Is this company legit imploding?
No. Revenue and users are both increasing year over year.
Do shareholders also care whether the revenue is accelerating or will they be happy if it's just increasing?
Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
71–80 of 185 posts
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#72This is why, if you advertise, measure results on purchases or leads generated and nothing else. Every ad platform's engagement measures are useless to you unless you have a lot of experience and context for what they mean.
And sue ad platforms who lie to you about metrics
No need. Just choose between them based on actual performance rather than the fake stats they report. If $1000 in ad spend drives 100 conversions, then at the end of the day who cares if the ad platform reports 10k clicks or 100k?
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For sure there are people who are careful with their spending and smart with their marketing.
But there's been too many reports of bot activity, fake likes, fake followers in those platforms that I'm sure many companies and marketing departments fall for them.
Not everyone does as good job as you Im sure.
Google, as far as I know, was never caught in dark ui patterns or fake number reports to generate revenue. They don't seem to need it.
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#74I work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry (especially marketers to follow them). I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition. We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to…
I'm just wondering, at how many companies does a oligopoly become a healthy, competitive environment?
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#75I work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry (especially marketers to follow them). I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition. We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to…
>I work in ad-tech
You just lost literally all of the default credibility that arbitrary humans get.
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#76This is why, if you advertise, measure results on purchases or leads generated and nothing else. Every ad platform's engagement measures are useless to you unless you have a lot of experience and context for what they mean.
That's incredibly difficult for large brands to do. If Target's sales are up this holiday, was it the TV ads, the print ads, or the online ads? Or maybe it wasn't any of them and the economy is just up.
It's mostly a matter of disciplined tracking and a decent chunk of boring work getting all the systems integrated. You click on a Target ad, go to their website (which you are logged into and have cookies), and get some attribution flags set on your account. When you make a purchase online (easy) or in-store (less easy, likely needs a rewards account linked), you credit that ad/campaign/channel with the conversion value.
It's not a perfect measure of the lift, but it's pretty solid and underestimates things if anything, which makes it good enough for basing ad buying decisions off of. You could do fancier geographic segmenting + statistics, but why bother when the direct method works?
It's actually easier for large brands, since they can afford to put engineering effort into building bespoke tracking and analysis software. The trickiest would be smaller brands, especially those who advertise via agencies - they can't do anything that isn't commercial off-the-shelf, and as of now there isn't anything great in this space.
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The explanation is solid, but that doesn't excuse Twitter. If you charge for clicks you should do your best to make sure that the clicks are genuine, not design a user interface where 95% of clicks are caused by bad interface design.
I spoke with a someone recently who uses gmail on his Android device. An ad at the top that resembles an email appears about a second after his real emails appear, timed perfectly to interrupt his attempt to tap and read his first email. Of course he immediately goes back if he makes the mistake, but google probably still charges the advertiser for a click. (This doesn't happen on my phone but I am more likely to hav…
I lived in Spain for a summer and my roommates there were definitively non-techy and had relatively slow internet.
I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it, which with slow internet takes more time too and probably doesn't look as much like a bounce.
It's the perfect cover for Google. All the techies who would get outraged by something like this generally have fast internet and ad-blockers.
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would be more interesting to know actual proportions. I don’t believe FB or G will outperform other in all cases all the time.
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#79Pretty 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…
There's always going to be a ~30% dropoff between clicks and analytics because people click on ads, realize they've done it, and either push back or close the popped-up page. It's even higher for video. I work for a company that is a DSP, ad server, and analytics, and I've been investigating these click discrepancies. It's surprising how many places this can all go wrong.
It gets especially worse when there are redirect after redirect to other ad servers, and you lose your tracking macros because the trafficker hasn't configured their landing page tracking macros correctly for each ad server redirect.
Re: Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
#80I work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry (especially marketers to follow them). I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition. We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to…
>I work in ad-tech You just lost literally all of the default credibility that arbitrary humans get.
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