Basically zero effort/intelligence compared to a lot of these, but the business wanted backup records from our CMS (of sorts), because they were gun shy of catastrophic losses after spending like 250 human hours on manual entry the last time. Thing was, the API provided zero means for export, either mass or individual.
Motivated to prove myself, I ended up writing a crawler with all kinds of contingencies for the crap UI, which would press the "Download" button that downloaded each record as a JSON file (couple thousand of these). Then my little node app would shoot the JSON files to an S3 bucket for safekeeping, parse them, and save each record in DynamoDB I believe it was.
Doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea to write a crawler, but no one else did, and the business was entering a state of frantic desperation re: this issue, so I felt pretty smart for a bit.
Then a few months later they abandoned the CMS and all it's corresponding data.
I didn't really read it as him having an obsession with beating her—
It struck me more that this was his reckoning with the inevitable regression of his own cognition, in the context of comparison to the developing cognition of his daughter. Like racing the clock even if you have competitors on the track.
Sure, there was some disconcert over the fact he was "getting lapped" and he knew it, but I think that realistically we'd all feel that way at least a little. Even if it was our kid. Not because we're jealous of them, but rather because they are forcing us to face our own decline.
Not that I am necessarily correct. Just a thought.
> give anything to replace macOS with Linux (or even Windows)
I agree that this was a fair, measured post, but I find it bizarre that a Linux enthusiast would ever want to replace their Mac OS with Windows when the biggest complaint is... window management? I feel like they left something out here.
The idea is because it's happening at scale. If you're getting hundreds or thousands of customers per day, the likelihood of this happening gets lower by some statistical proportion, especially if you don't have the organic exposure.
Also, definition of working: You make more than you spend, and if you stop the ads, you stop making as much.
That said, I'm not arguing for 100% accuracy either. It's certainly not. Simply that it's possible to be more accurate than not, which leads to profitability.
One more also- a comment above about how I failed to mention I'm not talking about paid search ads so much as other types like FB, YouTube, banners, etc.
You are totally correct, thank you— I addressed this to jjulius above, since they pointed out the same thing. Sometimes one must be reminded not to be flippant on the internet, it's all too easy, and I don't want to be that person.
>Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services?
You're right. We all know the value of the person who makes complaints without offering solutions.
If anyone reads this and would like some honest help in this area, send and email to the address in the 'about' on my profile, and I'll try to point you in the right direction (It only looks sketchy because it's a forwarding address, I'm sure you understand.)
No you're right, as someone who takes these things seriously, I should hold myself to a higher standard than to paint in such broad strokes. Thanks for checking me there.
Allow me to rephrase from a more compassionate perspective:
I don't expect any of these people to devote the type of effort that I have into this knowledge.
But I do wish they knew this stuff, because with even a little bit of this knowledge, they could have the power to make their own restaurant/software shop/insert_small_business more successful than it otherwise could have been... which may even be the difference between them successfully running said business vs. having to take a job they don't like.
Ultimately, it's a be the change you wish to see situation, I suppose.
My major failure in this thread was not specifying from that start that I'm not so much talking about paid search ads (google ads), as much as I mean FB, YouTube, etc. That's the arena where you've really gotta question if you're competing with yourself.
On the flip side of that, most of HN seems to think purely in terms of paid search ads, when there are many other types of online advertising that exist, and that don't have this issue baked into them.
Such is the nature of internet dialogue, I guess lol.
While you're not necessarily wrong, the distinction lies in how many people see you organically.
If I get 100 organic impressions/day, and then spend $N to get 500/day, I'm speeding the process up, and nearly guaranteeing to get in front of people who would never see me organically.
*Note: I'm largely not talking about paid search ads. Those are definitely an area where you can end up competing with yourself. Sorry to anyone who I replied to earlier, and wasn't clear enough on this with.
> You still don’t know whether the customer would have ultimately found you without the ad.
Sure, maybe 100 customers would eventually find you. But if you buy the traffic, you can make them all find you on the same day.
> But other than gross spend changes there’s no way of telling for sure that the ads do anything.
I'll use the most fundamental example:
If someone clicks your ad and buys the product during that session, you know the ad worked. If you keep increasing your ad budget every day, and you are consistently returning $2 for every $1 you spend, you know it's working. Turn off the ads, and the revenue goes away. You'd be surprised how many people make their living doing this.
You're right, this is actually a lot harder to recently, with the iOS updates that occurred a year or so ago. It's a space that evolves very quickly.
But this is a good place to point out that, yes - there is nuance to all of this - and I didn't really mean to turn it into a thesis on online advertising (lol) so much as to say:
It's still easy to be more accurate than "Turn it off and see what happens".
Even a semi-sophisticated media buyer is going in with a plan, and some method of measurement.