Google & Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless.

You Exec is a side-project that is very different from my 9-5 job, I use it as an excuse to try different services and do different consumer experiments. Recently, I have been using Fullstory and Crazyegg to view how visitors behave on the landing page - and boy does it make a *huge* difference when those visitors comes from Google or Facebook ads.

Good samaritan offer:

If anyone would like to do the same analysis, I'd be glad to help. Just write "analysis" in the comments below and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Normal organic visitors

On You Exec regular visitors from reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to mentally digest the content. Though the clip is 4X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense.

Google & Facebook ads traffic

The Google and Facebook ads visitor is very different on You Exec - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave. Many of them appear confused as if they clicked the wrong link. This is after advertising on very relevant keywords and audiences. See below:

Feedback & Actions

As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns on You Exec and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.

The videos above have been speed-up 4X so you can get the picture quickly. After watching 100s of sessions, I have to admit, about one out of 10 visitors from Google & Facebook ads seem legit.

Traffic blending

Due to the nature of You Exec's service - we have a very specific click-through and conversion rates. For example, when I use a channel to advertise You Exec, I get about X% CTR from all open emails, and Y% conversion. When I use either Google or Facebook ads I get much lower numbers - about 80% to 90% lower - almost an entire order of magnitude worst - even if I request CPM or CPC for a super targeted audience or keyword set. I'm not a conspiracist, but overall I feel mass-scale online advertising engines present ads to "active" and "non-active" users in such a way that the combined outcome of clicks matches the industry standard.

I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook ads relative to other organic means?

Using Crazyegg to test visitors on the aggregate

Crazyegg has a really cool feature called "Confetti" where you can see how the clicks of visitors from a particular referrer compare to the clicks of another source. When I compared the clicks of visitors from organic sources relative to Google & Facebook ads the same fundamental difference exists.

Statistical significance & other notes

The traffic on You Exec is minimal. This study was very informal and I did not ensure that my results are statistically significant. Overall I reviewed about 1,000 session videos on Fullstory - about 500 were organic and 500 came from Google and Facebook ads. For both sets of 500, about 250 were desktop sessions, and 250 mobile sessions. I also accounted for the fact that mobile users click about 1/4 of desktop users. If anyone recreates the same test let us know if your results in the comments.

All of the ads we tested on Google and Facebook were at the $0.50 to $1.50 click rate. It could very well be that this traffic is useless and the $2.00+ traffic is more useful. I did not test that range. Also when I turned off "Google Partners" and "external sites" from our campaigns, the ratio of idiot-clicks went down dramatically. I believe that most of the useless traffic (i.e.: bots or confused users) come from sites external to Google. Google has very strong bot protection - try using a VPN or a proxy service and access Google search and you will be welcomed with many complicated CAPTCHAs to test your human intelligence.

Disclaimers

1. I have no affiliation with Fullstory, Crazyegg, Google, or Facebook.
2. I help my friend manage You Exec.
3. I wrote this article after doing so traffic analysis for a side project, and was later featured on Ycombinator's Hacker News, Reddit, Highscalability - which lead to about 20,000 reads and about 1,000 comments - so I was inspired to share it on Linkedin as well. The original article with animations can be found here.