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Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

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Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#41
post #18

Pretty sure Twitter has an ad metrics problem too. As I wrote last year: > When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign. > The support team at T…

I do exactly that behavior all the time. It's difficult to tell whether an image will expand when I click it on Twitter app for iPhone. When it opens a browser window that I wasn't expecting, I close immediately.

> It's difficult to tell whether an image will expand when I click it on Twitter app for iPhone.

Tap and hold on a link. A sheet will pop up asking how to treat the link. The link address will be listed at the top.

Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#42
post #18

Pretty sure Twitter has an ad metrics problem too. As I wrote last year: > When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign. > The support team at T…

A billion dollar business relying such a shallow dark-ui technique for it's main source of revenue. The state of marketing departments in companies must be a joke if this is how Facebook and Twitter are milking them. I imagine billions of dollars are being wasted in companies with no return value in the name of "marketing". And if anyone ever thinks Facebook and Twitter are actual competition to Google in ad market t…

I am a direct response marketer, and only manage ad campaigns that provably generate revenue. Over $10,000,000 spend across more than a dozen companies. I can tell you that for many products Facebook absolutely outperforms Google.

Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Target has teams with context and experience in how to properly use, measure and attribute those numbers. 99% of start-ups, even very well funded ones, don't.

What do youbmean by that? When I buy something at Target stores, they have absolutely no way to attribute whether I saw something on TV, a billboard, the aisle, their junk mail in my mailbox, or online.

They do multivariate tests using geography, among other things.

Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#46
post #14

Is this company legit imploding?

At this point they might be "too big to fail".

Facebook is very replaceable, from a technical standpoint.

(From a social/demographic outlook, its replacement is inevitable.)

Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#47
post #15

On a side note, if you use instagram, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but literally every 3-4 pictures is an ad now. It's so annoying, they're completely ruining the experience and it affects my retention rate and my will to come back.

Just as a point of reference, as a very infrequent Instagram user (Maybe once a week, often much less) I have yet to see a single ad. So it seems like they scale the amount of ads they show depending on how heavily you use the service.

Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built entirely on fraudulent ad sales.

Shhh, don't say that out loud. I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.

Thankfully nobody important cares about my opinion.

Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit

#49
In 2008 I worked for an ad network and we dealt with a massive amount of fraudulent traffic. We did our best to shield our advertisers from the obviously bogus traffic, as it absolutely killed traffic quality and inflated CPAs.

However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website, wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get the bot traffic (which went for a CPC of about $0.001). They were buying $10-20k per day from us of fraudulent traffic. Turns out they were relying on the audience engagement platforms (alexa, hitwise, quantcast, comscore, etc) to track their audience size and those platforms incorrectly counted our bot traffic as legitimate.

As the majority of their advertisers were brand marketing (e.g. Nintendo paying for a full-site background spread for the latest Zelda) and there was no direct way to measure success, advertisers would be swayed by the third-party audience profiles and agree it was good idea to spend massive amounts of money on ad campaigns there.

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