commissions).

Recently, I’ve noticed Google will require “advertiser identity verification”. Because there are a few bad guys in the system, the whole world will need to go through more red tape.

Or another recent one: “3 strike rule” in Google Ads – if you commit 3 “crimes”, your account might killed for good. This is going to be fun – especially if dumb robots are going to decide whether you are violating or not.

No New “Big Hit” Formats

I don’t even remember when I last saw a new big thing which could bring more customers to your business (say something like Google Shopping which is now years old). Yes, there are always new ad formats being introduced but frankly – who cares that you can add extra 5 seconds to your YouTube ad? All the new ad formats are only small increments not resulting in large gains.

Everybody Doing the Same Thing

How many times have you landed on a page and saw their ad in your Facebook feed 10 minutes later? It has happened to me at least 100 times. When this happens, I immediately hide all ads from the advertiser on Facebook. Partially because I just don’t want to see any ads and partially because they are not creative enough.

The ad strategies are just so predictable it hurts.

If Your Products Suck, Advertising Won’t Help You

I’ve been in this situation a few times – trying to advertise for mediocre products which are just not compelling enough. People just don’t care and no matter how your campaign is set up, it will not generate enough conversions for a reasonable price.

Privacy Concerns

It’s been becoming very difficult to comply with new privacy regulations (GDPR,  CCPA, cookies, advertising opt-outs) and run your campaigns efficiently with enough data. Of course, you don’t really have to comply if you are just a small advertiser, there is a low likelihood you’ll ever get caught but if you are a big international company which kind of has to comply no matter what, you probably had to sacrifice a big chunk of your tracking efforts because you’ve lost lots of your cookies.

People more aware

Not only there are new regulations, general public is also becoming increasingly aware of online privacy and they simply don’t want to be tracked at all. The problem here is that people have no clue how online tracking works and they think advertisers can even know what they had for breakfast so they just hate all online tracking en bloc even though it’s not all that harmful. It’s very difficult to connect all the data to a real person/address/email and advertisers really don’t have time to bother with person level data anyway.

Increasingly Difficult Tracking

As touched above, tracking is becoming very difficult. If your cookie consents are done right (so transparent and not shady), you are probably losing 60-80% cookies because what sage person would give consent to be tracked and advertised later? This means that if nothing else, you cannot retarget 60-80% visitors of your site, not to say that may not be able to track various events in GA so you are running blind.

Use of Ad Blockers

Let’s face it – people just hate ads and there are quite simple ways to get rid of ads. You just install an adblocker and that’s it. Yes, it may not kill ALL ads, but most of the ads just won’t be shown to you. Research shows that up to 40% of users use adblockers. You know what? I am one of these people too. I have been using an ad blocker since 2021.

Now imagine you are trying to reach “smarter population” on desktop with an display ad – well most of this population is probably using an ad blocker. It’s kind of a problem for your campaign, isn’t it?

Less Control

It’s been a slow process, but the truth is that Google is slowly removing features/transparency form Google Ads. Very lose match types, half of search queries hidden, no average position, super lose budgets, absolutely terrible UAC campaign configuration options on mobile. advertisers being pushed into automated bidding and I could go on and on… I actually did in this article: Sneaky Google Ads Tricks to Put Money from Your Pocket into Google’s Pocket 

Dumb Robots, Buggy Systems, and Clueless Support

Never Ending Disapprovals

In my accounts, I’m repeatedly getting disapprovals for incorrect reasons. I get the system may make a mistake once. What totally pis*** me off is that the system disapproves ads for the same incorrect reason over and over and over. This has been happening to me in Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Facebook.

The last experience with Facebook was that I set up a new account and attempted to run the first ad. First of all, my absolutely fine credit card was immediately rejected and my account got suspended due to “circumventing systems” reason. Once resolved with FB support (after 3 chats and 1 call), I was finally OK to launch the campaign but what rotten bit of luck – my account got suspended again a few hours later! So my lovely conversation with FB support had to be resumed. But it does not end here. Every time I made a change to my ad, the account got suspended again. So to sum – campaign setup took like an hour, talking to support 10 hours (no kidding), and the total spend was like $50. What a deal. Now go and explain to your client that you are billing 11 hours of work for a $50 spend.

Issues with Credit Cards

As mentioned above, I’ve been also struggling to enter new credit cards into Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Facebook too, of course. I’ve been noticing this trend for about 2 years now. Yea, I get eventually get it sorted with support but it’s painful and it takes precious time. Of course, I’ve never been provided with any specific information on how to resolve the problem so it does not happen to me next time.

Clueless Support

I hardly find support helpful. Support barely provides any specific information, they don’t really know why your account got suspended/ads disapproved, they don’t advise what specifically to fix. I’ve seen numerous instances of suspended Google Ads accounts which used to run for years and Google support could not even tell what the suspension reason was.

If you are not talking to them about disapprovals/suspensions for once and you need some advanced information about a your campaign setup – they usually don’t know and send you a link which you’ve probably seen before.

Never Enough Conversions

I’ve never met a client who’d accept that the current volume of conversion for the given CPA is the max you can actually get. The truth is there is just not enough demand to endlessly grow the volume with same CPA for most of products. Every extra conversion tends to be more expensive than the previous one.

Overflood of Experts/Consultants/Strategists/Gurus

I’m gonna shoot myself in my leg now – but there are many consultants, agencies, and whoever running around and make overpromises on delivered volumes, expected CPAs, and general expected performance. Sometimes these are based on bad data (zero understanding what’s in your GA), bad expectations, misunderstanding of competitive landscape, and so on.

Hard to Identify Causes of Changes and Act on Them

Has your traffic just dropped by 5% week over week? Have your conversions increased by 10% all of the sudden? It must be pretty easy to tell what the causes are, right? Well, not really despite having endless data about everything. The cause can be a change in a competitive landscape, change in algorithms, bugs in Google Ads/Facebook Ads, change in consumer behavior, seasonality… or even better…everything combined! It’s just very difficult to pinpoint what’s causing the change so you can take appropriate actions. And even if you know what to do, you might be limited by your CPA or budget so you end up doing nothing anyway. You just cannot bid 30% more when a new competitor appears in your auction insights because if you could, you’d be already doing it to capture as much traffic as possible.

Falsely Attributed Successes

When you are lucky and your campaigns suddenly grow and deliver extra volumes, agencies don’t to forget to take credit for all the increments. Based on my experience, the growth (and even declines) is usually a result of external factors which are not in your control. Have you all of the sudden started to sell more computer games during Covid? Well, no wonder, the demand was up and 99% of the growth is just because of that, and maybe 1% can be due to your improved campaigns.

Shitty GDN Display Traffic

This is a never ending topic – but GDN traffic just sucks. Bots, kids, MFA sites, mobile traffic…it just never ends.

Difficulties to Make a Difference

Once your campaigns are running in “business as usual mode” (=stable traffic with acceptable CPAs), it’s extremely difficult to make them grow (all else equal). There is no extra demand or the extra clicks are so expensive that it just does not make sense to buy the extra traffic. Unfortunately I’ve never come across to a “secret trick” which would take my campaigns to the next level.

Low Understanding of Data despite Everyone Being “Data Driven”

People like to claim they are data driven, yet the same people still don’t understand basic GA metrics, different attribution approaches, channel allocation in GA, tracking issues… And frequently, because they don’t understand the data, they don’t believe what you are as consultant/agency saying.

Conclusion

Okay, my rant list is quite long but what do I really take out of all this? Since working in the digital marketing field has been becoming quite complicated (lots of activities not generating any value – just dealing with issues), I am leaving active campaign management.

I will keep a few existing clients but I won’t be taking on new ones unless I am 100% confident advertising can a make a difference to their business. My main focus is now automation (yes, I can still write a Google Ads script for you), no code programming via Integromat, and data processing of all kinds. Advertising was a good ride but it’s now time to move on to something which makes sense and generates clear benefits for clients.