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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

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't repairable. Apple devices have high prices simply because of the brand ecosystem. Old Thinkpads use commodity parts - but they command good prices because they are repairable. Marketing the new thing is what Apple does. It is good at it. That is not the entire spectrum of customer value.

Thinkpads are pretty much the worst form factor for a laptop that doesn't transition into "toy" space. Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.

That shows that 1) people are different or 2) you are a fan of Apple hardware. It doesn't show that Thinkpads are bad. IMO they are light-years ahead of anything Apple sells.

Source: Me.

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

#592
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinkpads are pretty much the worst form factor for a laptop that doesn't transition into "toy" space. Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.

That shows that 1) people are different or 2) you are a fan of Apple hardware. It doesn't show that Thinkpads are bad. IMO they are light-years ahead of anything Apple sells. Source: Me.

Out of curiosity, how do use it without bumping the trackpad while typing?

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

#594
post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

> searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) Tried it. One ad. From ozontel.com

It appeared 2 ads for me, the first one very big with 3 clickable links

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

#595
Online advertising is fundamentally broken because it pegs dollar amounts to HTTP requests. Ad fraud steals billions from advertisers because it's so easy to fake being a publisher, impression, or click. Not to mention that you have to take the word of the upstream partner (ie Google) that the requests are valid without them providing you any actual request logs.

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

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really, really not true. Advertising lift has been well studied, especially in metastudies spanning hundreds of digital campaigns across Facebook and Google. These are independent academic metastudies, with hundreds of millions of impression data samples. Positive lift in the range of 0-20% is very common, and many statistical aspects of causal inference on ad impacts are well understood. Negative lift and fl…

Did you read the transcript the for episode and the associated links and notes? They back up their claims with studies of their own as well as metanalysis.

It would seem their backing research and metastudy totally missed the boat and ignored well-known academic experts on the matter.

I definitely trust the academic studies over an entertainment podcast.

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

#598
post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

> searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) Tried it. One ad. From ozontel.com

One ad from dialpad for my try.

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

#599
post #242

I 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/

https://corgilytics.com/content/do-online-video-ads-impact-l...

This is a look at what a $200k Youtube ad buy will generate for a fictitious brand with 0 prior marketing efforts. Display advertising is so hard (if not impossible for many verticals) to get right.

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