Marie C. Cassandra

OK, so for anyone who has worked in a digital space that includes digital marketing I think this will come as not a big surprise. In my first job in e-commerce, we relied heavily on buying SEM (Search Engine Marketing) keywords. We had a SEM guru with impressive credentials – a PhD in Math from MIT who was the puppet master of this dark art. It became obvious to me that the mastery of this included a healthy blend of art and luck mixed in with any actual math/science.

Then I worked on the other side of media, on the platform sites who were the oh-so-important displayers of the digital ads where we had to design our entire site mostly around how to maximize the advertising space, with enough actual news content to make it viable.

Now anyone who has been around this space will know that it is rife with buzzwords that get thrown around and you are 99% sure most people using the terms don’t actually know what it all means. So I found the part of the second episode where the economist professor actually asks one of these companies what variables they are using in the equation that they say they’ve based their entire propriety algorithm on and they pretend to lose the phone signal (when he is calling from a landline) especially gratifying.

In short, this is an area severely lacking actual evidence/data and no one is particularly incentivized to measure it. In fact, there is a ton of incentive NOT to start to dig into this because there is SO much business built up around it that it’s a huge house of cards that too many people are too invested to start to question it. It could be totally devastating and turn digital businesses upside down if someone was able to actually measure and found that it hugely overvalued.

But eBay DID do some tests (which basically everyone else refuses to acknowledge the results). Not surprisingly at all, they found that paying for branded keywords, e.g. ebay paying for the keyword ‘ebay’ has 0 value since people entering this search term have the intent to go to ebay, so they would click on the organic listing anyway. So bidding on this keyword for them, is a total waste of money. Google makes a ton of money off of selling branded keywords to brands, so were….unavailable to comment.