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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

#871

Post by specialist »

missedthecue wrote: post #854
choward wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the next major recession is going to be triggered by this bubble popping.

Why would it cause a recession? Google and Facebook would report lower numbers, literally every other company on earth would save more money.

IDK. It's a risk worth chewing on. eg If Google and Facebook tanked, bringing down the stock indexes and all the institutional investors, triggering a sell off... What would the knockon effects be? I don't know (no clue). The 2008-9 crisis largely happened when CDS stuff popped. Is there a similar house of cards on top of FAANG stocks or the digital ad market or...?

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

#872

Post by somedude895 »

collyw wrote: post #755
ajit_singh wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thing is, everybody involved has an interest in making the numbers look good. And it's really easy to make them look good even without faking anything. Just omit the fact that you're counting post view leads, stretch the lookback window, etc

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

#873

Post by somedude895 »

riverdroid wrote: post #660
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…

From my limited experience, resources are better spent to SEO to boost ranking. Also, you can request review on google ads keywords to prevent competitors from using your name, especially if you have a trademark.

You can keep them from using your brand name in their ad text, but you can't keep them from bidding on and showing up on searches for your brand.

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

#874

Post by edgyquant »

rtkwe wrote: post #840
modin wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with kitchen appliances, but not limited to Facebook. I'm not going to buy another refrigerator for at least 10 years, but still I'm treated as Mr Fridge.

Honestly this might be a good thing, it seems to show that ad networks don't have or at least don't provide your actual purchase history to the ad space buyers because given that info they probably wouldn't be spamming someone who just bought a $thing with ads for $thing_but_from_us. As annoying as it is it's probably better than the alternative of ubiquitous access to your purchase history.

Well we know these places buy your credit card history, so it’s more proof that their ad system is shitty and their customers should make a fuss.

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

#875

Post by exikyut »

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…

Serendipitous but of anecdata... was curious where you were located (ah, CA), so googled :) aaaand my keyboard decided I wanted, uhhh, "ozometel" (???).

Did you mean: ozonetel?

Nice.

(Gboard bit me again while typing it out here too lol)

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

#876

Post by nuclearnice1 »

Akababa wrote: post #629
nuclearnice1 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

ozontel.com doesn't exist. Is that a typo or did a competitor really buy ads to a nonexistent domain?

good eye. That’s a typo on my part

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

#877

Post by dylan604 »

jtsiskin wrote: post #521
dylan604 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Nielsen surveys still a thing? Every single device that displays a video signal to you has been tracking what you watch since way before ad tech became a thing. The companies collecting that data then profit from that collection. As an anecdote, I have AT&T Gigaverse. I primarily only watch recorded material on the DVR, and only watch sporting events live. However, once I'm done watching a signal from my "cable b…

This is probably a waste of electricity?

Yes. It is. However, if you can tell me how to turn it off in a manner that actually turns it off without unplugging it, I'm all ears.

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

#878

Post by dockd »

diarrhea wrote: post #833
smnscu wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Windows and macOS support calculations in their respective system-wide search bars (Win key on Windows vs Cmd-Space for Spotlight on macOS). They both support pretty cool stuff like sqrt(9), 13^37, but Spotlight edges it slightly by also support bit shifting like 1 << 10 == 1024.

Is this a Cortana feature? Nothing pops up for me (WIN key), and a search online reveals it seems liked to Cortana, which I seemed to have disabled.

Start typing "calculator" after pressing WIN.

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

#879

Post by somedude895 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #84
dllthomas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wouldn't someone jump at an opportunity to prove the thing/service they provide actually works, unless they were unsure about it themselves? Because everyone is already acting like they know it works, so the only way that experiment can change things is in a way that's bad for the person in question. In that situation, they should (from a local, selfish perspective) be resisting even if they're awfully sure it…

Facebook's ad research team have run a lot of experiments. The goal was to demonstrate an impact of in-store sales from internet advertising. They did the first studies in about 2008-10, and have continued running these studies ever since. They even built a tool so that advertisers can run these studies, and get a sense for the incremental impact of their ad. Google have a similar (less full-featured) system. Really,…

Of course they'd say that.

We've run Google's Local Campaigns, which are supposed to drive brick and mortar store visits, which they measure using GPS and "other signals". I checked with one of our most remote and least frequented stores, to see whether they could see any of the 100 daily visits that Google claimed to have generated, and they couldn't see a thing (avg daily visits were around 80 before during and after the campaign)

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

#880

Post by missedthecue »

specialist wrote: post #871
missedthecue wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it cause a recession? Google and Facebook would report lower numbers, literally every other company on earth would save more money.

IDK. It's a risk worth chewing on. eg If Google and Facebook tanked, bringing down the stock indexes and all the institutional investors, triggering a sell off... What would the knockon effects be? I don't know (no clue). The 2008-9 crisis largely happened when CDS stuff popped. Is there a similar house of cards on top of FAANG stocks or the digital ad market or...?

2008 was bad because of excessive leverage. Top tech companies have little to no debt and there aren't any leveraged securities to do with ads.
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