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Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

nytimes.com

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Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#51

Post by geocar »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #36
stvswn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where to start? What makes you think that they reduced their spend by 99%? They simply limited their campaigns' targeting to a whitelist of 400 sites, there's not any indication that they were spending equal $ per placement. I'm not sure why you believe that aggregating statistics is some sort of lie -- in AdWords, advertisers are able to easily see the placement for each one of their clicks. It's not some big secret…

From the article: > Of the 400,000 web addresses JPMorgan’s ads showed up on in a recent 30-day period, said Ms. Lemkau, only 12,000, or 3 percent, led to activity beyond an impression. An intern then manually clicked on each of those addresses to ensure that the websites were ones the company wanted to advertise on. About 7,000 of them were not, winnowing the group to 5,000. They're pretty plainly saying that 388,00…

> They're pretty plainly saying that 388,000 sites were trash.

> How else to interpret no "activity beyond an impression?"

I'd argue the reverse.

Sites that generate a consistently high click rate are optimizing for people to leave. Sometimes the click target is obscured, so you'll end up with a high bounce rate. At the end of the day: If you don't prove the relationship between clicks and acquisitions you're going to just fund ad fraud.

Meanwhile, if the ad is in-view, and your marketing team isn't an idiot and managed to get 30 or so impressions on someone in a month (and enough someones in your market) then you'll be able to detect (by surveying) an increased brand awareness and preference.

This could be valuable because I suspect a lot of people who are considering another credit card will call in on the deal they remember, after talking about it with their spouse, than will click on an ad.

Of course, Chase doesn't ask people why they are signing up, so the only attribution data they have is clicks and post-click signups.

> I could print their ads on toilet paper and have the same result.

Yes you could, but that says more about the tools they're using to measure the result than the usefulness of toilet paper.

In this case, someone looked at their sources breakdown in mediaocean, it said the pay-per-click stuff was a winner. Well no kidding.

And when I say probably, I should say: I've worked with the ZO guys on the Chase account in my past life. This is probably what happened.

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#52

Post by [deleted] »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #23

It's crazy how many apologists there are for Big Web Advertising! So many commenters are giving the customer a hard time for realizing, "99% of my budget is spent on zero value, i.e. fraud." The biggest lie the online advertising industry has sold is aggregate statistics. Of course a handful of traffic sources convert massively while the supermajority (99%) don't convert at all. Advertising intermediaries rely on the…

[deleted]

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#53

Post by geocar »

thomed wrote: post #32

An important difference between buying ads on 400k sites and 5k sites is the margin for the middlemen. The money is going to get spent anyway, so the middleman needs to optimise his take. The bigger the sites; the more leverage they have over middlemen. The lower the fees exchanges/ssps can collect - for big sites (ones people have actually heard of) the fee is effectively zero, and are needed by exchanges as loss le…

Ad exchanges do not usually charge the sites.

Ad exchanges usually charge a fixed rate on revenue (like 15% or 20%).

If the spend is the same, then the ad exchanges don't make any more money.

There are other middle men, like the audit companies and the impression counters, but they end up making less money because they usually charge by the volume of impressions: Since the same budget will be spent over a smaller number of sites, the prices for those sites will raise and the number of impressions will go down.

The only people who win are the publishers of those sites who now have more money for the same users.

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#55

Post by retube »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #23

It's crazy how many apologists there are for Big Web Advertising! So many commenters are giving the customer a hard time for realizing, "99% of my budget is spent on zero value, i.e. fraud." The biggest lie the online advertising industry has sold is aggregate statistics. Of course a handful of traffic sources convert massively while the supermajority (99%) don't convert at all. Advertising intermediaries rely on the…

> I mean, what 400,000 sites do you think Chase was advertising on? Ones that really have to do with banking?

Hang on: ad placement is not based on page content but the viewers profile (constructed from search and browsing history, facilitated by tracking)

Right?

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#57

Post by retube »

jtraffic wrote: post #7

> At some point, a human is going to take a look. I recently saw a talk by Foster Provost, a big ML guy at NYU. The main points of his talk were that using fine-grained behavioral data (like browsing history) is better than demographics (at least in his context: predicting ad lift), and he proposed a way to interpret the model (somewhat). I left feeling disappointed. His system for interpretation was super post-hoc a…

> An example: if you do a Google search for "Amazon " then you'll almost always get an ad from Amazon. So Amazon pays for a click that would have happened anyway

This is absolutely understood, and in fact deliberate. Amazon does not want another advertiser sitting above their top position in the organics. It weakens mind share, and risks losing a click.

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#58

Post by kuschku »

retube wrote: post #55
doctorpangloss wrote: post #23

It's crazy how many apologists there are for Big Web Advertising! So many commenters are giving the customer a hard time for realizing, "99% of my budget is spent on zero value, i.e. fraud." The biggest lie the online advertising industry has sold is aggregate statistics. Of course a handful of traffic sources convert massively while the supermajority (99%) don't convert at all. Advertising intermediaries rely on the…

> I mean, what 400,000 sites do you think Chase was advertising on? Ones that really have to do with banking? Hang on: ad placement is not based on page content but the viewers profile (constructed from search and browsing history, facilitated by tracking) Right?

It’s actually both. The site determines what categories of ads can be displayed, and the viewer profile determines which in those categories will be actually shown.

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#59

Post by icebraining »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #49
doctorpangloss wrote: post #23

It's crazy how many apologists there are for Big Web Advertising! So many commenters are giving the customer a hard time for realizing, "99% of my budget is spent on zero value, i.e. fraud." The biggest lie the online advertising industry has sold is aggregate statistics. Of course a handful of traffic sources convert massively while the supermajority (99%) don't convert at all. Advertising intermediaries rely on the…

I agree completely with your assessment. I run a website called HeyAmIFat.com where you can send in a picture of yourself and we'll tell you if you look fat or not in minutes. I often look at the huge companies advertising on my site and think "if they could see where their ads are being placed right now they'd probably realize they're wasting their money" On the other hand this huge "fraud" is what makes Google free…

I often look at the huge companies advertising on my site and think "if they could see where their ads are being placed right now they'd probably realize they're wasting their money"

But are they? If they're paying per click, completely uninterested visitors won't cost them anything anyway. As dkuebric pointed out, we have no idea if those 395k sites were actually costing them any significant amount of money.

Re: Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

#60

Post by AznHisoka »

danjc wrote: post #43
dkuebric wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to tell from the article, but I don't think there was any change in Chase's advertising spend. My interpretation is that they are spending the same amount, but restricting bidding to a whitelist of sites. If so, the fact that they don't see an impact in # of impressions means more about the ad exchange's bidding system and inelastic demand (or lack thereof) for inventory on those whitelisted sites. I don't…

Also entirely possible that the balance of the 400k websites account for a miniscule percentage of impressions.

this. everyone else is arguing about a red herring. but 10 or 20 of those sites probably accounted for over 90% of the clicks.
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