3 ms·

You're coming at this from a SaaS point of view. Imagine if you're a rather large brand like Fedex. You can't tie your digital ads directly to a conversion beca

You're coming at this from a SaaS point of view. Imagine if you're a rather large brand like Fedex. You can't tie your digital ads directly to a conversion because the conversion happens offline. But their advertising department is supposed to make it seem like they're spending money and driving "brand awareness". So getting fake clicks, fake ad video views -- all of that can get reported up so they can make themselves seem successful.

eli 9y ago
I'm actually coming at it from an enterprise sales side. And sure it's harder to measure a branding campaign in any medium (though people certainly still do it). You don't necessarily care about clicks at all in that scenario. Brands have been figuring out ways to measure the effectiveness of campaigns on offline sales since long before the internet. Click fraud is an issue for the industry, but it's a small one. It's simply not true that "most clicks" are fraud. And, in any event, digital ad spend continues to grow. So if Buzzfeed and Vice are in a slump it's not because advertisers are shying away from digital.
wils1245 9y ago
Have you noticed how many brick and mortar stores ask for your email or phone number at the register during a purchase? They absolutely can tie offline purchases to online activity with that information (not to mention your credit card).
- com2kid 9y ago
  Some can, some can't. Ad networks such as Facebook actually don't let much information escape, getting even basic demographics on who saw one's Facebook ads can be hard, getting identifiable information is, to the best of my knowledge, not available around impressions.
shostack 9y ago
I think you'd benefit from researching a bit more around what major brands do from a measurement standpoint. With the benefit of that much data, you can do some fairly accurate econometric/media mix modeling and get a solid read on lift for core metrics that they've invested a lot in to understand their impact on the bottom line. There is absolutely garbage inventory mixed in, and lots of solutions to try to minimize the impact of that, but to assume that these major brands don't know how this all works is naive. Further, just as an example, both Google and FB have very solid options for importing offline conversions which are relatively easy to map back to an audience ID of some sort.
- eli 9y ago
  As a contrived example: it's easy to geotarget digital ads. So focus them on just Chicago and see if sales originating in Chicago go up or down vs other cities.

eli 9y ago

I'm actually coming at it from an enterprise sales side. And sure it's harder to measure a branding campaign in any medium (though people certainly still do it). You don't necessarily care about clicks at all in that scenario. Brands have been figuring out ways to measure the effectiveness of campaigns on offline sales since long before the internet. Click fraud is an issue for the industry, but it's a small one. It's simply not true that "most clicks" are fraud. And, in any event, digital ad spend continues to grow. So if Buzzfeed and Vice are in a slump it's not because advertisers are shying away from digital.

wils1245 9y ago

Have you noticed how many brick and mortar stores ask for your email or phone number at the register during a purchase? They absolutely can tie offline purchases to online activity with that information (not to mention your credit card).

com2kid 9y ago
Some can, some can't. Ad networks such as Facebook actually don't let much information escape, getting even basic demographics on who saw one's Facebook ads can be hard, getting identifiable information is, to the best of my knowledge, not available around impressions.

shostack 9y ago

I think you'd benefit from researching a bit more around what major brands do from a measurement standpoint. With the benefit of that much data, you can do some fairly accurate econometric/media mix modeling and get a solid read on lift for core metrics that they've invested a lot in to understand their impact on the bottom line. There is absolutely garbage inventory mixed in, and lots of solutions to try to minimize the impact of that, but to assume that these major brands don't know how this all works is naive. Further, just as an example, both Google and FB have very solid options for importing offline conversions which are relatively easy to map back to an audience ID of some sort.

eli 9y ago
As a contrived example: it's easy to geotarget digital ads. So focus them on just Chicago and see if sales originating in Chicago go up or down vs other cities.