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Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

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Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#811

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

diarrhea wrote: post #745

This is now at 700 comments, and no one is talking about the math in the Twitter "thread". Found no mention in the Twitter replies either. Is it just me or is the math hilariously off? [0]: "10% of $150M is $15M". Correct, but do we need a screenshot of a calculator for that, let alone Google? (why do people rely on an internet connection and Google for this?) [1]: Talking about "2/3", but putting in "0.75". So which…

I use google for maths because it's the fastest thing I can get to and TYPE my maths in without having to open a new application. You can even just type it in the search bar of Chrome/Edge and see the result immediately

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#813

Post by phire »

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

In my experience, the loss of conversion to competitors was not the problem with google ads on your brand.

The problem was phishing attacks on our customers.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#814

Post by ksec »

jariel wrote: post #578
Ericson2314 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortune 500 is a cesspool of insane inefficiency balanced by equally ~~insane rent seeking~~ insanely secure revenue. The sooner everyone understands this, the better.

The answer is not complicated, and the logic on this board is strained by people I think that don't work in marketing. 1) Advertising works. 2) Coke, a sugary drink, is largely kept alive by smart marketing, that involves mostly advertising in the end. 3) Much of advertising is quite wasteful, because it is a fuzzy instrument - but on the whole, good marketing works. 4) There is a lot of self-awareness in the industr…

Agree with most,

>2) Coke, a sugary drink, is largely kept alive by smart marketing, that involves mostly advertising in the end.

Not sure I agree. I haven't seen any Coke Cola Ads for years, not online digital Ads and I rarely consume any traditional media. But I will still buy Coke Cola every once in a while.

They are also on all of the convenience store with decent positional shelf space or visual merchandising. Something I learned that no one on HN actually knows anything about during the discussions of App Store.

Edit: All of my friends can taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi. It is just different. So I was surprised to read comments and youtube video about "blind tasting" on the two. No, I didn't drink Coke because of Ads, I drink it because it taste better. (And some people prefer Pepsi )

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#815

Post by IgorPartola »

ksec wrote: post #810
edgyquant wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook ads are the worst from a users perspective. I bought a floor mat through them once and for the next week all the ads were for floor mats. I just bought one I’m not interested in buying another. I bought a PC chair recently with my credit card, now I see a bunch of ads for PC chairs, again, I don’t need another one.

Well no one has a plausible explanation on it yet but with some of the highest A/B testing ratio and best Data Scientist Amazon too seems to think this works. And yes I agree it sucks.

Hah. I remember shopping for a wireless router and seeing things like “shoppers who bought this item also bought...”. Yes, we all buy three slightly different models of routers. Good job Amazon.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#816

Post by ksec »

Daho0n wrote: post #590
mschuster91 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all . "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather…

>A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years This shows that you are just spreading FUD. A Windows machine is no slower after 10 years than it is the day you bought it. Sure you might have added so much software-crap that the software runs slow (which is easily fixed) but the hardware is exactly as fast after 10 years as Apple hardware is. Do you think Apple builds their hardware out of magic and unic…

>but the hardware is exactly as fast after 10 years as Apple hardware is.

Capacitor, DRAM, Heat Sink, etc.... There are quality difference in hardware. Although the two / three years remarks were definitely exaggerated.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#817

Post by detaro »

mathw wrote: post #749
edgyquant wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook ads are the worst from a users perspective. I bought a floor mat through them once and for the next week all the ads were for floor mats. I just bought one I’m not interested in buying another. I bought a PC chair recently with my credit card, now I see a bunch of ads for PC chairs, again, I don’t need another one.

Amazon enjoy that kind of thing too. Look at a product page, Amazon ads become for that product or similar ones. Buy it, and... they still want me to buy another one. And they wonder why people use ad blockers...

I've seen the theory floated that people return so much stuff that shortly after buying a thing you are indeed most likely to buy another, slightly different one of the same kind, and that explains the weird categories where it happens. (and for lots of things Amazon sells recommending similar items does make some sense, although I would expect a bigger spacing in time sometimes.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#818

Post by ksec »

treis wrote: post #427
ABeeSea wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restaurants only pay because consumers demand it and would not visit the restaurant otherwise. That’s not rent seeking. That’s market forces. And what they pay correlates with how much their customers demand coke/Pepsi.

The rent seeking is buying up competitors until its a duopoly and then protecting that through shenanigans like exclusive agreements. It has nothing to do with consumer demand.

Buying up competitor does not immediately make it a monopoly or duopoly. Especially in industry where barrier of entry are low.

Exclusive / Special agreement with serving only one kind of Soda ( or no Pepsi where there is Coke ) are Anti-Competitive arrangement. Not Rent Seeking.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#819

Post by speeder »

zpeti wrote: post #752
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, FB ads were worse than useless for my business, all they attracted was 90% fraud. Looking at what business Ozonetel is in (i.e. sales are directed towards business owners), I'm not suprised FB ads were also worthless for you. I get the sense FB ads are really only good for things a consumer might impulse buy (e.g. clothing, games, small gifts, etc.) but anything where the user is probably going to do som…

Reading this thread I really start to feel people don't understand what fraud is. You shouldn't be calling it fraud when in the next paragraph you say that FB does work for impulse buys and not "ozonetel" Just because your ads didn't convert, or 90% of the traffic you buy didn't convert, doesn't make it fraud. Fraud is malice, with the intention to defraud someone and not deliver what you promise, with intent. This i…

I think you misunderstood what he wrote.

My business also sell only to other business, and Google kept calling us nagging us to do some "experiments".

One of them involved enabling "display network" ads on mobile.

Like the guy side... it "attracts" fraud.

So, what kind of fraud?

I am not talking about no conversion or no click, I am talking about all our clicks, or almost all to the point it was impossible to tell the difference, were fraudulent, for example most our ad spending was going into a musical keyboard app for kids, that has nothing to do with my business, despite me blocking the category multiple times, the app in question just kept being reuploaded in different categories to avoid bans.

When I went to check out the app Google Play page, it was rated 1 star, and lots of complaints similar to this:

"App is just a fraud, it keeps opening ads in the middle of the song while my toddler is playing to force my toddler to click the ads, then it automatically closes the page that opened and keep running, using all my battery and making my toddler see weird stuff."

So yeah, it is fraud, it is not "failed conversion", it is an app conning toddlers into clicking my ads that are selling stuff that shouldn't be anywhere near a toddler, both the parents and my business were being scammed.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#820

Post by josefx »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #366
jedberg wrote: post #20

There 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-…

Though not an intentional test, we found out what happens when a movie gets a wide release but does not advertise. In 2008, the movie 'Delgo' was released on over 2000 screens with nearly no advertising. Because the production company could not find a distributor, they spent their ad money on renting the screens for a week, with the hope that some people would randomly see it and word of mouth would spread, leading t…

> It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening.

On the other hand it got displaced by Oogieloves which had $40 million in marketing costs. Critics found it mostly bad and the only award it won was for films produced in Brazil. Maybe there was a reason no one wanted to spend ad money on that movie?

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