I love watching people realize that online ads do little to nothing. It took me a week or two to realize this years ago with my own sites.
Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
41–50 of 933 posts
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#42I 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've been playing a silly phone game for about a month now. Only last week I realized it has ads: I'd become so ad-blind that I completely ignored the banner ad they keep at the bottom of the window at all times. I only noticed it because it flickered when transitioning to another ad.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#43I think a lot of this was already obvious to slightly-savvy mobile app users. Look at pretty much any free-with-ads app; a majority of the ads are going to be ads for other free-with-ads apps, many of which you already have installed. The thing is, outside of the Internet most ad spend is for marketing ubiquity, not direct response. You don't really buy, say, TV advertising with the expectation of getting so many clicks or calls out of it. And, up until a few years ago, TV was the lion's share of ad spend. So who knows if we'll see an actual industry reckoning or not. The whole point of advertising is to waste money, after all, and plenty of brands were fine with getting nothing but exposure out of it.
More interesting to me is the fact that tech companies are finding it surprisingly difficult to control where their ad-spend goes. I suppose this is an inverse of the problems with supply chains, where Apple can take three years to get a connector vendor out of their supply chain even when they were using literal child/slave labor. It's a market for lemons; bad "money" (publishers, suppliers) drives out good. The question is: will questionable ad publishing actually harm corporate reputation to the point where big ad spenders go away, or will we just see periodic Adpocalpse-style waves of spending being decreased and then brought back?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Google ads you can select the countries where you want the ads to run in. If you go worldwide and chose to maximize clicks, Google Ads will mainly run them in India and other emerging countries because it's much cheaper to get clicks from there.
Yeah so that’s the weird part that I didn’t mention. These ads only run in the US.
Maybe this is due to chinese and indian click farms running through VPN’s?
Click farms click on everything in order to dodge fraud detection, as far as I know.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#45I'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.…
With google specifically, I've always wondered if the placement of the listing itself is related to the ad spend.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#46Playing devils advocate, couldn’t this just be reflective of the fact that Ubers brand reach us strong enough that there is very little advertising that gives them a marginal benefit?
Uber owns taxi services as a brand as much as Google does search.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, I've worked at several places that engaged in this practice, and they're perfectly clear that they're paying for clicks that they'd likely get for free. The theory is that if they don't do this, their competitors buy this ad space and steal some of their organic traffic, and/or that they're just bidding up the cost of that space to make their competitors less efficient. Now, that theory may not be cost-e…
The solution to this would be to have a very authoritative site for a query show above any ads.
If the company ranking results and selling these ad spaces are the same every decision will not be in case of advertisers/users. Google has long lost it‘s spirit and is only optimizing for money.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#48I like that this story references the #deleteUber tag on Twitter because it helps organize the timeline of events going on at Uber.
There was another twitter thread on here recently about the chaotic and disastrous (though successful) Swift rewrite they did which happened during the same time frame. https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845
During those time frames is also when all of the execs were quitting or being fired, along with their internal harassment problems.
It feels like Uber has really succeeded in spite of itself.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#49Welcome to the Advertising Tech Bubble.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#50You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another.
You don't have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty.
All big companies do this.
Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually found your product and bought it.
But that honestly doesn't seem that important compared to the other metrics - which most functioning large companies have decent data on.
You're also never going to know how many of your customers ate Green Eggs and Ham for breakfast. It's irrelevant. You have decent insight into your direct-online ROAS, and that's unique to direct online advertising, and it's important!!
Yes, you're never going to know if that million dollars you invested in online ads was the best use of that million dollars. But that's not much different than building a new factory, either.
Edit:
Specifically to Uber's case - they did NOT turn off 66% of ALL ads randomly to no adverse effect (implying that all ads are worthless).
They DISCOVERED that a certain type of ad (paying for installs on dubious ad networks) was mostly fraud. After turning off 100% of this type of ad - they found no adverse effect.
This is a fail on their analytics team. They should've been measuring this type of ad better - especially given how big a portion of the total spend it was - and had insight into something not being right. They should have been able to do this - and if they couldn't, because the network somehow didn't give them enough data to do it, they probably shouldn't have been spending this much money for exactly these reasons!