How were the ads "slipping thru"?
Some vendors weren't respecting the Breitbart ban.
Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
111–120 of 933 posts
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#112There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…
Yes, the advertising industry is just obfuscated basic income for the twitter class.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why wouldn't someone jump at an opportunity to prove the thing/service they provide actually works, unless they were unsure about it themselves? Because everyone is already acting like they know it works, so the only way that experiment can change things is in a way that's bad for the person in question. In that situation, they should (from a local, selfish perspective) be resisting even if they're awfully sure it…
Not really, scientists for example also have their whole careers based on the truth of some theories that they use. However, they're willing to put them to proof in different ways. The reason they do so is that they have a high degree of confidence that these theories are true. This cannot be said of people doing advertisement.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say. Scientists’ whole careers are based on running hypotheses to prove or disprove their theories. That IS their career.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#114Wow, 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?
Working in iPhone games, our biz dev people made us integrate with the shadiest of ad publishers. But we required attribution and could track how much the users spent, so could stop spending on them quickly, which was the normal result. Most of the companies were surprised we wanted attribution and had to build something custom, which to me means at the time nobody else was tracking it so lots of customers must have…
> Also worked in ad tech. There were some types of customers that cared about performance, but the largest were typically agencies and all they cared about was spending the budget they were given.
Large companies call it "brand" spending. Which is to say they're spending to maintain brand awareness. Measuring ROI would call the practice into question.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#115Ad tech is a bubble and full of sketchy players. The advertisers always get fleeced, the only question is for how much.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah I think Google and other advertisers are great at predicting what people will buy and then shows them ads for it. Seems to be entirely subjective. I bought a new blade for a bread cutting machine on amazon, the last one lasted ~25 years. My current recommendations: blades for bread cutting machines. I also checked some Christmas decorations on Amazon, but didn't buy any. So next to the blades I get Christmas d…
I would guess it's fairly hard to encode a lot of rules that are obvious to most people algorithmically. Amazon does encode a likelihood of repeat purchases to some degree; they offer a coffee subscription but not a weed whacker subscription. But besides doing something like "purchases >$100 are not likely to be repeat purchases," I would think it would be difficult.
The usual reply to this is that Amazon shows you that because you might return it and then buy a new one, gift it to someone, etc.
They show it because it "works" for them, not because it's wrong and they just can't somehow make sure they don't show something.
Because even if 99% of people don't buy anything twice, 1% probably does for some reason, and that signal just trumps all the noise. (And that's why most of ad spending is bullshit, but since Amazon's cost [even with opportunity cost] is basically 0 on their own site, they'll continue to do this.)
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#117Earlier 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.
By default Google will show ads to people in or "intersted in" the selected location. You can change this to only show ads to people actually present in the specified location, from campaign level location targeting. I spend low 5 figures per month on ads and changing this parameter has significantly reduced poor quality clicks.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#118There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…
> No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary.
Depends enormously what sort of business you're in. I used to work for a company where all of our sales came from ads, 100%. It was trivially true that if we stopped advertising we would have no sales. We were also committed to running experiments: we knew how well all of our many advertising channels performed, and we ran A/B tests for every change.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#119I expect Unilever has some data from their Facebook and Twitter ad boycott.
They're restarting their advertising.
https://www.campaignasia.com/article/unilever-to-end-faceboo...
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#120The podcast episode where Kevin Frisch (former Uber head of US/CA performance marketing) talked about this issue:
https://listennotes.com/podcasts/marketing-today/historic-ad...
All podcast interviews of Kevin Frisch: https://lnns.co/5UZnQ_FopCb