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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

#121

Post by jackcosgrove »

staticassertion wrote: post #55
chrisdinn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that the overwhelming majority of digital ad formats just don’t work. Does anyone who works in digital ad tech genuinely believe that these formats work? I have been here for the last ten years and have come to believe they do not, certainly not comparable like traditional linear TV or print in their heydays. There are exceptions. I think Google search ad works so well it’s eating the product.…

Mobile devices tend not to have adblockers, so exposure might be a lot higher. Also, the only ads I've clicked are mobile ads. I've even installed apps via ad before - I've never once purchased an item from an ad online (but I've also run an adblocker for a decade). Ads certainly "work" by some metric, and some definition of "work", but I think the metric and definition is unclear.

The only ads I click on are mobile ads, and that's because many times the X to close them is too small. Other times the ad is jumping around my screen and it steals my fingerpress.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#122

Post by tqi »

joaodlf wrote: post #68
aetherson wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

This being allowed shows the sad state Google is in - you search for a brand, get ads for a competitor? Search engine, my ass. You now effectively need to pay Google to keep your product relevant through ads, even when the user is specifically looking for you.

If I search "Kleenex", am I specifically looking for the Kimberly Clark product or should Procter & Gamble be allowed to bid on ads for that search?

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#123

Post by spatley »

josefx wrote: post #74
birdyrooster wrote: post #23

Yeah I think Google and other advertisers are great at predicting what people will buy and then shows them ads for it. That’s different than showing a person an ad and changing their behavior, but to advertisers they can’t know unless they experiment.

> 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…

The answer to your confusion is that un sophisticated remarketing (showing ads for searched or purchased items) has in nearly all cases a measurable improvement on ROI. Improvements to filter out useless ad views are much more complicated and expensive. Advertisers actually don’t care about any individual case, but buy on aggregate results.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#125

Post by garciasn »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
jedberg wrote: post #20

There 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 is willing to run the experiments necessary The people that would have the power to run this experiment have their entire careers depending on things staying as-is. Running the experiment carries a significant risk of exposing that the advertising operations they're responsible for provide much less ROI than they pretend it does. The unwillingness of anyone to run such an experiment is already an answer. Why…

I work in the field. Incrementality testing is a big part of marketing measurement at any reputable agency. Any claims to the contrary are FUD.

That said, companies like P&G, Airbnb, and Uber, which are oft-cited as examples of digital not being worth it, fail to understand their own brand recognition and organic power, built through prior marketing efforts, as key to their current standing.

Sure, TODAY, it doesn’t have the impact they’d like it to have but the investments PRIOR were key to ensuring their success.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#126

Post by liminal »

I know someone who worked at a marketing "machine learning" company. The ML really needs to be in quotes, because if you looked under the hood you'd see the people behind the curtain (literally -- Amazon Turk workers). But VCs loved them, customers loved them. The blind selling to the blind... Marketers had money to spend, ML is the hotness, everyone makes money! (My friend no longer works there)

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#127

Post by posedge »

jedberg wrote: post #20

There 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-…

Listening to the podcast just a minute ago as I found this post... What a coincidence. I second that recommendation.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#128

Post by pnw_hazor »

mumblemumble wrote: post #94
st1x7 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... Wait, why wouldn't that be important? It seems like the most important question since it asks whether advertising has any significant impact at all.

It's critically important for adtech companies' customers, since it's an essential part of determining return on investment. But it's also critically important for both adtech companies and data scientists who work in the space to direct people's attention away from those sorts of metrics. You generally don't want to call the attention of the person who signs your paycheck toward the fact that it's all but impossible…

This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud.

But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today.

edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#129

Post by jsnell »

idunno246 wrote: post #26
g42gregory wrote: post #4

Wow, 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…

> From the tweet, it’s crazy that they were spending 100m without tracking the quality of the users.

They were high quality users: Uber didn't pay for installs, but for installs + first ride. What's being alleged is that the ad networks were detecting a user installing the app, and fraudulently creating an ad display event to make it look like the install happened due to the ad.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#130

Post by Aldipower »

ishjoh wrote: post #31
janmo wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

I also had a small Google ad spend ($350 over 3 weeks), that I setup to run exclusively in the USA, and had the same experience where IP addresses recorded by hotjar were all from India, all new signups from the ad spend were '.gmail' email addresses and although I had about 100 signups not a single one entered a credit card.

Almost the same here. Had an Google Ads budget of $200 a month. All I got from this were dubious sign ups, which all together never looked around in the application and never came back. As my ROI turned to be negative, I turned off ads completely. My organic sign-ups even increased since that. And those people are staying!
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