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<edit> I should point out that we were measuring brick & mortar sales, not clickthroughs. So no cross site tracking involved. Maybe that's the easiest way to

<edit> I should point out that we were measuring brick & mortar sales, not clickthroughs. So no cross site tracking involved. Maybe that's the easiest way to clear things up for you? </edit> If you look at a distribution or histogram of ROIs from our thousands of studies, you will see that it approximates a gaussian distribution...right up until the left hand side hits $1.00, where it looks like the distribution hit a brick wall. Same thing for a distribution of incremental lifts, except that the brick wall is right above 0% lift. It's a discontinuity that shouldn't exist, like the Polish high school exit exams. See if you can guess what the minimum score to pass* was: https://imgur.com/4nnbyru https://imgur.com/4nnbyru Except, unlike that distribution, there is virtually nothing to the left of the discontinuity at my company. Without talking about the tech behind it, what I can say is that the fraud is not occurring on the impressions and tracking side. It's in the statistical tools that infer the incrementality of the purchasing behavior. Seriously, I urge you to listen to the Freakonomics episodes I mentioned. *The minimum score was 30. This is pretty damning evidence that teachers were juicing the tests of kids who filed by one or two questions.

whimsicalism 4y ago
> we were measuring brick & mortar sales, not clickthroughs I think this is probably where you get the room to juice the numbers like this. If you were tracking online conversions, people would easily be able to compare with an incrementality study run by the provider (say Google) and see that you are lying/wrong.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Yes, and the fact that "incrementality" is inherently unobservable.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Disagree. Why do you say that?
    - p0pcult 4y ago
      Incrementality, as defined in my original post, is the sales that would have not occurred, had the ad not occurred. It is impossible to actually observe what would have happened, had there been no advertisement, because there in fact was an advertisement. Thus, the estimation of incrementality must be inferred statistically.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        > It is impossible to actually observe what would have happened, had there been no advertisement, because there in fact was an advertisement. I can see how you would have that perspective as a third-party analyst of conversion. It's actually easy to do if you are the exchange/sell-side provider of the advertising space. In your logic, where the advertiser requesting the incrementality study would have won the auction, just randomly remove their bid from some won auctions, have the second highest bidder win, and then track that user as the "control" for conversion purposes vs. users you did display the ad to. Voilà! This is how Google in-house incrementality studies are run, for instance.
    - p0pcult 4y ago
      Replying here, because I cant reply to your comment several levels down. I can see how you would have that perspective as a third-party analyst of conversion. It's actually easy to do if you are the exchange/sell-side provider of the advertising space. In your logic, where the advertiser running the incrementality study would have won the auction, just randomly remove their bid from some won auctions, have the second highest bidder win, and then track that user as the "control" for conversion purposes vs. users you did display the ad to. Voilà! That's not observation. That's statistical inference. I am referring, strictly, to direct, empiricial observation. With any kind of statistical inference, you get into a pissing match about assumptions, model quality, etc... Is the "control" a good stand-in for the behavior of the "test", etc. Incrementality is able to be estimated, but unobservable. And therein lies the potential for fraud.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
jklinger410 4y ago
Thanks for the info. Doing brick and mortar sales attribution is a whole different ball-game. Frankly the number of dots that have to be connected between different systems in order to make that stuff work is too difficult for me to trust the data. If I'm going to trust a black box, I'm not going to trust programmatic exchanges and attribution vendors. I'm going to trust platforms that have vertical integration at as many stages as possible. So, Google basically.

whimsicalism 4y ago

> we were measuring brick & mortar sales, not clickthroughs I think this is probably where you get the room to juice the numbers like this. If you were tracking online conversions, people would easily be able to compare with an incrementality study run by the provider (say Google) and see that you are lying/wrong.

p0pcult 4y ago
Yes, and the fact that "incrementality" is inherently unobservable.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Disagree. Why do you say that?
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Incrementality, as defined in my original post, is the sales that would have not occurred, had the ad not occurred. It is impossible to actually observe what would have happened, had there been no advertisement, because there in fact was an advertisement. Thus, the estimation of incrementality must be inferred statistically.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      > It is impossible to actually observe what would have happened, had there been no advertisement, because there in fact was an advertisement. I can see how you would have that perspective as a third-party analyst of conversion. It's actually easy to do if you are the exchange/sell-side provider of the advertising space. In your logic, where the advertiser requesting the incrementality study would have won the auction, just randomly remove their bid from some won auctions, have the second highest bidder win, and then track that user as the "control" for conversion purposes vs. users you did display the ad to. Voilà! This is how Google in-house incrementality studies are run, for instance.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Replying here, because I cant reply to your comment several levels down. I can see how you would have that perspective as a third-party analyst of conversion. It's actually easy to do if you are the exchange/sell-side provider of the advertising space. In your logic, where the advertiser running the incrementality study would have won the auction, just randomly remove their bid from some won auctions, have the second highest bidder win, and then track that user as the "control" for conversion purposes vs. users you did display the ad to. Voilà! That's not observation. That's statistical inference. I am referring, strictly, to direct, empiricial observation. With any kind of statistical inference, you get into a pissing match about assumptions, model quality, etc... Is the "control" a good stand-in for the behavior of the "test", etc. Incrementality is able to be estimated, but unobservable. And therein lies the potential for fraud.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago

jklinger410 4y ago

Thanks for the info. Doing brick and mortar sales attribution is a whole different ball-game. Frankly the number of dots that have to be connected between different systems in order to make that stuff work is too difficult for me to trust the data. If I'm going to trust a black box, I'm not going to trust programmatic exchanges and attribution vendors. I'm going to trust platforms that have vertical integration at as many stages as possible. So, Google basically.