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Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
341–350 of 933 posts
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also an important signal to consumers.
That the products are overpriced?
No, that the product is good enough that it makes enough money to afford expensive advertising.
There is a really good essay about this that I re-read quite often: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least with ecommerce one can track users that have seen and/or clicked on ads with what they have purchased and return on ad spend can be calculated. But yes, the question still is: does it raise intent or did the user already want the thing, googled it, and clicked on the first result (which is your ad, above the organic results that also lead to your online store)?
The fundamental problem with this is that if I bought your product, it's because I was looking for your product after doing a decent amount of research which meant I was on a bunch of retargeting lists and you've wasted money on me. I have never to my recollection purchased anything because of an ad. If I have clicked through an ad, it was simply because it was the quickest way to get to the website/product. There is…
It's pretty clear to see direct causation when using ads to promote your product. Promote your product using ads for 1 month, then turn off ads and see how many sales you get. For a majority of e-commerce, you'll see a substantial drop.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source?
This all true. Source: My 11 years running ads on these platforms.
It is true. Partner sites make revenue for the partner through revshare and partners attempt to create fake clicks and even conversions to inflate their revenue. Cobra effect in play.
This risk is zero (except for things like ad neuseam) on first party / owned and operated placements like search/ig/fb.
As with anything you should verify your roi through third party measurement providers, just like you would do for others.
Disclaimer: current fb ads engineer, former google ads engineer.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Coca Cola rent seeking? How about Apple? I suspect you aren’t using that term correctly but maybe I’m missing something.
Effectively every restaurant in the US has to pay either PepsiCo or Coca Cola. Similarly, if you want to buy a non-alcoholic beverage at the grocery store it's mostly down to those two (with Dr. Pepper having a much smaller but still significant stake). Any competitor that emerges just gets bought up by one of the three. Apple's half of the phone Duopoly. Either you pay them or pay Google if you want a phone and want…
Restaurants only pay because consumers demand it and would not visit the restaurant otherwise. That’s not rent seeking. That’s market forces. And what they pay correlates with how much their customers demand coke/Pepsi.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#346I wish more companies would try to find out the actual value of advertising and targeting. And it probably won't be as good as FB and GOOG would like us to believe. BTW, there was a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio which talked about this eBay experiment https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
You can use third party measurement providers to validate the roi.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#347Tell this to the poor scammy-dating-site-slash-mail-order-bride-site operator who has been sold 10+ years of impressions on me: - an extremely happily married man - with multiple small children - in a rather conservative church Sometime during the last two years they finally stopped advertising to me. I've always blamed their marketers - or Google for being so utterly incompetent as to not pick up any of the availabl…
If you take a look at people who have been caught in extra-marital affairs I think you'll find those three qualities are not immediate disqualifiers.
Maybe the "happily" part, but how does Google know that?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#348Augustine fou is basically a troll in r/adops.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#349Earlier 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.
The thing about the "advertising doesn't matter" argument is that there are situations where advertising absolutely matters - when a company is just starting out and there's no way they can get organic referrals, when the public is unaware of their existence, etc. Moreover, most companies started small at some point so advertising and maintaining advertising made sense up to a point. And if we look at those companies…
This is the point that a lot of people are missing
Uber shows up in the news and in conversation every day. Most people have heard about it by now. Very few people are going to install it because they saw an ad.
Not the case for your neighborhood "Bob's Burgers" or "Uber Competitor" or some other new company. Or for specific marketing actions of known companies (promotions, new services, etc)
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#350I 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 cli…
The point of traditional advertising IS pretty much to waste money, similar to how the point of a peacock's tail feathers are to waste resources... it is a signal to potential partners (business or romantic) that they are so capable they can waste resources. It is a signal of bonafides.
I'm genuinely shocked at how many people think advertising doesn't work.
Just because it doesn't make a person consciously stand up and say, "I want a Snickers" does not mean the ad didn't work.
Like, honestly, are there people here suggesting viral ads don't work? Or don't understand the point of Coke or Mercedes Benz ads are for? Coke establishes themselves as the defacto soda. There is no other soda, or if they are, wish they were coke.
MB ads among other things reinforce to MB owners the wisdom and luxury of their brand. To own an MB is to be part of a club, one that is advertised across the media spectrum. If MB didn't advertise at all, they would either become another commodity brand, or have to be so luxury that only word of mouth is necessary (Bently, etc).
Now, maybe that's what cortesoft is saying "get you to waste money" but if it got you to waste money on their product, it worked.