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

Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by disgruntledphd2 on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:45PM (#25624528)

Facebook's ad research team have run a lot of experiments.

The goal was to demonstrate an impact of in-store sales from internet advertising. They did the first studies in about 2008-10, and have continued running these studies ever since.

They even built a tool so that advertisers can run these studies, and get a sense for the incremental impact of their ad.

Google have a similar (less full-featured) system.

Really, it's the rest of the ecosystem that has much of the fraud, and I think that a lot of people in the industry are aware of this.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by Daho0n on Sunday January 03, 2021 @09:28PM (#25627380)

A system to advertise how good FB's ad system is, built by FB who we know have fudged their numbers before? That isn't proof of anything.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by pessimizer on Sunday January 03, 2021 @05:40PM (#25625919)

> The goal was to demonstrate an impact of in-store sales from internet advertising.

So the goal was to advertise advertising. A more scientific goal would be to see if there was an increase of in-store sales from internet advertising. Instead they were looking to design experiments that would show a positive effect, with the goal of giving advertisers a dashboard so they could run those experiments themselves.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by hertzrat on Sunday January 03, 2021 @08:38PM (#25627099)

To let those advertisers do the experiments themselves, and to relate the campaign to in store sales, would require Facebook and google to share a ton lot of internet-user tracking data

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by webmaven on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @12:00PM (#25647590)

> To let those advertisers do the experiments themselves, and to relate the campaign to in store sales, would require Facebook and google to share a ton lot of internet-user tracking data

I think you are misinterpreting what "do the experiments themselves" implies.

Certainly there is a JOIN with Google's or FB's data, but it can still happen entirely in a hosted sandbox with no data sharing necessary.

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by somedude895 on Monday January 04, 2021 @01:28PM (#25635728)

Of course they'd say that.

We've run Google's Local Campaigns, which are supposed to drive brick and mortar store visits, which they measure using GPS and "other signals". I checked with one of our most remote and least frequented stores, to see whether they could see any of the 100 daily visits that Google claimed to have generated, and they couldn't see a thing (avg daily visits were around 80 before during and after the campaign)

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Re:Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their... by masonic on Monday January 04, 2021 @02:29AM (#25628618)

Heh. Just today, FB served me an ad claiming to be Macy's and talking about their closeout specials, accompanied by dozens of mourning comments. It was all phony.

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