What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.
In adtech you have to spend all the budget a client gives you. They get very pissy if you don't and it's not unheard of for clients to penalise you several multiples of the unspent budget.
Yeah, because their bonuses are based on spending all the allocated money (which is insane, so standard corporate behaviour).
If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…
> If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions Others have already pointed out that this is actually impossible. The big ad platforms charge on impressions you can setup any targeting you want but they charge on impressions that's it.
So Facebook charge based on impressions, but they rank based on conversions which tends to reduce the impression billing problem.
When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…
I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in…
Amidst all this fraud there must be a huge opportunity for a startup with a different model that actually delivers verifiable results (eg. higher fee for a cut of affiliated sales would better align incentives and perhaps encourage a reduction of unwanted spam to end users).
When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…
Advertising is corrupt, but much of business (and public perception) is corrupt in a much similar way. What you are seeing is a lack of integrity shared by business leaders who don't ask for rigor when their minions report higher rates of "engagement". There's too much of an incentive for the people in charge to be satisfied with someone telling them that something is "up", and too much incentive for those coming up…
Mr. Corneroffice has an incentive to catch BS like that, which is that aside from subscriber numbers, he's probably accountable for retention numbers, or even revenue numbers. If he accepts the fake numbers this month, his retention numbers are going to nosedive next month and he's going to look for a neck to choke. If he's content to fake all his numbers, his boss will have a similar counter-incentive, and so on all the way to the top until you reach investors, who are strongly incentivized to detect bullshit, if only to unload the stock onto some other sucker.
12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem, not a tech problem. All the major solutions are well known but not implemented because of the massive effect it would have on business for everyone down the chain for advertisers. The entire industry meets every year. They can figure this out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives are not aligned for that to happen.
So basically the industry is incentivized to waste money and hide this from the boss, even within companies that are spending on ads?
Mostly yes, but also common in many other industries (with different kinds of spending).
Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of them (including google) is supported by charging directly for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical phone, software subscription, etc.)
I'm referring here to Instagram / Facebook. How are you going to send your wedding or vacation or dog photos to your network? Mass email? The social platforms have a utility for most people at this point.
I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in…
See I run a DSP and I'm not sure what incentive we would have to be against this? My primary goal is to keep advertisers spending, and the better their results the longer they hang around. I have a vested interest in eliminating fraud if followed to that conclusion. Then again we focus on performance campaigns not brand awareness so we're a bit a different. Most of our inventory too comes from large sandboxed audio a…
When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…
that almost sounds whistleblower status. If they are a public company, and they are knowingly using bad data to look more financially successful, there may be something there.
I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in…
A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans. I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically ta…
Hmm, that raises the question whether marketing can be made cost effective. One would need to get the cat excited about a product that it can somehow instruct its human caretaker about...
It is definitely hard to compare one site ranking vs another and definitively conclude that AdSense made one rank higher than just Analytics, but in every case AdSense+Analytics sites correlated with a better ranking/.
Wouldn't another possibility simply be that that sites which invest in those 2 technologies also invest in SEO?
All of the cases were sites that were doing SEO (on- and off-site). There were lots of differences between them, so never an apples to apples, but Analytics + AdSense > AdSense only > Analytics only.
It was very compelling results. Never did a GA ONLY site improve better than an AS only or an AS + GA.