151–160 of 185 posts
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>I work in ad-tech You just lost literally all of the default credibility that arbitrary humans get.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how strongly you feel about ads or anything else. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks for trying to keep this place civil.
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…
It's not like TV where the money is spent and you have no way to measure the results. Many people are seeing results with Facebook and Instagram ads. So they are spending.
Google AdWords is the king of selling you something you are looking for. But Facebook and Instagram are highly effective at selling you stuff you didn't know you wanted. Not to mention political and spend.
I 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…
1) Call for abandoning the "Consumer Welfare Standard"
2) Enumerate how the Tech Tyrants have negatively affected the competitiveness of companies/projects you've worked on (M&A, canceled products, vaporware, embrace and extend, pricing changes, etc.)
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/consumer-welfare-standard-outd...
https://medium.com/@CDisrupted/does-the-consumer-welfare-sta...
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/effective-competition-standard...
Big Tech is lobbying hard to retain the "Consumer Welfare Standard", which they rely on for anti-trust evasion:
https://itif.org/publications/2018/10/04/why-consumer-welfar...
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/dont-damage-our-democra...
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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.
I’m not surprised. Google shows me ads for things I’m searching for, but Facebook shows me ads for things I wouldn’t even know to look for. I can definitely see how one or the other would be better depending on the type of product.
I can understand why Google gets bidding wars over people searching for "vacuum cleaner" or "cheap web hosting", but for most other things I can't quite imagine the use case. I either don't want to buy something, or I know who I'm buying from.
Facebook seems much better placed to show things like "hey, you liked this band and you live in this town, did you know they're coming next month?" On very rare occasions, FB actually manages to achieve the theoretical role of ads as "notifying people about mutually beneficial transactions". And when they don't, I can at least see that the ads are having effects like "making me aware of a consulting firm" that a marketer might value. Meanwhile, I've never seen a Google search ad I valued, and I don't know if I've ever seen an Ad Words ad I valued.
(Actually, I've benefited from Youtube ads occasionally also. But only ever for learning about new-release music, movies, or games.)
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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…
I'm guessing there's a good reason for this. Did you visit the company's website? And did you buy in person? If so, you're seeing the online to offline problem: specifically, it's hard to correlate your online data with your offline data, so it's hard to tell the difference between someone who already bought a ring from somebody who hasn't yet bought a ring. And I'd bet most people who visited the website haven't bought a ring yet.
So you bring up an interesting point: this is an externality of 1. wasted ads, 2. irritation for the user, 3. a useless invasion of your privacy.
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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.
I don't think it's clear that advertisers are bearing the whole cost, at least not directly. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snap etc. all sell placements via auction, so the advertisers themselves are determining the price. Presumably average fraud rate is already "priced in".
What I mean is actually this: Google, Facebook, etc. are opaque about fraud, to the point of misreporting metrics in Facebook's case. Let's say hypothetically that the advertiser had an oracle for whether any individual ad view was fake. I'm pretty sure the advertiser would be paying less. That difference is what I meant by bearing much of the cost.
Google/Facebook's marginal cost for the fraudulent traffic is basically just the cost of infrastructure. The publisher (if there is one) is often the one causing the fraud, so they're not really "bearing the cost."
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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…
> 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? I'm guessing there's a good reason for this. Did you visit the company's website? And did you buy in person? If so, you're seeing the online to offline problem: specifically, it's hard to correlate your online data with your offline data, so…
Ive used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
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I don't think it's clear that advertisers are bearing the whole cost, at least not directly. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snap etc. all sell placements via auction, so the advertisers themselves are determining the price. Presumably average fraud rate is already "priced in".
Agreed with you there, to some extent the fraud rate is already "priced in". What I mean is actually this: Google, Facebook, etc. are opaque about fraud, to the point of misreporting metrics in Facebook's case. Let's say hypothetically that the advertiser had an oracle for whether any individual ad view was fake. I'm pretty sure the advertiser would be paying less. That difference is what I meant by bearing much of t…
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I'm also a very infrequent user. I just checked my feed very carefully, making sure each photo was from someone I was following, and it was over 50 posts before I saw an ad.
Are you on the mobile app or the website? I get an ad every 3-4 posts on the app, but none on the site.
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> 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? I'm guessing there's a good reason for this. Did you visit the company's website? And did you buy in person? If so, you're seeing the online to offline problem: specifically, it's hard to correlate your online data with your offline data, so…
would they want to solve this problem? It would improve their targeting but also lower their advertising base significantly. Ive used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
Hypothetically, let's say current ROI is $1.10 for every $1 spent. We stop spending for people who already bought a diamond. Our ROI might go up to $1.12 for every $1 spent. That means the ability to avoid targeting people who already bought a ring is worth $0.02 for every $1 we spend. A company comes and says "for $0.01 on every dollar, we'll give you that ability". Of course you'd take it.
That's more or less what's happening now.
> I've used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
Yeah you're hitting on another theme of modern day digital advertising. Our collection of data far outstrips our ability to actually act on it. So you'll commonly find situations where you'd assume they could know based on the data they probably collected, but for some reason they don't act on it.