Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

841–850 of 933 posts

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

#841

Post by _gfrc »

ksec wrote: post #810
edgyquant wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well no one has a plausible explanation on it yet but with some of the highest A/B testing ratio and best Data Scientist Amazon too seems to think this works. And yes I agree it sucks.

Actually there is. There is a certain chance that you're unhappy with your fridge and you'll return it. So the assumption is that you are more likely to buy a different fridge than any other item. That's why they show you other fridges.

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

#842

Post by danpalmer »

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…

I think it's worth countering this with the fact that FB ads work very well for us at Thread, because in the HN echo chamber it's very easy to lose sight of this.

This is going to depend entirely on the product and the market. We're B2C, and a very "personal" service rather than a service for one's professional life, so that probably helps. Plus our target market isn't defined by being tech-savvy.

As with all channels, optimising for customer acquisition (not just clicks), and lifetime value (not just easy sales) is critical for the long term health of the channel.

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

#843

Post by [deleted] »

notatoad wrote: post #586
Pxtl wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.

There's nothing illegal about referencing somebody else's trademark as long as you're using it to talk about their product. Having a trademark doesn't forbid your competitors from talking about you.

[deleted]

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

#844

Post by czep »

jiofih wrote: post #796
kleiba wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as data science remains subservient to Product, the inevitable result is cherry picking and post hoc rationalizing of some PM's intuition. To blame is the "embedded" model in which DS works within (and takes direction from) a cross functional team driven by a PM.

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

#845

Post by spoonjim »

DrScump wrote: post #724
spoonjim wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. I had a startup completely powered by Google Ads. Ads brought in nearly 100% of the traffic. When my billing information with Google got mixed up and the ads stopped, the traffic went to 0 immediately.

That means you have zero loyalty among your consumers. Don't you see that as a problem?

Nope. They needed me for a specific job. Got their money, gave their thing, and they moved on.

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

#846

Post by [deleted] »

speeder wrote: post #819
zpeti wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think you misunderstood what he wrote. My business also sell only to other business, and Google kept calling us nagging us to do some "experiments". One of them involved enabling "display network" ads on mobile. Like the guy side... it "attracts" fraud. So, what kind of fraud? I am not talking about no conversion or no click, I am talking about all our clicks, or almost all to the point it was impossible to tell th…

[deleted]

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

#847

Post by iamacyborg »

pc86 wrote: post #831
iamacyborg wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, exactly what I was writing about here https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/marketers-addicted...

Hi, please don't do this. If the comments become just replies saying "I wrote about this on my blog!" with a link, they're unreadable. If you summarized your thoughts and posted it as its own comment, without a self-promotional link, I'm sure it would be very well received.

Sounds fair! Thanks for the feedback. The article did spur an interesting discussion previously on HN when I published it but seems relevant again given the ongoing discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532

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

#848

Post by j00b19 »

Good to see this type of fraud being called out.

I once worked for a company where we were tasked to create "fake users" to make it look like a website was getting way more traffic than it actually did on the premise of doing an "extended load test".

Come to find out years later the person commissioning the fake users was trying to sell the website and wanted to validate their asking price -- with fake users and fake traffic.

Long story short it didn't work out that well because eventually the algorithm running the fake users got entirely blocked out by whoever was the host at the time and the guy wasted his money.

I just wonder how many times things like this have happened and people were very successful from it.

Fake likes and fake posts by fake users who then are clicking real ads seems like the landscape nowadays =/

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

#849

Post by pc86 »

iamacyborg wrote: post #847
pc86 wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, please don't do this. If the comments become just replies saying "I wrote about this on my blog!" with a link, they're unreadable. If you summarized your thoughts and posted it as its own comment, without a self-promotional link, I'm sure it would be very well received.

Sounds fair! Thanks for the feedback. The article did spur an interesting discussion previously on HN when I published it but seems relevant again given the ongoing discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532

This is one of those things that isn't a big deal in isolated instances, but becomes an issue if it gets more prevalent, so it's always hard to know when/if to even say anything :)

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

#850

Post by jordache »

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…

why are you so focused on people using the google calculator? They built it, people will come.

who cares!?

Post reply on HN