Pretty sure Twitter has an ad metrics problem too. As I wrote last year:
> When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign.
> The support team at Twitter Ads told me they are legitimate clicks, but people are probably clicking the image in the tweet to expand the tweet or image, not expecting it to take them to a different site. As soon as they realize they’ve just clicked an outgoing link, they go back or close the tab before our site and Google Analytics script even has time to load.
I am a direct response marketer, and only manage ad campaigns that provably generate revenue. Over $10,000,000 spend across more than a dozen companies. I can tell you that for many products Facebook absolutely outperforms Google.
I’m not surprised. Google shows me ads for things I’m searching for, but Facebook shows me ads for things I wouldn’t even know to look for. I can definitely see how one or the other would be better depending on the type of product.
On the whole, Google shows me two types of ads: things I don't want, and things that are competing with non-ad links to the same product.
I can understand why Google gets bidding wars over people searching for "vacuum cleaner" or "cheap web hosting", but for most other things I can't quite imagine the use case. I either don't want to buy something, or I know who I'm buying from.
Facebook seems much better placed to show things like "hey, you liked this band and you live in this town, did you know they're coming next month?" On very rare occasions, FB actually manages to achieve the theoretical role of ads as "notifying people about mutually beneficial transactions". And when they don't, I can at least see that the ads are having effects like "making me aware of a consulting firm" that a marketer might value. Meanwhile, I've never seen a Google search ad I valued, and I don't know if I've ever seen an Ad Words ad I valued.
(Actually, I've benefited from Youtube ads occasionally also. But only ever for learning about new-release music, movies, or games.)
Search intent matters and FB + Google ads are shown in different contexts. Of course the FB vs Google comparison in aggregate is useful but performance varies across markets and also depends on the attribution model.
For sure there are people who are careful with their spending and smart with their marketing.
But there's been too many reports of bot activity, fake likes, fake followers in those platforms that I'm sure many companies and marketing departments fall for them.
Not everyone does as good job as you Im sure.
Google, as far as I know, was never caught in dark ui patterns or fake number reports to generate revenue. They don't seem to need it.
Surely though that's different from fake likes assuming the advertiser is aware of it.
I feel like YouTube by now is more similar to TV advertising, you take in consideration that people could just have the tv on in the background while doing something else or going around the house. Unless you don't know what you are doing with your advertising budget of course.
I don't if advertisers are thinking of it like TV but I believe you're right. Many people I know, including myself, leave videos running while working it gaming. It's not our primary focus, but it's there in the background.
Of course I run a malware blocker, I mean ad blocker, so I'm not seeing those ads served by malware networks.
No, the problem is exclusive to autoplay (in fact, I recall youtube adding some click through pause into videos, but I don't see them now).
I'm no advertiser, but simply introducing autoplay into the mix is kinda fraud imo.
With hindsight advertisers must be aware of fake likes and such too.
Every product is different. When I worked in automotive radio and physical mails were the most efficient, because there is a huge market of rather old people. For the 25-40 segment facebook can be very powerful though.
I too can support with anecdotal evidence for that (my wife). One of her habits is browsing Facebook ads and she end up actually buying stuff from those sites.
Mostly fashion related as those are something you don't search for but an impulse purchase. Fb is mostly like window shopping or street shopping - you have no idea what you want but you like something and take it. I on the other hand if I have to buy something will google it or go to amazon directly.
Eh... companies price this all into the spend. Honestly, especially in an auction style ad platform, a certain amount of fraud is tolerated as long as at the end of the day we spend $1 and get $1.20 back.
It seems self evident that Facebook (and to a much lesser degree, Twitter) are major competitors to Google in the ad market.
It's not like TV where the money is spent and you have no way to measure the results. Many people are seeing results with Facebook and Instagram ads. So they are spending.
Google AdWords is the king of selling you something you are looking for. But Facebook and Instagram are highly effective at selling you stuff you didn't know you wanted. Not to mention political and spend.
There's always going to be a ~30% dropoff between clicks and analytics because people click on ads, realize they've done it, and either push back or close the popped-up page. It's even higher for video. I work for a company that is a DSP, ad server, and analytics, and I've been investigating these click discrepancies. It's surprising how many places this can all go wrong.
It gets especially worse when there are redirect after redirect to other ad servers, and you lose your tracking macros because the trafficker hasn't configured their landing page tracking macros correctly for each ad server redirect.
> It gets especially worse when there are redirect after redirect to other ad servers
Yes this is very wrong, but not because your tracking loses accuracy.
You realize that this sort of careless trail you send your users along is exactly how people get served malware from ads right? I mean you admit yourself you lose track of where they end up so who knows what they get served or redirected to.
Your logs may be split across different services, and some of those services may be difficult to access. For example, if you're using a CDN, many hits won't go to your server.
Off-the-shelf analytics solutions have a ton of heuristics and in-house knowledge built up over decades that help deal with inherently janky data. For example: over half of all internet traffic these days is bots. All modern analytics solutions know how to discriminate bot traffic (to an acceptable extent), you would have to re-create that or get heavily skewed data. As another example, inferring geography from IP: Google, Adobe, etc maintain their own in-house databases for this sort of thing.
Analytics solutions can be configured to send data for interactions that don't involve a page load. There are a lot of interactions that won't put anything into the logfile unless you re-invent tracking beacons. The situation gets more complicated for Single-Page Applications for both types of tracking, but generally the solutions for off-the-shelf technologies are more understood and can be applied more generally.
For another thing, cost and ease of access. Google Analytics has a free version. And for businesses, many of the people who want data work in marketing or UX, not the sort of people who have various types of expertise to dig around in logfiles. At the level of effort it would take for someone to build a logfile tool or learn to dig through the data, GA would offer more benefit at lower cost.
For a solo dev or small team running a not-too-complicated website, logfile parsing may make sense. For a large-enough organization, a custom solution that addresses their specific needs may make sense. But aside from a few sweet spots, most off-the-shelf tools are going to give a better benefit at lower cost. This is especially true of companies that have different teams with different needs and skills, and that benefit from integrations with other tools (like testing or personalization platforms).
Also, slightly-less related... analytics load time is not always a dominant factor in not recording clicks. Most clicks on ads go through a chain of redirects through a half-dozen different services that set cookies, read cookies, attach data, increment counters, etc. There's a large window where a user can cancel navigation before a request is made to the website. Analytics should run pretty fast, unless there is a long time in-between when your server receives the initial request and when the user begins to receive HTML.
I understand the reasons better, it’s unfortunate and slightly depressing to me that the community hasn’t been able to come up with a better solution. Particularly as the google analytics approaches involves giving data up to a 3rd party for processing.
Google has an Analytics product so that website owners can see how much money they make from AdWords, thus encouraging them to spend more money on AdWords. GA is a strategic complement to Google's advertising services, and that is how they derive value from it.
Google does not dip into GA data for their own uses. Post-GDPR this is extra-explicit because they take pains to clarify how much they are not a Controller and only a Processor, but this has always been in their TOS. Frankly, most people's GA implementations are dumpster fires and trying to make use of that data would be more cost and less benefit than punching themselves in the dick.
Google does look at GA data on occasion, but only for the purposes of debugging and for ensuring compliance with the TOS (e.g. they will flag accounts that contain PII).
Yes but you’re saying twitter say their metrics are off by a factor of 5 because it’s not running the GA JS. If you wanted to properly investigate that looking at the server logs would probably give a better idea in this case.
I guess with serverless you should be able to see this either with your own logging or perhaps on AWS with Cloudwatch? (no idea as I’ve not used it).
I do exactly that behavior all the time. It's difficult to tell whether an image will expand when I click it on Twitter app for iPhone. When it opens a browser window that I wasn't expecting, I close immediately.
> they are legitimate clicks, but people are probably clicking the image in the tweet to expand the tweet or image, not expecting it to take them to a different site. As soon as they realize they’ve just clicked an outgoing link, they go back or close the tab before our site and Google Analytics script even has time to load.
I do this a lot on Wikipedia on my phone. My workflow is to open a new browser tab (Wikipedia is the homepage) and hit the magnifying glass in the corner to search. But shortly after the page loads, it reconfigures itself so I end up hitting a link to somewhere else. (Wikimedia, I think.)
It is incredibly annoying.
The equivalent on a desktop is a badly behaved site (such as... gmail) which first loads a bunch of stuff and then, only then, focuses a text field, so you end up typing the second half of your password into the field that just got focused.
I am not in favor of letting webpages suddenly adjust their own layout or move your focus once they've already loaded or you've already picked a focus.
Just compare the other comments in this very thread:
> I do exactly that behavior all the time.
> Can't disagree with Twitter's reasoning there, anecdotally I myself have done that many times.
> I spoke with a someone recently who uses gmail on his Android device. An ad at the top that resembles an email appears about a second after his real emails appear, timed perfectly to interrupt his attempt to tap and read his first email. Of course he immediately goes back if he makes the mistake
> I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it
It happens all the time. This is an issue with dysfunctional webpage design/layout.
These comments feel oversold.. but one could agree with the dysfunctional by design revenue generation. I don’t think you need to be dysfunctional here.
The explanation is solid, but that doesn't excuse Twitter. If you charge for clicks you should do your best to make sure that the clicks are genuine, not design a user interface where 95% of clicks are caused by bad interface design.
I spoke with a someone recently who uses gmail on his Android device. An ad at the top that resembles an email appears about a second after his real emails appear, timed perfectly to interrupt his attempt to tap and read his first email. Of course he immediately goes back if he makes the mistake, but google probably still charges the advertiser for a click.
(This doesn't happen on my phone but I am more likely to have configured it than your average user.)
I lived in Spain for a summer and my roommates there were definitively non-techy and had relatively slow internet.
I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it, which with slow internet takes more time too and probably doesn't look as much like a bounce.
It's the perfect cover for Google. All the techies who would get outraged by something like this generally have fast internet and ad-blockers.
For me, that first "email" is not the ad itself, but the "promos" folder, tapping it only expands the promos folder, not any of the ads. It does appear a ~second after opening the app though. However, a ton of other things cause the same shifting-as-I-tap problem (not just ads) causing me to mistap on the wrong e-mail all the time. So it seems like garbage UI design more than anything else. UIs moving around while trying to interact with them is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Happens to me. Sometimes out of reflex I'll accidentally click it two or three more times before I have to resist muscle memory and wait for the page to completely finished jumping around.
It is near impossible to properly meter ad shows on the web. An ad can load somewhere in the footer of the page and never seen, and it will be logged as a show.
If some scripting is involved to log scrolling, and logging it over ajax, it will not help for the fact that when the page is being rendered, footer may for a split second appear within the viewport.
The later, is what makes the lion share of contention around video ads.
Did you exclude Twitter Display ads? Because those are absolute shit that skew every metric in the wrong direction. And of course they are turned on by default.
We had a similar problem and it was all down to Twitter Display. Once we turned those off, the metrics improved immensely.
Honest question - who here has done Twitter ads and got positive ROI? AdWords/Bing/Facebook all seem to "work", but I've never found Twitter to be fruitful..at all.
I've run lead gen campaigns there that were almost comparable to Facebook but can't they "worked".
I think the problem is, as an advertiser, treating it like I do the other social channels. I don't feel like it's similar to Facebook at all and has become even more different over time. Pinterest has similarly fragmented.
I see using content as remarketing ads to be effective there. But that's the hardest ad-use-case to prove ROI on, in my experience.
Also, I thought something like 40% of browsers run adblockers, and possibly a disproportionate amount in your demographics. That could explain the bulk if the difference.
That’s a good point! Twitter’s tracking is almost perfect with their link shortener. I wonder if/when adblockers will take care of that as well (resolve the link once then cache it).
There's actually no need to resolve it. At least so far, they put the full url in the page source. I have a proof of concept extension already coded up for removing the redirects. I plan on adding a bunch of other sites (google, facebook, whatever else) and releasing it.
> Twitter’s tracking is almost perfect with their link shortener.
Perfect for measuring raw HTTP requests, sure, but if you post a link to a brand new, zero-follower account you'll still get a few dozen bots that are doing link analysis against the Twitter firehose (well, a random sampling of it).
I personally try to make sure that nobody in my circles, techie or otherwise, surfs without an ad blocker. This irresponsible 3rd party advertising bullshit has got to stop.
We have people in this very thread openly talking about deploying third party ad scripts that send their users on chains of redirects that they admit to losing track of, and the only thing they see wrong with this is that they can't accurately track their users, not that they very probably sent their users down whatever rabbit/shithole serving malware, miners or drive-by downloaders.
Online advertising is a disgusting wasteland and many people coming out of the woodworks in this thread, working in the industry, are knowingly, unknowingly or usually willingly blindly working to create this situation as it is. Dollar bills make for very good blinders, especially if it's your living.
I have mentioned that several times before, but I always believed that FB's but also Google's metrics are at least borderline fraudulent. Inflated by bots and apps that simulate DAUs and clicks.
I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own site. I believe FB is same.
I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.
Yes and no. Conventional wisdom inside ad tech is that fraud rates are about 30% on average. Typically lower for video. So there's real value in there (in terms of ROI for the advertiser) but there's effectively an entire margin of fraud where advertisers are bearing much of that cost.
Video ads are intolerable. Whenever they exist, they spawn an arms war of dark patterns to get and stop them from auto-playing, without warning, at maximum volume. The Facebook Android app is gawdawful for this; I just discovered that you can put it into some sort of a data-saving mode, which seems to stop auto-play for the moment... but time will tell. And though we're supposed to be bagging on Facebook here, YouTube is really bad with some of their in-the-middle of content ad spots that I've been noticing lately. I'll be watching a peaceful little Timeline documentary, and right in the middle of an interview the TV starts blaring pop music for something I am never going to buy. Especially galling when it's something produced for cable TV, so it has commercial breaks built into it naturally, where the ads could be inserted unobtrusively.
I think what’s shocking is how awful a lot of the targeting is. Even before I started getting super aggressive about blocking all trackers, I regularly got fed ads for products and services I didn’t need, and in languages I couldn’t understand.
The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?
> The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?
I'm guessing there's a good reason for this. Did you visit the company's website? And did you buy in person? If so, you're seeing the online to offline problem: specifically, it's hard to correlate your online data with your offline data, so it's hard to tell the difference between someone who already bought a ring from somebody who hasn't yet bought a ring. And I'd bet most people who visited the website haven't bought a ring yet.
So you bring up an interesting point: this is an externality of 1. wasted ads, 2. irritation for the user, 3. a useless invasion of your privacy.
would they want to solve this problem? It would improve their targeting but also lower their advertising base significantly.
Ive used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
Do you mean the online to offline issue? It's a pretty big thing right now because it's actually two issues: (1) is being more efficient with ad buying, and (2) is knowing whether your online ads are actually getting people to come in and buy stuff.
Hypothetically, let's say current ROI is $1.10 for every $1 spent. We stop spending for people who already bought a diamond. Our ROI might go up to $1.12 for every $1 spent. That means the ability to avoid targeting people who already bought a ring is worth $0.02 for every $1 we spend. A company comes and says "for $0.01 on every dollar, we'll give you that ability". Of course you'd take it.
That's more or less what's happening now.
> I've used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
Yeah you're hitting on another theme of modern day digital advertising. Our collection of data far outstrips our ability to actually act on it. So you'll commonly find situations where you'd assume they could know based on the data they probably collected, but for some reason they don't act on it.
>> Hypothetically, let's say current ROI is $1.10 for every $1 spent. We stop spending for people who already bought a diamond. Our ROI might go up to $1.12 for every $1 spent. That means the ability to avoid targeting people who already bought a ring is worth $0.02 for every $1 we spend. A company comes and says "for $0.01 on every dollar, we'll give you that ability". Of course you'd take it.
But this is only if you are looking at 1 user right? The advertiser is making the call between the incremental income from better tracking vs the extra income from more impressions.
It seems as if they are choosing the extra income from more, but worse impressions. If they are not solving the online ad to online purchase, which in my mind, they arent doing because it limits the advertising base, which limits ROI more than targeting
Weddings are a high-margin business, they can afford to spend a lot on advertising and not be too careful about their targeting. The advertising service is happy to take their money. It's not that we can't do better, it's that there isn't enough incentive to do better at any level.
I don't think it's clear that advertisers are bearing the whole cost, at least not directly. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snap etc. all sell placements via auction, so the advertisers themselves are determining the price. Presumably average fraud rate is already "priced in".
Agreed with you there, to some extent the fraud rate is already "priced in".
What I mean is actually this: Google, Facebook, etc. are opaque about fraud, to the point of misreporting metrics in Facebook's case. Let's say hypothetically that the advertiser had an oracle for whether any individual ad view was fake. I'm pretty sure the advertiser would be paying less. That difference is what I meant by bearing much of the cost.
Google/Facebook's marginal cost for the fraudulent traffic is basically just the cost of infrastructure. The publisher (if there is one) is often the one causing the fraud, so they're not really "bearing the cost."
The fraud rate is only priced in if every member of the auction has that oracle though right? Otherwise, they are unaware of the fraud and bidding as if their isnt. Inflating the ad price
Yes and no. You have a point, but I don't think you need every bidder to have this oracle.
If only one bidder could tell the difference, that bidder might just buy fewer ads because ROI estimates will be lower, so fewer ad buys would look like positive ROI. Of course, that's under the assumption that fraud inflates performance metrics, but I think that's a pretty safe assumption.
Watching Twitter attempt to deal with the cryptocurrency spammers that chain on to every half-popular tweet leads me to believe that it really is just incompetence (+ being a hard problem in general).
For example, their latest solution is to prevent you from having the exact same name as a famous person. Notice all the bots now have the name "Elon" or "Elon Mu5k" when responding to Elon Musk.
My previous company stopped advertising on Twitter for precisely this reason. Our own analytics showed that the majority of the clicks we were getting and being charged for were obviously either bits or other spam accounts. It was actually crazy what we were being charged for.
They are the top two players in the digital ad space, which this article is about. Talking about how others in the industry also follow this practice seems like a pertinent topic of discussion in light of the article
I once had google adwords flooding my website with some ridiculous number like 1000 clicks in 5 minutes, zeroing my daily budget in just a few seconds. The clicks had nothing to do with my campaign keywords, which was set to gradually distribuite the adverts during the day instead of rushing to the budget limit.
Conversion was terrible, as in no one subscribed to the newsletter (the website usually had a very high newsletter conversion rate (20-30%? I forgot), but of those 1000, not even one person decided to subscribe.
The ad spend for the day (I remember now) was even higher than the daily limit.
I spent two weeks talking to the useless billing support that would admit no fault before giving up and paying for a "bug" in their system.
You hear about it when someone gets caught. You don't hear about it when they don't. Who would ever say, publicly, "Look! I've been faking out AdSense for years and getting away with it!"?
I work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry (especially marketers to follow them).
I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition.
We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down on them. They are too big for small players to compete.
For anyone in the U.S. who feels similarly, I urge you to write to the FTC and your representatives, and specifically:
1) Call for abandoning the "Consumer Welfare Standard"
2) Enumerate how the Tech Tyrants have negatively affected the competitiveness of companies/projects you've worked on (M&A, canceled products, vaporware, embrace and extend, pricing changes, etc.)
I once saw an economics paper that used a simple model and showed that when the top 4 companies in a given industry controlled more than 60% of the market they would naturally behave like a cartel even if they weren't coordinating. So that's probably the tipping point.
On a side note, if you use instagram, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but literally every 3-4 pictures is an ad now. It's so annoying, they're completely ruining the experience and it affects my retention rate and my will to come back.
I've been a major Insta user since the beginning, with a few different accounts (I do photography on a few different topics, so I keep them separate to appeal to each niche). I would be on for a few hours a day, every day, chatting to people, sharing photos, etc.
I recently deleted all my accounts completely, because it just became so horrible to use. Timeline all over the place, overwhelming number of ads, impossible to use search anymore, Explore that just ignores what you like and shows you stuff they want you to see, etc etc.
They're just reinforcing the demise of the platform. Over 80% of the last followers I picked up were bots. At least I'm assuming anyone who followers 4800 people can't be human.
And I'm sure there is still room. In magazines like wired there's a full page ad every other page (last time I checked a few years back). 50% ads is probably where these plarforms are going.
Just as a point of reference, as a very infrequent Instagram user (Maybe once a week, often much less) I have yet to see a single ad. So it seems like they scale the amount of ads they show depending on how heavily you use the service.
I've also stopped using it. I just went there for the first time in months and counted the sponsored posts. They appear every 4, 5 or 6 posts. Are you sure you don't mistake sponsored post for real ones?
I'm also a very infrequent user. I just checked my feed very carefully, making sure each photo was from someone I was following, and it was over 50 posts before I saw an ad.
This is why, if you advertise, measure results on purchases or leads generated and nothing else. Every ad platform's engagement measures are useless to you unless you have a lot of experience and context for what they mean.
It's mostly a matter of disciplined tracking and a decent chunk of boring work getting all the systems integrated. You click on a Target ad, go to their website (which you are logged into and have cookies), and get some attribution flags set on your account. When you make a purchase online (easy) or in-store (less easy, likely needs a rewards account linked), you credit that ad/campaign/channel with the conversion value.
It's not a perfect measure of the lift, but it's pretty solid and underestimates things if anything, which makes it good enough for basing ad buying decisions off of. You could do fancier geographic segmenting + statistics, but why bother when the direct method works?
It's actually easier for large brands, since they can afford to put engineering effort into building bespoke tracking and analysis software. The trickiest would be smaller brands, especially those who advertise via agencies - they can't do anything that isn't commercial off-the-shelf, and as of now there isn't anything great in this space.
It’s even more difficult for small brands and local businesses who bleed money into FB ads with such a bad return it's painful to watch.
We’ve seen it with a lot of services businesses that use our e-commerce platform.
To solve this and out of our own frustration of working with ad agencies for no ROI, we created a tool to run influencer campaigns that pay each influencer a commission of sale generated.
Once a campaign is created, influencers join this campaign and start sharing. They earn commissions automatically each time followers buy from their unique affiliate link. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackbell-promote/id14241791... / https://www.blackbell.com/influencermarketing
We recently started speaking with small ad agencies about it, most are afraid to start using our tool and philosophy for one reason: it can disrupt themselves, they are happy charging fees to manage FB / Google ads with bad and blind ROI, especially as most take % of ad spending…
For the huge marketing groups ( Omnicom, Publicis Groupe etc ) my personal meetings with top decision makers paints the same picture from yesterday Axios article:
> Between the lines: Financial struggles and minimal oversight at some of the biggest global agencies have for years led to bad practices, like kickbacks and bid-rigging, that have led marketers to question whether their dollars are being wasted.
https://www.axios.com/businesses-moving-media-advertising-in...
Target has teams with context and experience in how to properly use, measure and attribute those numbers. 99% of start-ups, even very well funded ones, don't.
What do youbmean by that? When I buy something at Target stores, they have absolutely no way to attribute whether I saw something on TV, a billboard, the aisle, their junk mail in my mailbox, or online.
I believe that Google can link in-store purchases to online ad exposure for most credit card users in the US. They've done this by doing a deal with MasterCard to integrate sales data cookie data. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...
Not where you specifically saw it, but in aggregate they can track things like purchase volume after a specific ad airs in a specific market or what was advertised in the circular, etc. They could vary things slightly by market as well to help pinpoint what's most impactful.
And companies that do not employ skilled statisticians to keep track of all of this is where I believe real money is being made in adtech. A few companies are competent enough to handle this complexity, the rest can be duped into the belief that their ad spending works.
No need. Just choose between them based on actual performance rather than the fake stats they report. If $1000 in ad spend drives 100 conversions, then at the end of the day who cares if the ad platform reports 10k clicks or 100k?
In 2008 I worked for an ad network and we dealt with a massive amount of fraudulent traffic. We did our best to shield our advertisers from the obviously bogus traffic, as it absolutely killed traffic quality and inflated CPAs.
However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website, wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get the bot traffic (which went for a CPC of about $0.001). They were buying $10-20k per day from us of fraudulent traffic. Turns out they were relying on the audience engagement platforms (alexa, hitwise, quantcast, comscore, etc) to track their audience size and those platforms incorrectly counted our bot traffic as legitimate.
As the majority of their advertisers were brand marketing (e.g. Nintendo paying for a full-site background spread for the latest Zelda) and there was no direct way to measure success, advertisers would be swayed by the third-party audience profiles and agree it was good idea to spend massive amounts of money on ad campaigns there.
How and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC? No ad network would price legitimate traffic that low, which means you must have known it was illegitimate. So that means you were complicit in committing fraud against the downstream advertisers, correct?
> How and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC?
Our ad server code only supported 3 decimal places. It wasn't until later that we figured out the how/why behind their desire for what we outright informed them was most likely bot traffic. And yeah, I didn't stay much longer at that company. The entire industry is incredibly sketchy and that apparently hasn't changed much.
Facebook could still be doing it... There is no third party auditor of their ad analytics. And you can't create one either, because you can't scrape a walled garden like Facebook the way you can scrape the internet.
The only thing that's true is the data you are measuring yourself, which would be web traffic, conversions etc. Although it's not inconceivable that a fraudulent actor would send bit traffic with (e.g. Facebook) referrer tags to your site to make you think you were getting greater reach with your ads than you were.
You can create "custom audiences" by uploading a list of email addresses, it has to be a minimum size group of 100 I believe.
However it's unlikely that you'd see too much as I have to imagine most of the inflation is happening in the broader targeting efforts. "males 18-31 with these interests" etc.
I genuinely don't understand why anyone, anywhere, would trust Facebook with anything. They've been nothing but unethical and misleading from the start. I'm not saying this to be hyperbolic - it simply seems like a poor business decision to get involved with them.
I've been doing a large amount of video production that is published to Facebook for the last few years. Mostly live, some post / uploaded work. But the live productions stats the morning after an event are extremely suspect. It seems like the numbers astronomically inflated.
When you sit in meetings and hear the social media and sales people spit their numbers, and it defies all forms reality...
Well, they look good to the company and the bosses eat up the voodoo science they are preaching.
I've yet to ever see true ROI or accurate numbers of any kind coming out of Facebook or Instagram for content or marketing campaigns. Instagram is mostly a bot problem. Facebook has loose impression and view numbers. YouTube hasn't ever been a red flag in my experience, but I've never been involved with any ad work there, just content.
Many of the numbers I've seen are more in line with impressions. The app loading and being somewhere in a timeline dramatically inflates their numbers. In reality, I know a lot of people who see little to no gain from Facebook as a platform at this point. Especially for small business.
Seems to be a pretty big nail in the coffin for them and this is just the tip of the iceberg. lol. A class action of one of their core revenue streams is going to be very expensive. I think we should just make Facebook a public utility, and do them like the utility companies were done; congress can easily decide to transfer control of the company and all of its assets in a single resolution. Then, drastically reduce headcount by getting rid of all the business teams, sales, marketing and keeping only essential technical and administrative staff. Sell off the other unrelated business units (Oculus etc). Allow the company to operate and make a minuscule profit margin while allowing the local governments decision making ability regarding the content and policing of the networks under their geography.
I'd like this more than the status quo, but this still leaves the door open for governments to read private messages and leverage social platforms for manipulation. In my mind, and I admit I am not certain this is possible - the only right way for a social network to function is for it to be decentralized and user data controlled by individual users - with optins for any "sharing".
Other than that you hopefully can't do that without having to pay a massive amount of money under imminent domain laws, it now means everybody has to pay for Facebook, and that it will improve (if at all) at the level of congress.
is there any chance facebook will improve in the future, in any way? both the increasingly terrible user experience and the company's shady practices seem like features rather than bugs at this point and to fix either would require a fundamental shift that i can't imagine happening.
It wasn't an excuse, it was a public service announcement.
Hauling Facebook's CEO into legislative inquiries worldwide totally misses the Mark. Masquerading Facebook as the Face of this reality is totally disingenuous and more of a reflection of discomfort and fatigue people already had with that service than a genuine expression against the data brokers.
Imploding might be extreme but I think it's entirely plausible that 1-2 years from now their stock is at half its current value or at least half the value of its all-time high.
Actually I think Facebook stock is quite undervalued after losing 20-30% of value recently. I believe there is a lot of upside. I would not be surprised if ATH is broken before end of this year.
You are correct, no company has ever filed a "misrepresenting" earnings report ever, certainly not ones that share the same high moral standards as Facebook.
Cooking the books is far worse than pushing misleading metrics to customers, at least as far as corporate ethics goes. The risks would be enormous, and the benefit would be temporarily propping up the stock price, which is not all that helpful if you aren't currently raising money. Facebook most likely isn't defrauding investors simply because it goes against Facebook's interests to do so.
Of course, companies come up with their own metrics all the time, but they have to be published alongside GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) metrics.
I think there's a risk that Facebook won't be replaced, because may early adopters won't sign up for any new social network. Both Facebook and Google have severely hurt the trust of many, to the point where they will be reluctant to sign up for any new alternatives in the fear that they will eventually be equally "evil".
dont think facebook is that kind of company yet .... other businesses which are core to our day to day are not built on fb's operations i would think (such as banks manufacturing companies etc).
and if this happened could you imagine the influx of engineers available
> When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign.
> The support team at Twitter Ads told me they are legitimate clicks, but people are probably clicking the image in the tweet to expand the tweet or image, not expecting it to take them to a different site. As soon as they realize they’ve just clicked an outgoing link, they go back or close the tab before our site and Google Analytics script even has time to load.
https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/