Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mercurynews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 185 posts

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

#131

Post by a_imho »

lorenzobr wrote: post #125
ethbro wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume parent was referring to... gets up and walks away, while youtube continues to autoplay

Surely though that's different from fake likes assuming the advertiser is aware of it. I feel like YouTube by now is more similar to TV advertising, you take in consideration that people could just have the tv on in the background while doing something else or going around the house. Unless you don't know what you are doing with your advertising budget of course.

No, the problem is exclusive to autoplay (in fact, I recall youtube adding some click through pause into videos, but I don't see them now). I'm no advertiser, but simply introducing autoplay into the mix is kinda fraud imo.

With hindsight advertisers must be aware of fake likes and such too.

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

#132

Post by mbesto »

gk1 wrote: 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…

Honest question - who here has done Twitter ads and got positive ROI? AdWords/Bing/Facebook all seem to "work", but I've never found Twitter to be fruitful..at all.

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

#133

Post by cedivad »

jsemrau wrote: post #2

I have mentioned that several times before, but I always believed that FB's but also Google's metrics are at least borderline fraudulent. Inflated by bots and apps that simulate DAUs and clicks. I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own site. I believe FB is same.

I once had google adwords flooding my website with some ridiculous number like 1000 clicks in 5 minutes, zeroing my daily budget in just a few seconds. The clicks had nothing to do with my campaign keywords, which was set to gradually distribuite the adverts during the day instead of rushing to the budget limit.

Conversion was terrible, as in no one subscribed to the newsletter (the website usually had a very high newsletter conversion rate (20-30%? I forgot), but of those 1000, not even one person decided to subscribe.

The ad spend for the day (I remember now) was even higher than the daily limit.

I spent two weeks talking to the useless billing support that would admit no fault before giving up and paying for a "bug" in their system.

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

#134

Post by draw_down »

dirkgently wrote: post #23
jsemrau wrote: post #2

I have mentioned that several times before, but I always believed that FB's but also Google's metrics are at least borderline fraudulent. Inflated by bots and apps that simulate DAUs and clicks. I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own site. I believe FB is same.

And another discussion where Facebook does something wrong and HN immediately starts talking about Google.

Give me a break. It’s a discussion about advertising and Google is the ad company.

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

#135

Post by nkrisc »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #62
wongarsu wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

Happens to me. Sometimes out of reflex I'll accidentally click it two or three more times before I have to resist muscle memory and wait for the page to completely finished jumping around.

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

#136

Post by nkrisc »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #38
cm2012 wrote: 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.

Not where you specifically saw it, but in aggregate they can track things like purchase volume after a specific ad airs in a specific market or what was advertised in the circular, etc. They could vary things slightly by market as well to help pinpoint what's most impactful.

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

#137

Post by village-idiot »

thrower123 wrote: post #37
munchbunny wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Conventional wisdom inside ad tech is that fraud rates are about 30% on average. Typically lower for video. So there's real value in there (in terms of ROI for the advertiser) but there's effectively an entire margin of fraud where advertisers are bearing much of that cost.

Video ads are intolerable. Whenever they exist, they spawn an arms war of dark patterns to get and stop them from auto-playing, without warning, at maximum volume. The Facebook Android app is gawdawful for this; I just discovered that you can put it into some sort of a data-saving mode, which seems to stop auto-play for the moment... but time will tell. And though we're supposed to be bagging on Facebook here, YouTub…

I think what’s shocking is how awful a lot of the targeting is. Even before I started getting super aggressive about blocking all trackers, I regularly got fed ads for products and services I didn’t need, and in languages I couldn’t understand.

The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?

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

#138

Post by village-idiot »

ttty wrote: post #84
gk1 wrote: 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…

You should check server hits not Google analytics. From my experience analytics didn't track many visitors. For example cloudflare reports 1000 unique users, GA only 300 to 500.

Anecdotally, even a lot of non technies in my life are starting to install browser extensions to stop ad spying.

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

#139

Post by everythingswan »

mbesto wrote: post #132
gk1 wrote: 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…

Honest question - who here has done Twitter ads and got positive ROI? AdWords/Bing/Facebook all seem to "work", but I've never found Twitter to be fruitful..at all.

I've run lead gen campaigns there that were almost comparable to Facebook but can't they "worked".

I think the problem is, as an advertiser, treating it like I do the other social channels. I don't feel like it's similar to Facebook at all and has become even more different over time. Pinterest has similarly fragmented.

I see using content as remarketing ads to be effective there. But that's the hardest ad-use-case to prove ROI on, in my experience.

Post reply on HN