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If you aren't tracking conversions then buying fraudulent impressions is your fault. Regardless of how your site/business works you should attribute some valuab

• 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.
        • Eridrus 9y ago
          15% is still billions of dollars though.