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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

#231

Post by wasdfff »

chrisdinn wrote: post #13
Snoozus wrote: post #3

I 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 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.…

Instagram ads for millenials are like flies to honey in my anecdotal experience. So many of my peers buy their furniture, dress shoes, clothing, water bottles, watches, dog leashes, pretty much everything in their lives from seeing some like-aged person use that thing on an instagram ad (and the product usually being pretty cheap). It blows my mind how successful these dime a dozen drop shipping companies based on instagram are with millenials and gen z, and buying like this will only be more normalized in the future as more people know someone who got something nice from that instagram ad.

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

#232

Post by eitland »

panda888888 wrote: post #189
josefx wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

Agreed. Companies often don't understand the "directionality" of purchasing behavior. For instance, I recently bought a new iPhone directly from Apple, and I bought a case for it on Amazon. Now two months later, Amazon is recommending that I buy an iPhone (...which I bought two months ago from Apple). Buying a case an then waiting two months to buy the actual phone would be a very strange thing to do, but Amazon seem…

Remember this is the same Amazon that files C# and Javascript books under "Law books" etc, I have documented it: https://erik.itland.no/fun-with-amazons-ai-machine-learning

And Amazon is definitely not alone: Google has been troubled with "AI" running rampant in search results for years, seemingly with no or very little QA.

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

#233

Post by g42gregory »

This looks like a very significant disclosure on the businesses' part. Before COVID-19, there was no reason really to turn-off the ad spending just to see what happens (with some exceptions, such as Uber in the other article). I was surprised to see that the small businesses have experienced the same outcome as the large ones. It also looks like at least partially this seems to be coming from the mobile advertising. I wonder, how should we change our Ad placement strategy as a result of this data?

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

#234

Post by dmix »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #216
rm999 wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2010s I worked in ad tech on a data science team, and one of the things we were pushing for was causal A/B testing; basically turn off a campaign's advertising to a % of people and correlate it with sales to measure ROI. As we were kicking this off I was at a conference chatting with an executive at another ad tech company. His response: "oh yeah I know a guy who tried that, he's not in the industry…

Similar time frame for me, worked at an ad-tech startup, when retargeting was first becoming a big thing and we were pivoting the startup from the bad business idea it started to to doing retargeting as a demand"-side-platform" (DSP) on ad various exchanges. Tried myself to confirm whether any of it had any positive effect, I couldn't really discern any increase in the click-through-rate (CTR) for various approaches,…

Reading about startups that pivot dramatically multiple times make me cringe so hard.

The goal of pivoting isn’t throwing spaghetti at the wall until you hit something before running out of VC or angel money. That just shows terrible product/marketing leadership.

Your prior story is unsurprising combined with that.

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

#236

Post by wasdfff »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #166
st1x7 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't want to lose the web along with the ad tech industry though.

The web existed before the adtech industry. It will live after it.

As a smoking crater maybe. The web was orders of magnitude smaller before the adtech.

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

#238

Post by dehrmann »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #222
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-…

I'm only about halfway through the first of the podcast episodes you linked (thanks!), but just thinking about this logically for a moment: I would not be shocked to learn that advertising for a specific product or event is not particularly effective. However, I'm inclined to believe it has a huge effect on overall brand recognition. Let's say you go to Amazon to buy a roll of toilet paper. How do you choose from the…

There's also the bit about luxury (mostly) car commercials. Half their purpose is to remind you that you made a good decision buying your car, and maybe your next car should be the same brand.

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

#239

Post by daniellarusso »

I had consulted for a gentleman that owns a one-word domain. He was using AdWords to direct traffic to his site, without any analytics.

I added analytics and began tracking conversion rates (sales).

I was able to reduce his ad-spend by 75% and maintain the conversion rates.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

ryanSrich wrote: post #53
ishjoh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, same here. We have done some spam mitigation, but we still get so many bogus sign ups and form submissions. In this instance, who is committing the fraud? Is it Google to ensure you spend your entire budget? I don’t see anyone else benefiting from these bots and click farms. We’re so small and new that it can’t be a competitor.

[deleted]
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