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Old story. For non-brand advertising this is easily solved by down funnel tracking. Any marketer worth their salt tracks to the 'ultimate goal' and will avoid t

Old story. For non-brand advertising this is easily solved by down funnel tracking. Any marketer worth their salt tracks to the 'ultimate goal' and will avoid the shadier networks by looking at overall results. End of the day it comes down to a ROMI metric. It doesn't matter if 50% of the impressions are fake as long as the total investment pays off. For brand marketing I follow the networks that show DM performance as this shows some level of quality.

newman8r 11y ago
The tricky part is what to do when it doesn't pay off.. This isn't and has never been my primary line of work - but I can't say that every campaign I ran was profitable, even though the ones that were extremely profitable did make up for those.
- geon 11y ago
  It is not tricky. You just stop using that ad network.
  - newman8r 11y ago
    That's a solution to mitigate losses but it doesn't address the fact that someone has lost money due to fraud - and I'm guessing it hurts small businesses the most. Strategy-wise the solution is simple, but digital marketing is intrinsically flawed nowadays and it's one industry that could literally be turned upside down at some point in the coming decades as the internet evolves. And I think a lot of people wouldn't mind that - especially the people with the power to bring the change (i.e. developers and proponents of open source solutions and haters of crappy spam)
    - geon 11y ago
      > it doesn't address the fact that someone has lost money due to fraud You would try it out with a few hundreds or possibly thousands first. If it isn't showing any return at all, something is fishy. You wouldn't with a sum that would hurt to lose. Then nice thing about the web is that we can measure and analyze user behavior.
      - newman8r 11y ago
        Of course. I'm not saying it isn't possible to have a profitable marketing campaign despite fraudor limit your losses (just starts to cost more since some industries are more impacted than others). I'm just pointing out that it's inherently a fraudulent/sketchy industry and therefore very subject to potential disruption.
- Gustomaximus 11y ago
  There's a great quote form John Wannamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Marketing is a case of art meets science. You need to make sure the total spend is net positive. Also it sounds like you do this a bit on the side. I'd really recommend getting a professional to help if you have the scale or a scalable business. Treat it like an investment. If you can get $1.30 back for a $1 in, go nuts and grow. You'd be amazed how common I find businesses that treat marketing as a cost center, refusing to invest more even when it's proven there is a significant positive return on their spend.

newman8r 11y ago

The tricky part is what to do when it doesn't pay off.. This isn't and has never been my primary line of work - but I can't say that every campaign I ran was profitable, even though the ones that were extremely profitable did make up for those.

geon 11y ago
It is not tricky. You just stop using that ad network.
- newman8r 11y ago
  That's a solution to mitigate losses but it doesn't address the fact that someone has lost money due to fraud - and I'm guessing it hurts small businesses the most. Strategy-wise the solution is simple, but digital marketing is intrinsically flawed nowadays and it's one industry that could literally be turned upside down at some point in the coming decades as the internet evolves. And I think a lot of people wouldn't mind that - especially the people with the power to bring the change (i.e. developers and proponents of open source solutions and haters of crappy spam)
  - geon 11y ago
    > it doesn't address the fact that someone has lost money due to fraud You would try it out with a few hundreds or possibly thousands first. If it isn't showing any return at all, something is fishy. You wouldn't with a sum that would hurt to lose. Then nice thing about the web is that we can measure and analyze user behavior.
    - newman8r 11y ago
      Of course. I'm not saying it isn't possible to have a profitable marketing campaign despite fraudor limit your losses (just starts to cost more since some industries are more impacted than others). I'm just pointing out that it's inherently a fraudulent/sketchy industry and therefore very subject to potential disruption.
Gustomaximus 11y ago
There's a great quote form John Wannamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Marketing is a case of art meets science. You need to make sure the total spend is net positive. Also it sounds like you do this a bit on the side. I'd really recommend getting a professional to help if you have the scale or a scalable business. Treat it like an investment. If you can get $1.30 back for a $1 in, go nuts and grow. You'd be amazed how common I find businesses that treat marketing as a cost center, refusing to invest more even when it's proven there is a significant positive return on their spend.