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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

economist.com

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Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#481

Post by zuminator »

scarface74 wrote: post #376
ineedasername wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated. Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then…

55% of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-... And considering that most people spend 8 hours a day at work, how much personal usage on the web comes from the desktop? How many younger people are using computers for personal use - especially if it a shared family computer. Heck I am a software developer and my personal computer is just sitting in a…

Worldwide contains a lot of places without personal computer friendly economics. The corresponding stat in the USA is about 47% by way of comparison.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/683082/share-of-website-...

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#482

Post by yuliyp »

samwillis wrote: post #94
prasadjoglekar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix models are still the only way to understand the relative performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled garden" that doesn't exchange data with others. FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though. The contra-contraria…

Exactly, as a small business we are completely dependent on the ad platforms internal attribution tools, if they don't work or can't be trusted we won't use them. It's unfortunate that the incredably invasive tracking and profile building has become conflated with ad attribution. For us attribution is essential and we have little interest or use for invasive tracking. We just want to know from which ad a customer con…

What do you mean by conflated? The tracking and profile building is how they correlate results with ad impressions. That this data is then also used for training the models and identifying the user coefficients is just a different use of the same correlation data (a website visit is just another type of ad conversion, after all).

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#483

Post by yuliyp »

oconnore wrote: post #433
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil. I still don't understand your point. The only reason Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down drastically is specifically because of the iOS privacy changes that require user opt in to track across different sites . Fin…

Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals? IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: Come buy my product, you'll love it! Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can c…

Not all purchases come immediately after clicking through an ad. They may come days later, even. Knowing that "this user who purchased this product saw this version of the ad" and "this user saw the other version" is what attribution is.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#485

Post by Ntrails »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #22
samwillis wrote: post #9

As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively…

> Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?

> Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?

I do sometimes find it odd that such a thing is insufficient for tracking sources of traffic in and of itself. No doubt there is a complexity that I have missed

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#486

Post by CrazyStat »

oconnore wrote: post #433
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil. I still don't understand your point. The only reason Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down drastically is specifically because of the iOS privacy changes that require user opt in to track across different sites . Fin…

Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals? IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: Come buy my product, you'll love it! Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can c…

You do not understand correctly.

Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person.

Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#488

Post by jfim »

CrazyStat wrote: post #486
oconnore wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals? IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: Come buy my product, you'll love it! Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can c…

You do not understand correctly. Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then th…

Out of curiosity, does attribution also work if the ad is not clicked?

For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product.

I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#489

Post by DanHulton »

danudey wrote: post #468
erikpukinskis wrote: post #224

I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph. I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web. Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web…

I kind of miss those awful games, honestly. There was one my girlfriend at the time was playing, and I thought it was interesting but kind of tedious, the UI reacted too slow, etc. So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and completely blew past her in progression. Now everyt…

I'm still playing one, actually: https://www.mousehuntgame.com. They transitioned to just being a web game that runs in a FB frame for users that still wanted to play it there, but I haven't had an FB account for years now, and I can still play right at the URL.

"Interesting but kind of tedious" is absolutely a great descriptor, though. It's basically an incremental game that grows at the slowest possible rate you can imagine.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#490

Post by asiachick »

I find it sad that Google's response to privacy is FLoC / Topics API instead of just embracing privacy like Apple. I know Google is an ad company. Still, they mostly control both Android and Chrome which means if they followed Apple's example on privacy they wouldn't be losing much of competitive advantage because if both Android and Chrome were privacy oriented that means there'd be no OS where some competitor could track. In other words, it still seems like they'd be #1 if they switched to content based ads and context (search) but zero tracking.
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