big brands have the least to gain from online ads
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
#272You 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…
> 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.
Does advertising create an increase in buying your product. That’s the most important question.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likewise, I probably haven’t seen an ad for coca cola or kleenex in a while. Once a brand is ubiquitous to the point where soda becomes coke and tissues become kleenex in the lexicon, it feels like ad spend is wasted.
Brand advertising is different. It is there to remind people about the brand. Companies do it because they have the analytics that show that it works.
They mostly do it from inertia, how well it works is a separate question. Historically you can find many examples of hugely successful advertising campaigns, it’s much harder to quantify the negative.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Ads also has a built in report for seeing uplift of ads + organic and organic only
I'd take that report with a big grain of salt and run my own tests independently. Google is more than slightly biased here.
You’ve got a point. Plus attribution modeling isn’t for the faint of heart.
One popular method is a geolocation test. Turn off the test campaign (usually remarketing) in certain geos and see what happens.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#275You 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…
So how much ad spending is going to 'dubious ad networks'?
Are they easy to categorize? Or is it a big secret what's dubious and what isn't?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#276You 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…
Did you actually read the linked tweets?! Uber turns off a shitload of ad spending, nothing bad happens to new user acquisitions. I'd say there are about a million better uses of a million dollars than just pissing them away on a scam.
There's a huge difference between a company that is widely known for being the app for ride hailing and a small company trying to get eyes on their new product.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#277Got a call from our Google Ads account manager to better match conversion analytics with Google Ads, after 90 days we found that the ads didn't convert at all, no change in sales. End result was to suspend our Google Ads budget. The best phone call I got from Google staff.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#278[deleted]
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#279>Stopped [some] Spending on Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why? [Added "some" for clarity.] Let me try to restate the author's article because he presents it in a confusing way. The issue is that both Google and Facebook have "core ad tech" that works decently with proven ROI -- and they both have "additional ad tech inventory" (a.k.a the partners/affiliates) that's much lower quality : Facebook "quality" ad placemen…
Source?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
yep, but it is mostly those parts I want back. I can almldt live fine with:
- programming blogs that doesn't have ads
- Wikipedia
- three or four online newspapers/websites that I pay for anyway.
- HN
- all the old stuff: web rings and enthusiast web sites
- I'd probably miss stackoverflow but I use that site less and less these days anyways.
Most of the rest can burn and we'd maybe be better off. At least search results would be cleaner :-)