Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter • Hacker News Board

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#41

Post by fweespeech » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 1:49 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #22

TomGullen wrote: post #15

If you've got a team of smart people willing to drop $500k on a banner campaign and you can accurately measure the results and it's still worth it with all the fraud, good for you. If you're a mom and pop store looking to spend $500 on advertisements they should be made aware there's a good chance they will be defrauded unless they know what they are doing.

This is really important. I really believe small-time projects have no business buying advertising online. It's just so incredibly low value that to scale it to meaningful results takes a lot more money than a person or small group of people bootstrapping their project on a shoestring can muster. For example: my wife has written a sci-fi novel. You can buy an eBook or paperback on Amazon. We would have to spend a few…

As easy as it might be for some people to buy into your narrative, on HN, it realllllly isn't true.

The basic statistics to calculate the RoI on a banner ad spend isn't particularly difficult when you have a software dev/web dev available.

No matter how much click/impression fraud there is...you are trying to track conversions not clicks/impressions at that scale.

If I know I spend $500 and get 10 sales, it isn't a statistically valid sample but its pretty clear if I break even on that $500...I should keep doing it since its essentially free marketing. Similarly, if I'm willing to eat $N per customer acquired via marketing, the same is true as long as $50/customer is equal to or less than my margin per sale + $N. "Sale" in this context is tracking what exactly those 10 people bought over the lifetime of them being a customer, generally.

The only real thing the "already successful" people have is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that honestly doesn't have verifiable value that they use to bullshit clients. Conversion rate is literally the only statistic that is verifiable, cost effective to verify, and able to give you a concrete idea of whether or not the RoI of the campaign is worth it.

We have an on staff statistician and his primary job is just automating the conversion rate calculations, the return-per-ad-campaign, etc. We spend enough money its worth hiring a staff statistician to do that but honestly any programmer with a book on statistics would 90% as good.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#42

Post by maroonblazer » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 1:51 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #24

morley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article's point is that, if you compare banners to physical billboards, then you have the same issue but the billboard still works. So even your theoretical mom and pop store is getting value out of the impressions.

There is no value to "impressions". Impressions != sales. Sales are the only thing we should be counting as value. Focusing on impressions is how we get click-fraud in the first place.

How can I buy a product or service I'm not even aware exists? That's the value of display advertising.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#43

Post by jaawn » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 1:52 PM UTC

forgetsusername wrote: post #38

The fact that no user really enjoys banner advertising occupying their screen real estate, and that most of this advertising can be prevented from displaying with a simply installed browser plugin, makes the whole online advertising economy seem rather tenuous. And yet, some of the largest companies on the planet derive most of their value from it.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Attractive, non-animated banner ads are my "favorite" type of online advertising to encounter. Standard AdSense text ads are ugly and add so much clutter to the page because of the added text.

If ads were usually like this, instead of resource-heavy Flash ads or ugly AdSense ads, I probably wouldn't use any ad blocking software. Static image banner ads are probably the only online advertising I have ever clicked or taken notice of.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#44

Post by jaawn » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 1:55 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #34

morley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article's point is that, if you compare banners to physical billboards, then you have the same issue but the billboard still works. So even your theoretical mom and pop store is getting value out of the impressions.

But when you pay someone to put up a billboard, there isn't a risk that they'll put it by a road they think gets tons of traffic, but is actually just used by one guy being paid by the building owner to drive past it repeatedly.

...and you also don't get thousands/millions of billboards put up for $500. This part of the comparison should probably be ignored as it is more to do with the intrinsic differences between the physical world and the digital "world" than it is with banner ads vs. billboards.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#45

Post by sago » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 1:55 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #26

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #12

I detest advertising. It's literally designed to undermine reason and supplant critical evaluation of ones needs and priorities. As for web advertising, maybe I was the last person on the planet to figure this out but sometime late last year the web just became unusable on most popular news sites. Popover ads that come up before you can read the content and multiple large ads inline with the content and that "no mans…

No, people want to buy things, and there are a lot of things competing for their attention. Advertising, at its most basic, is just how we inform potential customers that we even exist. Yes, some (a lot? Most?) advertisers get way out of hand. But advertising is not itself evil. It's a tool that may or may not be misused.

> It's ... designed to ... supplant critical evaluation of ones needs....

> No, people want to buy things

That's rather the point. The desire to buy things is driven not by critical evaluation of need, but by psychological trickery that falsely associates buying stuff with a whole range of actual needs.

If ads promoted critical evaluation of a person's needs in relation to available products, that would be a different thing entirely. It is quaint, but I can't help think naive to suggest that the core of advertising is informing customers, and the psychological trickery is 'misuse'.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#46

Post by exelius » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:06 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #24

morley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article's point is that, if you compare banners to physical billboards, then you have the same issue but the billboard still works. So even your theoretical mom and pop store is getting value out of the impressions.

There is no value to "impressions". Impressions != sales. Sales are the only thing we should be counting as value. Focusing on impressions is how we get click-fraud in the first place.

No, but if you're a brand marketer, you need to be able to perform demand planning. If $(ad spend) > (impressions) * (conversion rate) * (price) then you do it. You can't get around counting impressions. But it's not important that impressions are accurate; just that they behave roughly like they have in the past.

What the article is saying is that there's an upper limit on the amount of fraud that can be perpetrated without showing up in other metrics, and at current prices, brand marketers just don't care. Because brand marketers don't care about impressions; they care about P&L at the brand level. If a banner ad campaign drives top line brand revenue, that's all they need it to do.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#47

Post by _lce0 » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:06 PM UTC

There's a subtle difference measuring who saw a road billboard and a website banner. On the former you must spend your own resources, on the later it's paid from your visitors' wallet (internet connection + power + cpu time)

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#48

Post by jaawn » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:10 PM UTC

I hadn't considered this article's perspective before, but I think it is very compelling. A lot of commenters (and likely readers) are probably focusing heavily on the perceived impact of the "fraud" of reporting X amount of impressions and/or clicks, when only Y amount of them were "real." They feel like they are paying for X but only getting Y. I think the simple point this article effectively made is that ad companies have continuously reduced prices so that their clients are actually only paying for Y, or at least they are benefiting from a discount which observes the uncertainty.

I think the basic assumption has been that, even though we know the total number of "impressions" is exaggerated, the number is correlated with the "real" number. So long as that assumption is usually true, this is no more a case of fraud than Airlines' reward "miles".

To be fair though, larger clients who blanket the web with ads for a campaign have the advantage of spreading the risk over a large number of websites and times. The people most impacted by impression-based ad runs are those who can only afford the smallest campaigns.

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#49

Post by moron4hire » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

fweespeech wrote: post #41

moron4hire wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really important. I really believe small-time projects have no business buying advertising online. It's just so incredibly low value that to scale it to meaningful results takes a lot more money than a person or small group of people bootstrapping their project on a shoestring can muster. For example: my wife has written a sci-fi novel. You can buy an eBook or paperback on Amazon. We would have to spend a few…

As easy as it might be for some people to buy into your narrative, on HN, it realllllly isn't true. The basic statistics to calculate the RoI on a banner ad spend isn't particularly difficult when you have a software dev/web dev available. No matter how much click/impression fraud there is...you are trying to track conversions not clicks/impressions at that scale. If I know I spend $500 and get 10 sales, it isn't a s…

I am talking about ROI. If you're bootstrapping a project, I doubt you can get a good enough ROI in online advertising for your first 100 sales. If I had the kind of money to make online advertising work for the conversion rates I've seen on my projects, I wouldn't be trying to start a business in the first place.

If you were starting a project on your own, tomorrow, and the only money you had was the money in your own savings, what would you do? You said $500 gets you 10 sales. Where? How?

Re: Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

#50

Post by moron4hire » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

maroonblazer wrote: post #42

moron4hire wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no value to "impressions". Impressions != sales. Sales are the only thing we should be counting as value. Focusing on impressions is how we get click-fraud in the first place.

How can I buy a product or service I'm not even aware exists? That's the value of display advertising.

There are more ways to advertise than online.