> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.
It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.
Amazon won't care because it's peanuts for them. Sellers will care and will pay amazon more in ad revenue than it will cost in potential sales.
Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.
> Advertising as inference not influence.
People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".
You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.
His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.
I miss that world.
This guy's publisher is paying Amazon $1/click to show the book to people who are already going to buy the book. It's basically the same thing.