How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions • Hacker News Board

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#61

Post by appleiigs » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #13

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they perfectly know that more than 1/5 of their ads expense is having "null" results but overall they are ok to spend the 100% price for less than 80% "real" impressions Don't ad companies charge fees as a function of spend? The chumps in this chain are (a) shareholders and (b) the managers hiring the agencies. (Counterfactual: if this spend is that useless, it should be possible to start a competitor that focuses…

> Counterfactual: if this spend is that useless, it should be possible to start a competitor that focuses on high-ROI advertising. Exactly! And that's where online ads, user tracking, online-to-offline came in. The whole reason why it gained so much traction in the past 20 years is that it began to offer better tracking and results than other forms of advertising. If Google (or Facebook, or anyone else) stands still…

> If Google (or Facebook, or anyone else) stands still and lets fraudsters abuse their ad networks, the return on their ads will drop, opening space for their competitors.

I wish corporations would be so forward looking, but they are mostly short-sighted, worrying about the next quarters results.

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#62

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 1:14 AM UTC

cf498 wrote: post #49

milesskorpen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond this, ad spend ASSUMES some level of fraud. It's baked into your ROI numbers, at least for performance advertising. Probably the main people getting stiffed are the publishers who are offering real traffic, and getting a smaller share of dollars relative to the incremental value they deliver.

Can you point me towards credible work determining ROI for online advertisement? Whats the current state of the art? edit: I should rephrase, this sounds hostile. I know there is wide work in influencing people to buy stuff when influenced in person. The interpersonal dynamics are widely studied. I also know, that chumming content and goating works to gather more views, but that can only be turned into a ROI by peopl…

[deleted]

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#63

Post by downandout » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

cf498 wrote: post #49

milesskorpen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond this, ad spend ASSUMES some level of fraud. It's baked into your ROI numbers, at least for performance advertising. Probably the main people getting stiffed are the publishers who are offering real traffic, and getting a smaller share of dollars relative to the incremental value they deliver.

Can you point me towards credible work determining ROI for online advertisement? Whats the current state of the art? edit: I should rephrase, this sounds hostile. I know there is wide work in influencing people to buy stuff when influenced in person. The interpersonal dynamics are widely studied. I also know, that chumming content and goating works to gather more views, but that can only be turned into a ROI by peopl…

There are two distinct areas of online advertising: performance marketing, and brand advertising. I'm a performance marketer. I make a profit only when ads result in conversions - usually sales or signups for trial offers, but in some cases we do lead generation campaigns for clients as well. We spend high 5/low 6 figures per month, mostly on Facebook ads, with a monthly ROAS (return on ad spend) that beats Berkshire Hathaway's annual returns. The idea that online advertising cannot work is absurd.

The schemes mentioned in articles like this are almost exclusively targeted at brand marketers. My guess is the problem lies in the way that large brands incentivize the people running their campaigns, because the technology exists to knock out the vast majority of this type of fraud. Companies like Coke hire ad firms that send them reports about impressions, and they are thus incentivized to not pay attention to traffic quality, and just maximize impressions. That has to be the problem, because just my internal traffic quality tools that I have written would have shutdown ad delivery on the sites sending such obviously bad traffic within a few clicks from each referrer - and I don't claim to have written the most sophisticated filter out there. There are many ways to do reality checks on traffic, on a per-referrer basis, and cut out much of this stuff. Webview traffic (the kind being taken advantage of here) is among the easiest to detect.

As to your question about measuring ROAS it's simple for performance marketers. Take your ad spend and compare it to revenue. I'm not sure that brand marketers have a reasonable way of determining ROAS, either online or in the physical world. I suppose they could take brand recognition surveys and compare before/after a given campaign, but that is hardly an exact science.

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#64

Post by jlarocco » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 2:13 AM UTC

canadapups wrote: post #37

janesvilleseo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that they do it. It’s that they allow it. Not outright, but they don’t go out of their way to suppress/stop it anymore more than anybody else.

When it comes to email spam or fake email accounts, Google not only allows it, they enable it. One scammer can setup thousands of gmail accounts and google doesn't blink an eye. Gmail also allows "scammer+1@gmail.com" and "scammer+2@gmail" to be the same account. I've reported obvious gmail abuse to Google through their channels, but nothing. Same scammer keeps coming back with new email accounts.

Tagging email with + has been a feature of email forever, and has nothing to do with Google. Their service would be broken if they didn't support it.

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#65

Post by simtam » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 2:15 AM UTC

cf498 wrote: post #49

milesskorpen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond this, ad spend ASSUMES some level of fraud. It's baked into your ROI numbers, at least for performance advertising. Probably the main people getting stiffed are the publishers who are offering real traffic, and getting a smaller share of dollars relative to the incremental value they deliver.

Can you point me towards credible work determining ROI for online advertisement? Whats the current state of the art? edit: I should rephrase, this sounds hostile. I know there is wide work in influencing people to buy stuff when influenced in person. The interpersonal dynamics are widely studied. I also know, that chumming content and goating works to gather more views, but that can only be turned into a ROI by peopl…

Shall I point you towards some keywords: ghost ads, conversion lift, brand lift studies.

But what does it have to do with the ad fraud?

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#66

Post by Eridrus » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 3:30 AM UTC

canadapups wrote: post #37

janesvilleseo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that they do it. It’s that they allow it. Not outright, but they don’t go out of their way to suppress/stop it anymore more than anybody else.

When it comes to email spam or fake email accounts, Google not only allows it, they enable it. One scammer can setup thousands of gmail accounts and google doesn't blink an eye. Gmail also allows "scammer+1@gmail.com" and "scammer+2@gmail" to be the same account. I've reported obvious gmail abuse to Google through their channels, but nothing. Same scammer keeps coming back with new email accounts.

So, you've basically outsourced your spam detection to Google, and you're here complaining that you have to do a few small things on your end?

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#67

Post by milesskorpen » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:15 AM UTC

cf498 wrote: post #49

milesskorpen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond this, ad spend ASSUMES some level of fraud. It's baked into your ROI numbers, at least for performance advertising. Probably the main people getting stiffed are the publishers who are offering real traffic, and getting a smaller share of dollars relative to the incremental value they deliver.

Can you point me towards credible work determining ROI for online advertisement? Whats the current state of the art? edit: I should rephrase, this sounds hostile. I know there is wide work in influencing people to buy stuff when influenced in person. The interpersonal dynamics are widely studied. I also know, that chumming content and goating works to gather more views, but that can only be turned into a ROI by peopl…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225474/booking-holdings-...

Booking Holdings, for example, spent $4.1 billion dollars in 2017 on performance advertising. This would generally mean they had an ROI target (e.g., each dollar of spend should return $1.2 in revenue). The method of measuring this would generally come from an agreement between the marketing team and the finance team — it might require some assumptions on things like LTV or the value of certain actions, but the finance team would be major participants in determining this value.

There's no way Booking or similar massive advertisers are spending billions of dollars without a very very clear POV on the return they're receiving.

I think a lot of the "state of the art" that you're asking for won't be shared with the public by these companies.

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#68

Post by milesskorpen » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

rayvy wrote: post #52

milesskorpen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond this, ad spend ASSUMES some level of fraud. It's baked into your ROI numbers, at least for performance advertising. Probably the main people getting stiffed are the publishers who are offering real traffic, and getting a smaller share of dollars relative to the incremental value they deliver.

> Probably the main people getting stiffed are the publishers who are offering real traffic Unless you're a large premium publisher like say a NYT, a Techcrunch, or even a Forbes, more of your traffic probably wont be real , and you have little to no control over that. The online ad/traffic buying game is so mind-blowingly convoluted, you can be a small publisher (foo.com), having your site spammed, and what little r…

I guess I don't think the advertisers are getting stiffed — yes, they pay a CPM for 1000 impressions where some meaningful percentage are fake, but that should be baked into their models. The effective CPM for whatever the real number of impressions is is still ROI positive.

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#69

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:39 AM UTC

milesskorpen wrote: post #67

cf498 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point me towards credible work determining ROI for online advertisement? Whats the current state of the art? edit: I should rephrase, this sounds hostile. I know there is wide work in influencing people to buy stuff when influenced in person. The interpersonal dynamics are widely studied. I also know, that chumming content and goating works to gather more views, but that can only be turned into a ROI by peopl…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225474/booking-holdings-... Booking Holdings, for example, spent $4.1 billion dollars in 2017 on performance advertising. This would generally mean they had an ROI target (e.g., each dollar of spend should return $1.2 in revenue). The method of measuring this would generally come from an agreement between the marketing team and the finance team — it might require some assumptions o…

As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, however, there is a big difference between performance marketing, where it's relatively easy to track conversion, vs brand marketing.

In fact, a huge reason Booking is so successful is because their sites convert at a higher rate than their competitors (which they themselves attribute to an early and maniacal focus on A/B testing), and thus they are able to bid more for travel-related search terms on Google as each click is worth more to them. It's pretty easy for them to track what percentage of Google AdWords click-throughs result in a completed booking.

Brand advertising, though, has much fuzzier metrics, and the incentives for brand advertisers is to show that they have a larger impact than they actually do.

Re: How a Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Exploited Android Phones to Steal Millions

#70

Post by Donzo » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

janesvilleseo wrote: post #34

da02 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fraud does Google do?

It’s not that they do it. It’s that they allow it. Not outright, but they don’t go out of their way to suppress/stop it anymore more than anybody else.

I'm a small to medium sized publisher and I've had to travel through Google's compliance funnels more than I would have liked.

I've never had any compliance issues with any other advertising network.

Google works hard to keep the ecosystem healthy because it's good for their long-term interests. But of course, their systems are not perfect.