Does the idiocy of these companies surprise anyone? I had people tell me I can't stream videos... here it is... thousands of paying customers every month. The difference between Uber and I? I'm profitable. I'm coming after Udemy and Pluralsight. https://www.codehawke.com/all_access.html
Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
481–490 of 933 posts
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#482>Stopped [some] Spending on Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why? [Added "some" for clarity.] Let me try to restate the author's article because he presents it in a confusing way. The issue is that both Google and Facebook have "core ad tech" that works decently with proven ROI -- and they both have "additional ad tech inventory" (a.k.a the partners/affiliates) that's much lower quality : Facebook "quality" ad placemen…
Just because the ad placement is low quality (eg audience network) doesn’t mean they can’t produce a positive ROI. Keep in mind, Lower quality comes with a lower price, so it makes sense for some brands, and some products. The reason people dont get a positive return on low quality ad placement is that they often use the same ad, or adverse the same product as for the higher quality ad placement. These ads and product often needs to be tailored for that specific placement.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually found your product and bought it. But that honestly doesn't seem that important compared to the other metrics... Wait, why wouldn't that be important? It seems like the most important question since it asks whether advertising has any significant impact at all.
The thing about the "advertising doesn't matter" argument is that there are situations where advertising absolutely matters - when a company is just starting out and there's no way they can get organic referrals, when the public is unaware of their existence, etc. Moreover, most companies started small at some point so advertising and maintaining advertising made sense up to a point. And if we look at those companies…
Ad spend by incumbents will also drive up the price of advertising in general since it's a limited resource, making an uphill battle for the smaller competitors where it matters. It's another moat.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#484You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another. You don't have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty. All big companies do this. Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually…
"You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another." Nope. You need a unique id for an AB test AND apple wont give this to you. No company is going to give you a click/tap id. Android might. This is so inaccurate I don't know where to start. Apple has turned off all unique ids that work across an AB test [1] cross platf…
For native Android you 100% have access to an Android "device id". I set this up on an Android app we delivered. There's even companies that pay other Android apps to host their code inside the app, co-related that ID to other data available to the web (e.g. IP address, installed fonts, etc) to provide a very good guess of a user's device id via the web.
Apple had something similar, but you're right they're starting to turn it off. In my past life in Adtech we noticed the click through rate of users with Android user agents were a lot higher on certain campaigns than iOS users for this reason.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come up with some new product that requires some personal data for usage (eg. age, gender/sex, address). Start to advertise this in just one country to one demographics, and look how many out-of-target orders you get. Maybe it's even enough if you simply just sell it via mail order, you can then look at the addresses. There's probably a natural information spread in any market (word of mouth, trade magazines), and th…
For most vendors, not possible to accurately target age/sex/address online. They will certainly sell you the option, but they won't tell you how accurate the data is - or they will provide it a high accuracy with extremely low coverage. To see this in action - spend a day watching pitbull videos on youtube and see how many spanish language ads you'll get.
Hm. How about simply buying ad space at a few local newspaper sites? Sure, it's noisy as hell, but maybe still a decent proxy variable.
Plus, maybe it's possible to somehow offer a coupon for those who buy via the ad, and so on.
After all the ad/tracking industry probably have a thousand tricks to increase accuracy of this.
But, yeah, I'm not holding my breath for a conclusive answer on this.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly. It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around h…
The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. If downvote is opposed with upvote and upvote is understood to mean "I agree" or "this is informative" then downvote would be expected to mean "I disagree" or "this is bunk". It's semantically misleading.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#487There 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-…
>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.
This may be true but it's a separate issue than the fraudulent clicks.
Brand advertisement (the kind you are talking about, as opposed to closed-loop direct advertising) is an investment in a brand, that doesn't get paid off in a day, or a week, or a month, or even a year. It adds fractions of a penny onto a customers value, every day from today into eternity. It's an investment in your mind, but the long time horizon makes it, as you point out, nigh impossible to measure ROI.
However, this is one of those cases where despite being immeasurable, it still works.
Imagine doing a study on low-fat or low-fat diets and trying to measure health outcomes like lifespan, or heart disease, or cancer after just one month. You can't do it. The best you can do is measure markers of these outcomes, like insulin resistance, blood triglycerides etc. Brand advertising is similar. You measure markers of long-term purchase intent. It's not perfect.
And just like actually doing a long-term study of diet for example is riddled with confounding variables and very hard (nigh impossible) to do well, so it is with advertising.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect the HN sentiment comes from a common feeling among techies that they are somehow immune to influence from advertising, combined with a high adoption rate of ad blockers. I don't believe this at all. The reason I am skeptical of the effectiveness of advertising is despite engaging with dozens of people over the years, I have never had a single person provide me with convincing evidence that it works. Inste…
I manage advertising spend for a small technology company. We spend in the 10's of thousands per month on Google and Facebook. We can measure customer acquisition cost and we do using normal tools like Google Analytics. We've had days where we pause our campaigns, and we get fewer new customers that day. We've had platforms pause for a period of time because of some issue, and we get fewer new customers over that per…
Thank you. Even if it's only one data point, I appreciate it.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#489>Stopped [some] Spending on Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why? [Added "some" for clarity.] Let me try to restate the author's article because he presents it in a confusing way. The issue is that both Google and Facebook have "core ad tech" that works decently with proven ROI -- and they both have "additional ad tech inventory" (a.k.a the partners/affiliates) that's much lower quality : Facebook "quality" ad placemen…
Text-based search ads - are completely different from - network banners ads.
They are used for different reasons.
100% of ad buyers, marketing people know this, it's not an insight.
Nobody is 'accidentally spending money' on banner ads, when they thought they'd be spending money on Text ads.
Also - it's very straight forward to apply different measurements to FB ads in and out of network.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly. It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around h…
> It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring.
I don't have an opinion on what "correct" downvoting culture would be, one way or the other, but - if you say "contributions that don't add much to a discussion" should be downvoted, then isn't a "boring" comment precisely one that _should_ be downvoted?