This article is massively misleading. Its key points: > 36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker, which means your javascript based website tracking i

This article is massively misleading. Its key points: > 36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker, which means your javascript based website tracking is meaningless It doesn't mean it's meaningless, it means it's only based on part of your traffic. But 2/3 of your traffic is still a lot of traffic, and ad blocker users aren't that different from the rest of your users. Additionally, ad blockers generally do not block first-party JavaScript, or most first party tracking, so your sample may be much better than that. > Email open rates don't actually indicate that an email was opened, merely that a request was made to a server Emails are read by a mixture of three kinds of clients: ones that never download images, ones that always download images, and ones that only download images when the email is opened. This means that absolute "open" rates are not that meaningful, since you don't know how many users are in each category. On the other hand, relative "open" rates are still very meaningful, and an email that has an unusually high "open" rate will in practice have been opened an usually large numbers of times. If you want, you can then calibrate with click rates. > The black boxes inside Facebook and other ad exchanges give you flat out wrong data about how your ads are performing This links to https://www.etcentric.org/facebook-agrees-to-40-million-fine-for-incorrect-ad-metrics/ https://www.etcentric.org/facebook-agrees-to-40-million-fine... where Facebook was fined for misrepresenting one of its video ad metrics. The post presents a single (newsworthy!) issue as if it applies to every metric on every exchange. Additionally, advertisers are generally able to verify the claims of the exchanges through JavaScript that runs inside the creative, which dramatically limits the ability of any unscrupulous exchanges to cheat. > The audiences you're targeting on Google, Bing, etc are fraudulent and don't even exist This link to https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/11/02/got-large-budgets-you-need-to-spend-fraudsters-will-help-you-spend-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/11/02/got-lar... which references (but does not link to) "A new report from cybersecurity company CHEQ" and claims "Their data also estimates that 1 in 5 clicks are not from humans, and greater than 10% of the spending is likely siphoned off by ad fraud." Setting aside the question of whether the statistics are correct, there's a world of difference between 10-20% fraudulent traffic and "don't even exist" > The exchanges you're purchasing media space from are cheating you This links to https://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/is-ubers-new-ad-fraud-lawsuit-futile-or-game-changing/ https://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/is-ubers-new-ad-fraud-law... which describes a suit by Uber against "Hydrane SAS, BidMotion, Taptica, YouAppi and AdAction Interactive". We don't know how the suit is going to turn out, but these five companies are tiny players in the advertising world. Again, highly misleading. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)