Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
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Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#2As someone who believes that ad tech is the primary force driving the ever growing consumer distrust of technology, I can’t help but feel a little giddy reading this story.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#3I have this suspicion that mobile ads have way weaker effect than claimed. No-one in adtech has any interest in finding out. Marketers don't want to lose budgets or importance either. So a lot of money is wasted on annoying people. How sad.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#4Wow, that’s quite a revelation. Uber turns off 2/3 of ads and metrics are the same. Eventually, with optimizations, they got down to 10% of previous spend without loss of revenue. I wonder if the Uber story is unique or it cuts across all advertisers. How would this affect Ad Tech industry?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#5Cities discovered they'd been defrauded out of 2/3 of their taxi revenues... By Uber.... Looks like money is flowing...
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#6Wow, that’s quite a revelation. Uber turns off 2/3 of ads and metrics are the same. Eventually, with optimizations, they got down to 10% of previous spend without loss of revenue. I wonder if the Uber story is unique or it cuts across all advertisers. How would this affect Ad Tech industry?
Impending crash - time to short the entire ad tech industry.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#7Wow, that’s quite a revelation. Uber turns off 2/3 of ads and metrics are the same. Eventually, with optimizations, they got down to 10% of previous spend without loss of revenue. I wonder if the Uber story is unique or it cuts across all advertisers. How would this affect Ad Tech industry?
The ad industry has always claimed that fraud doesn't matter because it is priced in. It's been over a decade since I worked in click fraud detection but I believe Google's numbers were around is a huge revelation from my perspective.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#8I'm not surprised by this a all. I do PPC for a living and I find that a lot of ad spend is totally wasted on paying for clicks that you would have gotten anyway, especially on Google and on Mobile devices.
A lot of big brands bid on, and pay for, their brand terms because someone at some point told then that they should. So when a person uses search to find Uber, they get an ad first, then a regular listing second. And almost everyone clicks the first link. Take away the ad and the free click is first.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#9I’m not sure if this is equivalent to fraud. But I’ve recently discovered that 99.9% of the website visitors to my new startup’s website are just random @gmail addresses from India and China - most of which are coming from Google ads. We don’t spend much, about $100/m mostly to keep our #1 ranking in Google (which I think helps), but it does seem fraudulent. If I turn the ads off, the traffic from those IPs drops off a cliff.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#10I have this suspicion that mobile ads have way weaker effect than claimed. No-one in adtech has any interest in finding out. Marketers don't want to lose budgets or importance either. So a lot of money is wasted on annoying people. How sad.
I'm certain they do want to find out. Adtech still wants to know where paying users are even if the total is less than they'd like to claim.