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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

I think the case for this is to be robust for the many legitimate ways that online marketers use ads and create landing pages.

Often marketing platforms (like Hubspot or whatever) lets you create multiple landing pages which might all be on a subdomain(s) to rather than handing full control of the root domain to the platform. In these cases, you wouldn't want pages.ctvnews.com to appear as the display domain.

Also not to mention the myriad of services and ways that act as a middleman for the click, in the same way that the link display on Twitter appears as ctvnews.com but it's actually a t.co link

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I don't buy it, it's an oversight IMO.

Marketers can buy domains if they won't want to display a sub domain, and Facebook can check the final destination landing page. I mean, they already do! Every time you make a new ad they scrape the final destination for meta tags and content.

Same thing still applies - they don't want ctvnewsmarketing.com appearing as the domain.

Who doesn't, the marketers?

I'm saying they should have to suck it up and buy the domain they want to display.

The issue is that they are hosting their pages on a 3rd party platform (HubSpot, Pardot, Unbounce, &c) and don't want to point root DNS at the landing page host or put bounce pages TO landing pages from the main site. They just wanna set up a pages. cname and run with it.

Right, and I'm saying that Facebook should tell them "too bad" the way Google does

I think you're right.

It looks like Facebook host a lot of ads themselves, so I guess that advertisers use URL shorteners as a way to verify click throughs from Facebook.

For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) I guess it's pretty easy and effective.

>For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis)

In that case most advertisers are unsophisticated. Even the biggest ad-networks/retargeting/tracking solutions all depend on redirect via their servers to their end customer.

I am constantly disappointed with the technical knowledge and understanding display by our advertising partners. A large number of them have almost zero understand of how the internet work. Of cause part of the problem is that as a developer you're inclined to point out that something won't work because it won't work 100% of the time. That a useless answer for the advertising department and you end up with duct taped solution that works well enough, but of cause create their own set of problems.

I've worked with multiple retargeting company and advertisement departments in the past, and I got the exact same conclusion. Most of the time the people in charge of "digital innovation" or "e-marketing" have absolutely no idea of what's going on behind the curtains. Even worse, their whole pricing model (ctr, conversions, ...) is hanging on broken solutions that "work most of the time". So, needless to say you often have to alter numbers/rates manually in AB testing reports to let them have clean numbers they can sale. Even if every tech knows how much bullshit is flowing in this industry, it's way easier to let the big ones have what they want than argue about how everything is broken (especially when you don't necessarily have a way to fix it).

I secretly suspect they -at least- know, but prefer to sweep these issue under the rug and that's why they prefer to involve as little technical people as possible. And that's why I don't work in this industry anymore and I won't come back to it until they've all burnt to the ground.

We currently have an issue where the company that handle our ad-tracking/referral payout track and want payment for the same orders multiple time. They honestly doesn't seem to understand the issue, customer will, sometimes, return to the conversion page (checkout-success page) multiple times, because people are just weird like that.

The fix is super simple: Their tracking pixel receive our order number, all they need to do is accept that it's unique and just tracking the first occurrence. Part of their problem is of cause that they switch to a new platform and didn't migrate any data.

Because many of the amount are so small, they just accept a ton of errors and as you say: "sweep these issues under the rug" because it's just a few cents so who cares. But it adds up.

I guess it'd be just downright impossible for one of Facebook's 10,000 employees to handle some bitly level analytics in order to counter rampant fraud.

or just ban those all together, no smart marketer wants others to see their stats, they should probably own their own domain or other tool that can do this type of analytics for them if they want such data.

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