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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

#611

Post by dillondoyle »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #50

You 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…

You can definitely measure 'lift' - though it's far easier with online only sales.

For sure it's harder for say Gucci to measure incremental cross-platform lift but any good large brand spends big money trying to parse it out

One example way to get some value measurement would be Facebook's powerful tools. Beyond a basic 1:1 audience 50/50 exposure test, Facebook also lets you upload offline sales (or use their pretty effective pixel for real time online sales) and then feed into their system. Using the data your purchase data FB matches to ads delivered and you (with PII but also purchase value and frequency). Then the advertiser can define lookback/conversion definitions to get a measure of incremental lift. E.g. those who clicked ad bought __ right away, those who viewed ad within 1, 7 or 28 days bought __.

For what it's worth the adtech forums I participate on view Uber as incompetent idiots on this issue (which has been reported on like last year) - all they had to do was measure beyond the initial install for say did these installs actually pay to ride...

Install fraud from SSPs and resellers is huge, doing this basic measurement and quality control is the reason Facebook and Apple have huge and growing app install business. Though TBD on Apple fucking over Facebook and keeping the attribution for themselves alone with their new privacy features

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

#612

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

nutanc wrote: 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…

If anything, FB ads were worse than useless for my business, all they attracted was 90% fraud.

Looking at what business Ozonetel is in (i.e. sales are directed towards business owners), I'm not suprised FB ads were also worthless for you. I get the sense FB ads are really only good for things a consumer might impulse buy (e.g. clothing, games, small gifts, etc.) but anything where the user is probably going to do some more in-depth thinking about the purchase, they're beyond useless. Which pretty much makes sense - even if you've drilled down your targeting well for business decision makers who may sign up for Ozonetel, it's highly unlikely that decision maker is going to really want to know more about Ozonetel while they're looking at cat vids and fighting with crazy uncles about politics.

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

#613

Post by voxl »

crakhamster01 wrote: post #610
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 can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. This is entirely false. I work in adtech, and almost all companies run experiments in order to optimize their ad spend (everything from Ad A vs Ad B, to Ad vs No Ad, to Channel A vs Channel B, and more). This isn't to say that advertising always produces ROI. Quite often, experiments will be run that will show a cer…

That's great, thanks for your experience, but can't comment on the argument provided?

Isn't it possible that these experiments you talk about are fatally flawed? I have serious doubts that a company can run and do well designed statistical experiments when academic experts are plagued by p-hacking and other foot guns.

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

#614

Post by [deleted] »

megablast wrote: post #272
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.

Does advertising create an increase in buying your product. That’s the most important question.

[deleted]

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

#615

Post by maxwelljoslyn »

bdefore wrote: post #566
efreak wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tip: URL suggestions are rarely advertising, and pop up faster than the results page does. Check the suggestions before searching.

Too much to hope for: a Chromium fork to have the search hint dropdown provide suggestions + Duck Duck Go results. And maybe block the enter key unless a resolvable address had been entered to prevent inadvertent Google searches.

I had a hunch and looked at MDN's list of web extension APIs.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

It seems like you could implement your described behavior as a cross-browser extension, for everything except Safari (and Android Firefox -_-). Easier than forking Chrome! :)

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

#616

Post by Spivak »

voxl wrote: post #613
crakhamster01 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. This is entirely false. I work in adtech, and almost all companies run experiments in order to optimize their ad spend (everything from Ad A vs Ad B, to Ad vs No Ad, to Channel A vs Channel B, and more). This isn't to say that advertising always produces ROI. Quite often, experiments will be run that will show a cer…

That's great, thanks for your experience, but can't comment on the argument provided? Isn't it possible that these experiments you talk about are fatally flawed? I have serious doubts that a company can run and do well designed statistical experiments when academic experts are plagued by p-hacking and other foot guns.

That’s kinda a weird take when there’s every incentive to be the the person/manager/director who saves tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend.

Sure marketing people want to protect their jobs but the odds of “advertising is entirely worthless” being this closely guarded secret kept by millions of people in the industry or being a collective delusion is pretty darn low. The reward for defectors is just too high.

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

#617

Post by [deleted] »

pb7 wrote: post #537
nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

[deleted]
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