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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

#751

Post by adwww »

base3 wrote: post #539
adwww wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in this industry. A small tech team investigated fraud on our platform and developed a system that was pretty robust at detecting and potentially shutting it down. But literally nobody was interested - even the people advertising don't want to know. The people spending money are typically networks, media buyers, ad agencies, etc, far removed from the actual brand. There are so many parties who want a s…

I worked in adtech. I built a simple ML system that detected signals of fraud on our network. When I reported my findings execs told me the group that was facilitating the fraud was our only profitable division. Soon after, our company went bankrupt. My final paycheck was months late.

Sounds exactly like my former employer ha.

IIRC our system wasn't even fancy ML - just finding known user IDs with identical timestamps over many simultaneous clicks / impressions on really diverse publishers.

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

#752

Post by zpeti »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #612
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 som…

Reading this thread I really start to feel people don't understand what fraud is. You shouldn't be calling it fraud when in the next paragraph you say that FB does work for impulse buys and not "ozonetel"

Just because your ads didn't convert, or 90% of the traffic you buy didn't convert, doesn't make it fraud. Fraud is malice, with the intention to defraud someone and not deliver what you promise, with intent. This is completely different to you setting a target demographic on FB and Google and it not converting.

I imagine most people calling fraud in this thread aren't actually talking about fraud, just non converting traffic. There could be a million reasons for this. You haven't set up conversion tracking, your targeting could be off, or your product or landing page is just crap. Calling it fraud is not helpful.

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

#753

Post by Grustaf »

drusepth wrote: post #731
Grustaf wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google ads are just links to sites, there’s absolutely no malware.

While Google does admittedly do a much better job preventing malware-ridden sites from running ads (for very long) than most platforms, to say there's "absolutely no malware" is a bit disingenuous when there do exist some sites with exploits and/or malware that manage to get ads in search results. The ad itself might not have malware, but the site it links to sometimes does.

Yeah that's what I meant, clicking the ads will always be just as safe as visiting the sites themselves, you can't really ask for more than that.

EDIT: I suppose you could ask for more, you could do as you hint at and not even link to sites with malware I suppose.

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

#754

Post by nebolo »

roenxi wrote: post #706
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…

Prefacing this with an acceptance both that HN culturally has US management principles and that I've got no idea how to run a business... Why is it an initial assumption that customer acquisition and ad spend are linked short or even medium term? That doesn't seem right. When I see an ad for washing machines it doesn't make me run out and buy a washing machine. It gets me familiar with Samsung the brand so in 6-12 mo…

That's fine - that's awareness marketing and if you want to do it with online ads that's up to you. But then you should consider it compared to your other awareness marketing channel.

But the promise of performance marketing is exactly this immediate connection between ad spend and performance (i.e. sales).

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

#755

Post by collyw »

ajit_singh wrote: post #685
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…

Great initiative. Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads. They randomly change distribution models, ignore the bot traffic, and pre…

One place where I worked spend a lot on ads, but they also hired some marketing people and a leads conversion person who seemed to be able to quantify how much return on investment they were getting from ads.

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

#756

Post by yreg »

pjc50 wrote: post #737
TriNetra wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone. > When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves. Isn't above an example of a criminal intent of deliberate fraud?

Yes, and? How on earth are you going to even explain it to the police, let alone find which jurisdiction to use?

You are buying it from some vendor, their company is invoicing you. You can use either your or their jurisdiction, whatever fits better and you can also sue them directly.

You explain it like:

>For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone.

>When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves."

You don't have to be a genius software engineer to understand that.

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

#757

Post by manigandham »

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-…

This was a superficial analysis at best. Adtech produces petabytes of data every day proving that advertising works. There's a reason why two of the most valuable internet companies sell ads.

The problem is knowing exactly which formats and campaigns are working down to the dollar, but part of that is just the reality of fuzzy attribution and it's only getting harder as privacy regulations get stronger. However you can definitely tell the difference when turning everything off, and if you can't then you were advertising to the wrong people in the first place.

Uber's mistake isn't that advertising didn't work, but rather that they didn't vet their vendors or even bother doing any checking and optimization of their own.

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

#758

Post by bitcharmer »

pvorb wrote: post #732
bitcharmer wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know how much of that is true as I am not a practitioner but when I was studying marketing we were taught this (continuous brand awareness reinforcement) only works for FMCG.

So this is arguing against GP's point since a washing machine should last for several years and is not fast-moving, right?

Yes, that's correct

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

#759

Post by V_9 »

diarrhea wrote: post #745

This is now at 700 comments, and no one is talking about the math in the Twitter "thread". Found no mention in the Twitter replies either. Is it just me or is the math hilariously off? [0]: "10% of $150M is $15M". Correct, but do we need a screenshot of a calculator for that, let alone Google? (why do people rely on an internet connection and Google for this?) [1]: Talking about "2/3", but putting in "0.75". So which…

Yes, but marketers don't really care about math. Only about the numbers!

You would expect a few hiccups and a steep learning curve when the product they are trying to buy is a bid for visibility on insanely complex networks of platforms using said rocket science to guess where one's mind is at.

Disclaimer: worked years in the space on the topic of performance, only one time ever have i seen an AB test correctly run and correctly understood by a client. Most requested false numbers because they couldn't understand the difference between branding, attribution and incremental sales. To be fair, neither could most anyone working in the field... Seems like that doesn't change too quick!

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

#760

Post by manigandham »

OmarShehata wrote: post #474
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-…

They mention the common retort to this which is very bizarre to me: "If online ads don't work, then huge companies wouldn't spend billions of dollars on them. Therefore they must work. You academics are just missing something." Ok, how does those companies know it works? They don't have any real data to show that it does, just the fear that if they stop they'll lose a lot of business.

They do have data. It's pretty easy to see sales without ads vs sales with ads and then do further testing to narrow down results from there. This has been done for over a century since the first billboards were put up.

The amount of data generated by adtech today is staggering. The problem isn't data or advertising, it's the wrong people running the wrong campaigns for the wrong reasons.

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