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Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals? IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a href="website.com/ad-34"

Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals? IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a href="website.com/ad-34" ping="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/ping"><img src="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/img.jpeg" /> Come buy my product, you'll love it!</a> Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can correlate those sessions with the "ping" it receives to determine clicks vs. conversions.

yuliyp 5y ago
Not all purchases come immediately after clicking through an ad. They may come days later, even. Knowing that "this user who purchased this product saw this version of the ad" and "this user saw the other version" is what attribution is.
CrazyStat 5y ago
You do not understand correctly. Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person. Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.
- jfim 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, does attribution also work if the ad is not clicked? For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product. I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    Modern models do try to take views into account. (Also cross-device views and DOOH - which again rely extensively on tracking.)
- oconnore 5y ago
  You can do that with first-party cookies though. Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made. I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.

yuliyp 5y ago

Not all purchases come immediately after clicking through an ad. They may come days later, even. Knowing that "this user who purchased this product saw this version of the ad" and "this user saw the other version" is what attribution is.

CrazyStat 5y ago

You do not understand correctly. Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person. Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.

jfim 5y ago
Out of curiosity, does attribution also work if the ad is not clicked? For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product. I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.
- morelisp 5y ago
  Modern models do try to take views into account. (Also cross-device views and DOOH - which again rely extensively on tracking.)
oconnore 5y ago
You can do that with first-party cookies though. Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made. I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.