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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

#791

Post by baybal2 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #655
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…

Luckily bidding on your competitors name is illegal in Germany. We did get our competitors to not do that with some letters from lawyers.

I always thought that it was clear cut decided by Interflora case in EU court, and that such bidding is only prohibited if impersonation happens.

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

#792

Post by azmodeus »

danielscrubs wrote: post #788
ljm wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for the calculator screenshot, that kind of stuff feels like a consequence of having 'show your working' drilled into your head at school. Which is great to show your teacher that you understood the question and didn't plug it into a calculator, but unnecessary later on.

Send it to your university professor and see how it goes. You can’t really blame academia for this one.

academia != education

The education system incentives students to be teachable to conserve teacher resources.

Transparent calculations are more important to help folks with low numerical skills.

I think this is actually a really hard challenge to communicate simple calculations easily to a wide audience.

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

#793

Post by polk »

manigandham wrote: post #757
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 c…

The implication here is that money spent on ads is largely wasted.

Companies like Uber and Ebay have turned off all their adspend and saw little to no change in their acquisition metrics. You can argue that they were just doing it wrong. But the point is that, if even they are doing it wrong - and getting nothing in return for the millions they're spending on ads - then it's very likely most others are in the same situation.

You are right that this doesn't mean _all_ advertising is useless, there are absolutely profitable usecases. But the larger points still stands: most money being spend on advertising right now is likely not returning anything.

We now have some strong precedents being set. I believe this will cause more major companies to run the ultimate experiment: turn off all ads and see what happens. It's too early to tell, but it's not impossible we'll see adspend drop significantly across the industry once everyone finds out they're just burning money.

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

#794

Post by denton-scratch »

nicbou wrote: post #56
Nextgrid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is willing to run the experiments necessary The people that would have the power to run this experiment have their entire careers depending on things staying as-is. Running the experiment carries a significant risk of exposing that the advertising operations they're responsible for provide much less ROI than they pretend it does. The unwillingness of anyone to run such an experiment is already an answer. Why…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

"If you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

~Chomsky to Andrew Marr.

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

#795

Post by MaxBarraclough »

edgyquant wrote: post #738
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Facebook ads are the worst from a users perspective. I bought a floor mat through them once and for the next week all the ads were for floor mats. I just bought one I’m not interested in buying another. I bought a PC chair recently with my credit card, now I see a bunch of ads for PC chairs, again, I don’t need another one.

One way to avoid/reduce this is to always place orders from a private browsing/incognito window, and to never log in using your normal browsing sessions.

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

#796

Post by jiofih »

kleiba wrote: post #787
V_9 wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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

And sad. Same thing happens in data science now - people are happy to have any number regardless of correctness. They just need something to report on and keep the work going.

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

#797

Post by eznzt »

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…

>[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?)

She knows her audience.

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

#798

Post by yreg »

fegu wrote: post #773
yreg wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Usually you will have to choose the jurisdiction of the party you want to take to court. This is part of the reason some regulated industries require you to have presence locally.

Ah right, usually you can sue on your home turf only if there's a treaty for it (e.g. when both parties are based in EU).

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

#799

Post by aaronmdjones »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #705
pb7 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s fine. But if you want to use a service, you have to agree to the service’s terms. That includes ads that appear before results and competitors bidding on ads for any search terms. That’s just how it works in a rational world. It doesn’t really matter the reason you had to use the service. Otherwise, why is Grammarly a billion dollar company? People are bad at grammar, let them live! And use the service for fre…

That's how it works under certain market conditions. Calling out flaws, or wanting a change, doesn't mean people are demanding the strawman you've constructed of "exactly like you get today but free". Just as an example , the people at the top of a few organizations could flip a switch and make all the major browsers default to nonprofit search engines.

Or Google could display ads on the right, next to the results, like they used to, instead of putting them above the results.

Putting them above the results gets more clicks though, and the predatory advertising customers know this.

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

#800

Post by pfalke »

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-…

At least in e-commerce it’s very much possible. The company that I work for does such experiments regularly (there’s a dedicated Data Science team for measurement) and I’ve personally been involved in lift studies for Google Ads. They work, you just have to be careful with the ‘how much’ combined with ‘for what’.

Happy to chat with anyone who is interested in the topic (pfalke at pfalke dot com).

Haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast, apologies if that made me miss the point of the parent post!

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