4 ms·

A bank spends $1000 on advertising and it ends up with dozens of accounts and credit cards opened and they decide it's a good ROI. So they spend another $1000 o

by acchow 9y ago

A bank spends $1000 on advertising and it ends up with dozens of accounts and credit cards opened and they decide it's a good ROI. So they spend another $1000 on advertising and get the same results again. Why does it matter that millions of the ad impressions were fake?

snissn 9y ago
For one the "fake" impressions represent actual revenue brought into the ecosystem that's taken out by fakers aka fraudulent parties aka criminals. Banks don't want to be funding criminals.
- acchow 9y ago
  Ah got it. Thanks for the explanation.
Eridrus 9y ago
This assumes that they can actually track advertising impressions to events they care about, many advertisers don't have this, either for technical reasons (i.e. just not implemented), or fundamental reasons (e.g. you sign up for a credit card offline). It also assumes you have enough impressions from a single source to actually be able to make a statistically significant decision - if you only get 1000 impressions from a single site, not getting any conversions may not be out of the ordinary.
- soared 9y ago
  If you aren't tracking conversions then buying fraudulent impressions is your fault. Regardless of how your site/business works you should attribute some valuable actions to your ads and optimize against that.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    That sounds great, except how is Coca-Cola meant to advertise? Or any car company? Or McDonalds? And why is crediting the last advertisement a user saw the right thing to do when it is usually a totality of advertising that causes people to buy things, rather than a single ad.
    - soared 9y ago
      Good points! 40% of my clients are actually car dealerships and branding is easier is than is seems. Last-touch attribution isn't always the best, that is why for display ads you count post-impression conversions as well. For car companies they track website sessions, chat/contact us forms/phone calls, and "vdps" (vehicle description pageviews, basically the product page for a car). There are services that claim to track back a car purchase to user's online habits/ads viewed but I've never had the chance to try it out. For Coke/McDonalds you do brand lift studies which are expensive and difficult, but if you're doing branding advertising you can afford it. They basically test before and after how many people know your brand and how they feel about it. If your numbers are flat thats good, if they're up thats great. Last touch credit isn't always the best, but its what everyone uses and makes sense most of the time as long as you track post-impression conversions for display and social and give them partial credit. (I'm a fan of time decay models, but since google analytics is last touch that what always gets used.)
      - Eridrus 9y ago
        > For car companies they track website sessions, chat/contact us forms/phone calls, and "vdps" (vehicle description pageviews, basically the product page for a car). But here's the thing: all of these things are fake-able. chat sessions are probably the least gameable metric since you'd need to target that specifically, whereas all the others can be done in a completely non-ad specific way - just browse the site in a statistically normal way, but how many impressions do you need to tell that the chat metric isn't tracking the other ones and become suspicious? And do you just not advertise on longer tail sites where you can't get that volume? [EDIT]: I mean, click throughs definitely get faked, and post-click behaviour too. I don't know what chat rates you expect, but if it's small enough you might have people manually doing those chat sessions. Not all of these bots/fraudsters are naive.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        soared 9y ago
        Yeah thats true.. but as far as I can tell that advanced fraud is at an acceptable level. That level might be 15% of traffic/conversions.. but its not severely hurting campaigns. This is a weird answer, but all the fraud/viewability/etc is priced in to some degree. So an advertiser who wants less fraud can just spend more to get high quality impressions. The long tail is super important and you can't exclude it. How you can see those individual sites (by proxy) is through something like a supplier vendor, fold location, geo, etc.. so you can't see the site, but other factors you can bid will point to and show that fraud. I think my point is that a skilled campaign manager can get rid of fraud, but the average marketing manager can't. That is a problem for most businesses, but also why agencies specialize in things like rtb.
jdavis703 9y ago
Many ad campaigns are sold by the impression. It would be like if you bought a bag of rice, but after you opened it you discovered that half the grains were in fact plastic. Of course you could still filter out the fakes, and you're still left with a half bag of edible rice, but in the end that's not what you thought you bought. In other words, this is fraud, and marketplaces fail if there's too much fraud.
- soared 9y ago
  Ad campaigns used to be sold by impressions, but any advertisers worth their salt doesn't buy like that anymore. Most are sold with a budget and a guarantee of a minimum amount of impressions, and then a goal cost per acquisition (sale, etc.) that the performance is actually measured against.
saas_co_de 9y ago
It matters to buzzfeed it their competitors are getting deals off fake traffic :) But really, when you are a large corporation that advertises through hundreds of channels there is no way to attribute conversion to particular ads. You are paying to have your ads seen by real people to create brand awareness and get the multiple touches that will result in conversions. If those ads aren't getting seen then obviously they are not effective.
- walshemj 9y ago
  There is if you manage you ppc and display advertising properly. btw I think you misusing channel here there are not "hundreds of channel's". A channel is say Display vs PPC or Organic - I think you meant campaign.
  - Uw7yTcf36gTc 9y ago
    I think he was correct. Channels is utm_source and Display/PPC/Organic would be utm_medium.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    You are only talking about online advertising. I am talking about large corporations like JPMorgan Chase (the subject of the article) that are on the internet, tv, radio, billboards, print, sponsoring conferences, sports teams, lobbying governments, thousands of physical locations and ATMs that people see every day, etc, etc, etc. Even with a PPC ad that results in a conversion can you really attribute that sale to that particular ad? For a large corporation no, because you can't tell what part of the sale is due to the corporation's existing brand that is built up through exposing the consumer to that brand thousands of times across multiple media. Conversion rates for digital ads are only meaningful relative to the conversion rates for other digital ads. They do not not allow you to attribute a value to digital advertising relative to the rest of your ad spending.
philipodonnell 9y ago
Because there may be another strategy that you are missing out on because you are incorrectly measuring this one. If there are fake impressions then your actual ROI is higher than stated, so it's likely there is another strategy that is less effective that you may switch to without realizing it.
- acchow 9y ago
  This makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't ad prices already reflect the quality?
  - philipodonnell 9y ago
    Because it's so difficult to measure the quality. The ad networks benefit greatly from not allowing an accurate measure of quality.
greglindahl 9y ago
If half of your traffic is fake, then you could have spent less and gotten the same amount of new business. This is the same as every other kind of advertising. Sophisticated advertising campaigns involve looking at the actions of each source of traffic separately, because there will always be bogus sources.
ddebernardy 9y ago
It doesn't, until it does... When the whole scenery is fraught with fraud and dubious ROI, you pull the plug and see how well you do without any advertisement. http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/p-g-slashe/309936/ http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/p-g-slashe/309936/ Plus, the money lost to fraud could have been better spent elsewhere.

by acchow 9y ago

snissn 9y ago

For one the "fake" impressions represent actual revenue brought into the ecosystem that's taken out by fakers aka fraudulent parties aka criminals. Banks don't want to be funding criminals.

acchow 9y ago
Ah got it. Thanks for the explanation.

Eridrus 9y ago

This assumes that they can actually track advertising impressions to events they care about, many advertisers don't have this, either for technical reasons (i.e. just not implemented), or fundamental reasons (e.g. you sign up for a credit card offline). It also assumes you have enough impressions from a single source to actually be able to make a statistically significant decision - if you only get 1000 impressions from a single site, not getting any conversions may not be out of the ordinary.

soared 9y ago
If you aren't tracking conversions then buying fraudulent impressions is your fault. Regardless of how your site/business works you should attribute some valuable actions to your ads and optimize against that.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  That sounds great, except how is Coca-Cola meant to advertise? Or any car company? Or McDonalds? And why is crediting the last advertisement a user saw the right thing to do when it is usually a totality of advertising that causes people to buy things, rather than a single ad.
  - soared 9y ago
    Good points! 40% of my clients are actually car dealerships and branding is easier is than is seems. Last-touch attribution isn't always the best, that is why for display ads you count post-impression conversions as well. For car companies they track website sessions, chat/contact us forms/phone calls, and "vdps" (vehicle description pageviews, basically the product page for a car). There are services that claim to track back a car purchase to user's online habits/ads viewed but I've never had the chance to try it out. For Coke/McDonalds you do brand lift studies which are expensive and difficult, but if you're doing branding advertising you can afford it. They basically test before and after how many people know your brand and how they feel about it. If your numbers are flat thats good, if they're up thats great. Last touch credit isn't always the best, but its what everyone uses and makes sense most of the time as long as you track post-impression conversions for display and social and give them partial credit. (I'm a fan of time decay models, but since google analytics is last touch that what always gets used.)
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      > For car companies they track website sessions, chat/contact us forms/phone calls, and "vdps" (vehicle description pageviews, basically the product page for a car). But here's the thing: all of these things are fake-able. chat sessions are probably the least gameable metric since you'd need to target that specifically, whereas all the others can be done in a completely non-ad specific way - just browse the site in a statistically normal way, but how many impressions do you need to tell that the chat metric isn't tracking the other ones and become suspicious? And do you just not advertise on longer tail sites where you can't get that volume? [EDIT]: I mean, click throughs definitely get faked, and post-click behaviour too. I don't know what chat rates you expect, but if it's small enough you might have people manually doing those chat sessions. Not all of these bots/fraudsters are naive.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - soared 9y ago
        Yeah thats true.. but as far as I can tell that advanced fraud is at an acceptable level. That level might be 15% of traffic/conversions.. but its not severely hurting campaigns. This is a weird answer, but all the fraud/viewability/etc is priced in to some degree. So an advertiser who wants less fraud can just spend more to get high quality impressions. The long tail is super important and you can't exclude it. How you can see those individual sites (by proxy) is through something like a supplier vendor, fold location, geo, etc.. so you can't see the site, but other factors you can bid will point to and show that fraud. I think my point is that a skilled campaign manager can get rid of fraud, but the average marketing manager can't. That is a problem for most businesses, but also why agencies specialize in things like rtb.

jdavis703 9y ago

Many ad campaigns are sold by the impression. It would be like if you bought a bag of rice, but after you opened it you discovered that half the grains were in fact plastic. Of course you could still filter out the fakes, and you're still left with a half bag of edible rice, but in the end that's not what you thought you bought. In other words, this is fraud, and marketplaces fail if there's too much fraud.

soared 9y ago
Ad campaigns used to be sold by impressions, but any advertisers worth their salt doesn't buy like that anymore. Most are sold with a budget and a guarantee of a minimum amount of impressions, and then a goal cost per acquisition (sale, etc.) that the performance is actually measured against.

saas_co_de 9y ago

It matters to buzzfeed it their competitors are getting deals off fake traffic :) But really, when you are a large corporation that advertises through hundreds of channels there is no way to attribute conversion to particular ads. You are paying to have your ads seen by real people to create brand awareness and get the multiple touches that will result in conversions. If those ads aren't getting seen then obviously they are not effective.

walshemj 9y ago
There is if you manage you ppc and display advertising properly. btw I think you misusing channel here there are not "hundreds of channel's". A channel is say Display vs PPC or Organic - I think you meant campaign.
- Uw7yTcf36gTc 9y ago
  I think he was correct. Channels is utm_source and Display/PPC/Organic would be utm_medium.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  You are only talking about online advertising. I am talking about large corporations like JPMorgan Chase (the subject of the article) that are on the internet, tv, radio, billboards, print, sponsoring conferences, sports teams, lobbying governments, thousands of physical locations and ATMs that people see every day, etc, etc, etc. Even with a PPC ad that results in a conversion can you really attribute that sale to that particular ad? For a large corporation no, because you can't tell what part of the sale is due to the corporation's existing brand that is built up through exposing the consumer to that brand thousands of times across multiple media. Conversion rates for digital ads are only meaningful relative to the conversion rates for other digital ads. They do not not allow you to attribute a value to digital advertising relative to the rest of your ad spending.

philipodonnell 9y ago

Because there may be another strategy that you are missing out on because you are incorrectly measuring this one. If there are fake impressions then your actual ROI is higher than stated, so it's likely there is another strategy that is less effective that you may switch to without realizing it.

acchow 9y ago
This makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't ad prices already reflect the quality?
- philipodonnell 9y ago
  Because it's so difficult to measure the quality. The ad networks benefit greatly from not allowing an accurate measure of quality.

greglindahl 9y ago

If half of your traffic is fake, then you could have spent less and gotten the same amount of new business. This is the same as every other kind of advertising. Sophisticated advertising campaigns involve looking at the actions of each source of traffic separately, because there will always be bogus sources.

ddebernardy 9y ago

It doesn't, until it does... When the whole scenery is fraught with fraud and dubious ROI, you pull the plug and see how well you do without any advertisement. http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/p-g-slashe/309936/ http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/p-g-slashe/309936/ Plus, the money lost to fraud could have been better spent elsewhere.