Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
> When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors from the campaign.
> The support team at Twitter Ads told me they are legitimate clicks, but people are probably clicking the image in the tweet to expand the tweet or image, not expecting it to take them to a different site. As soon as they realize they’ve just clicked an outgoing link, they go back or close the tab before our site and Google Analytics script even has time to load.
Tap and hold on a link. A sheet will pop up asking how to treat the link. The link address will be listed at the top.
(This doesn't happen on my phone but I am more likely to have configured it than your average user.)
I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it, which with slow internet takes more time too and probably doesn't look as much like a bounce.
It's the perfect cover for Google. All the techies who would get outraged by something like this generally have fast internet and ad-blockers.
gmail on Android has ads? and they're disguised as email messages?
... no wonder they're killing Inbox
The state of marketing departments in companies must be a joke if this is how Facebook and Twitter are milking them.
I imagine billions of dollars are being wasted in companies with no return value in the name of "marketing".
And if anyone ever thinks Facebook and Twitter are actual competition to Google in ad market they must be out of their minds.
I can understand why Google gets bidding wars over people searching for "vacuum cleaner" or "cheap web hosting", but for most other things I can't quite imagine the use case. I either don't want to buy something, or I know who I'm buying from.
Facebook seems much better placed to show things like "hey, you liked this band and you live in this town, did you know they're coming next month?" On very rare occasions, FB actually manages to achieve the theoretical role of ads as "notifying people about mutually beneficial transactions". And when they don't, I can at least see that the ads are having effects like "making me aware of a consulting firm" that a marketer might value. Meanwhile, I've never seen a Google search ad I valued, and I don't know if I've ever seen an Ad Words ad I valued.
(Actually, I've benefited from Youtube ads occasionally also. But only ever for learning about new-release music, movies, or games.)
But there's been too many reports of bot activity, fake likes, fake followers in those platforms that I'm sure many companies and marketing departments fall for them.
Not everyone does as good job as you Im sure.
Google, as far as I know, was never caught in dark ui patterns or fake number reports to generate revenue. They don't seem to need it.
Autoplay videos with ads?
It's far different from let them click on this by mistake
I feel like YouTube by now is more similar to TV advertising, you take in consideration that people could just have the tv on in the background while doing something else or going around the house. Unless you don't know what you are doing with your advertising budget of course.
Of course I run a malware blocker, I mean ad blocker, so I'm not seeing those ads served by malware networks.
With hindsight advertisers must be aware of fake likes and such too.
Are you serious? Google uses dark patterns all the time.
It's not like TV where the money is spent and you have no way to measure the results. Many people are seeing results with Facebook and Instagram ads. So they are spending.
Google AdWords is the king of selling you something you are looking for. But Facebook and Instagram are highly effective at selling you stuff you didn't know you wanted. Not to mention political and spend.
If some scripting is involved to log scrolling, and logging it over ajax, it will not help for the fact that when the page is being rendered, footer may for a split second appear within the viewport.
The later, is what makes the lion share of contention around video ads.
We had a similar problem and it was all down to Twitter Display. Once we turned those off, the metrics improved immensely.
It gets especially worse when there are redirect after redirect to other ad servers, and you lose your tracking macros because the trafficker hasn't configured their landing page tracking macros correctly for each ad server redirect.
Yes this is very wrong, but not because your tracking loses accuracy.
You realize that this sort of careless trail you send your users along is exactly how people get served malware from ads right? I mean you admit yourself you lose track of where they end up so who knows what they get served or redirected to.
For example cloudflare reports 1000 unique users, GA only 300 to 500.
I do this a lot on Wikipedia on my phone. My workflow is to open a new browser tab (Wikipedia is the homepage) and hit the magnifying glass in the corner to search. But shortly after the page loads, it reconfigures itself so I end up hitting a link to somewhere else. (Wikimedia, I think.)
It is incredibly annoying.
The equivalent on a desktop is a badly behaved site (such as... gmail) which first loads a bunch of stuff and then, only then, focuses a text field, so you end up typing the second half of your password into the field that just got focused.
I am not in favor of letting webpages suddenly adjust their own layout or move your focus once they've already loaded or you've already picked a focus.
> I do exactly that behavior all the time.
> Can't disagree with Twitter's reasoning there, anecdotally I myself have done that many times.
> I spoke with a someone recently who uses gmail on his Android device. An ad at the top that resembles an email appears about a second after his real emails appear, timed perfectly to interrupt his attempt to tap and read his first email. Of course he immediately goes back if he makes the mistake
> I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it
It happens all the time. This is an issue with dysfunctional webpage design/layout.
We have people in this very thread openly talking about deploying third party ad scripts that send their users on chains of redirects that they admit to losing track of, and the only thing they see wrong with this is that they can't accurately track their users, not that they very probably sent their users down whatever rabbit/shithole serving malware, miners or drive-by downloaders.
Online advertising is a disgusting wasteland and many people coming out of the woodworks in this thread, working in the industry, are knowingly, unknowingly or usually willingly blindly working to create this situation as it is. Dollar bills make for very good blinders, especially if it's your living.
Perfect for measuring raw HTTP requests, sure, but if you post a link to a brand new, zero-follower account you'll still get a few dozen bots that are doing link analysis against the Twitter firehose (well, a random sampling of it).
Seems like it might show requests that failed to get to the point of processing the analytics JS as well as those running adblockers.
I accept that GA will be off +/-10% because it’s clientside. Don’t need total accuracy to make marketing decisions.
I guess with serverless you should be able to see this either with your own logging or perhaps on AWS with Cloudwatch? (no idea as I’ve not used it).
Off-the-shelf analytics solutions have a ton of heuristics and in-house knowledge built up over decades that help deal with inherently janky data. For example: over half of all internet traffic these days is bots. All modern analytics solutions know how to discriminate bot traffic (to an acceptable extent), you would have to re-create that or get heavily skewed data. As another example, inferring geography from IP: Google, Adobe, etc maintain their own in-house databases for this sort of thing.
Analytics solutions can be configured to send data for interactions that don't involve a page load. There are a lot of interactions that won't put anything into the logfile unless you re-invent tracking beacons. The situation gets more complicated for Single-Page Applications for both types of tracking, but generally the solutions for off-the-shelf technologies are more understood and can be applied more generally.
For another thing, cost and ease of access. Google Analytics has a free version. And for businesses, many of the people who want data work in marketing or UX, not the sort of people who have various types of expertise to dig around in logfiles. At the level of effort it would take for someone to build a logfile tool or learn to dig through the data, GA would offer more benefit at lower cost.
For a solo dev or small team running a not-too-complicated website, logfile parsing may make sense. For a large-enough organization, a custom solution that addresses their specific needs may make sense. But aside from a few sweet spots, most off-the-shelf tools are going to give a better benefit at lower cost. This is especially true of companies that have different teams with different needs and skills, and that benefit from integrations with other tools (like testing or personalization platforms).
Also, slightly-less related... analytics load time is not always a dominant factor in not recording clicks. Most clicks on ads go through a chain of redirects through a half-dozen different services that set cookies, read cookies, attach data, increment counters, etc. There's a large window where a user can cancel navigation before a request is made to the website. Analytics should run pretty fast, unless there is a long time in-between when your server receives the initial request and when the user begins to receive HTML.
I understand the reasons better, it’s unfortunate and slightly depressing to me that the community hasn’t been able to come up with a better solution. Particularly as the google analytics approaches involves giving data up to a 3rd party for processing.
So did you ever stop to ask yourself, if it's free then who exactly is the product? And did they consent to be being sold?
Google has an Analytics product so that website owners can see how much money they make from AdWords, thus encouraging them to spend more money on AdWords. GA is a strategic complement to Google's advertising services, and that is how they derive value from it.
Google does not dip into GA data for their own uses. Post-GDPR this is extra-explicit because they take pains to clarify how much they are not a Controller and only a Processor, but this has always been in their TOS. Frankly, most people's GA implementations are dumpster fires and trying to make use of that data would be more cost and less benefit than punching themselves in the dick.
Google does look at GA data on occasion, but only for the purposes of debugging and for ensuring compliance with the TOS (e.g. they will flag accounts that contain PII).
It almost seems that the tracking of users has to be looped through as many third parties as possible.
I don't know, whatever, it makes it easier to block.
I think the problem is, as an advertiser, treating it like I do the other social channels. I don't feel like it's similar to Facebook at all and has become even more different over time. Pinterest has similarly fragmented.
I see using content as remarketing ads to be effective there. But that's the hardest ad-use-case to prove ROI on, in my experience.
Facebook to actually advertise to my customer base.
I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own site. I believe FB is same.
I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything that they advertise.
The most confusing is that I keep getting ads from the same company I bought my wedding ring at. Like, I’m not divorced, and I don’t need a second. Why would they re-target me?
I'm guessing there's a good reason for this. Did you visit the company's website? And did you buy in person? If so, you're seeing the online to offline problem: specifically, it's hard to correlate your online data with your offline data, so it's hard to tell the difference between someone who already bought a ring from somebody who hasn't yet bought a ring. And I'd bet most people who visited the website haven't bought a ring yet.
So you bring up an interesting point: this is an externality of 1. wasted ads, 2. irritation for the user, 3. a useless invasion of your privacy.
Ive used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
Hypothetically, let's say current ROI is $1.10 for every $1 spent. We stop spending for people who already bought a diamond. Our ROI might go up to $1.12 for every $1 spent. That means the ability to avoid targeting people who already bought a ring is worth $0.02 for every $1 we spend. A company comes and says "for $0.01 on every dollar, we'll give you that ability". Of course you'd take it.
That's more or less what's happening now.
> I've used a shopping cart product for about 6 years, I still get ads for their company on my phone. No offline to online issue there and they still dont solve it.
Yeah you're hitting on another theme of modern day digital advertising. Our collection of data far outstrips our ability to actually act on it. So you'll commonly find situations where you'd assume they could know based on the data they probably collected, but for some reason they don't act on it.
But this is only if you are looking at 1 user right? The advertiser is making the call between the incremental income from better tracking vs the extra income from more impressions.
It seems as if they are choosing the extra income from more, but worse impressions. If they are not solving the online ad to online purchase, which in my mind, they arent doing because it limits the advertising base, which limits ROI more than targeting
What I mean is actually this: Google, Facebook, etc. are opaque about fraud, to the point of misreporting metrics in Facebook's case. Let's say hypothetically that the advertiser had an oracle for whether any individual ad view was fake. I'm pretty sure the advertiser would be paying less. That difference is what I meant by bearing much of the cost.
Google/Facebook's marginal cost for the fraudulent traffic is basically just the cost of infrastructure. The publisher (if there is one) is often the one causing the fraud, so they're not really "bearing the cost."
If only one bidder could tell the difference, that bidder might just buy fewer ads because ROI estimates will be lower, so fewer ad buys would look like positive ROI. Of course, that's under the assumption that fraud inflates performance metrics, but I think that's a pretty safe assumption.
For example, their latest solution is to prevent you from having the exact same name as a famous person. Notice all the bots now have the name "Elon" or "Elon Mu5k" when responding to Elon Musk.
Conversion was terrible, as in no one subscribed to the newsletter (the website usually had a very high newsletter conversion rate (20-30%? I forgot), but of those 1000, not even one person decided to subscribe.
The ad spend for the day (I remember now) was even higher than the daily limit.
I spent two weeks talking to the useless billing support that would admit no fault before giving up and paying for a "bug" in their system.
I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition.
We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down on them. They are too big for small players to compete.
1) Call for abandoning the "Consumer Welfare Standard"
2) Enumerate how the Tech Tyrants have negatively affected the competitiveness of companies/projects you've worked on (M&A, canceled products, vaporware, embrace and extend, pricing changes, etc.)
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/consumer-welfare-standard-outd...
https://medium.com/@CDisrupted/does-the-consumer-welfare-sta...
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/effective-competition-standard...
Big Tech is lobbying hard to retain the "Consumer Welfare Standard", which they rely on for anti-trust evasion:
https://itif.org/publications/2018/10/04/why-consumer-welfar...
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/dont-damage-our-democra...
I recently deleted all my accounts completely, because it just became so horrible to use. Timeline all over the place, overwhelming number of ads, impossible to use search anymore, Explore that just ignores what you like and shows you stuff they want you to see, etc etc.
I get an ad every 3-4 posts on the app, but none on the site.
If Target's sales are up this holiday, was it the TV ads, the print ads, or the online ads? Or maybe it wasn't any of them and the economy is just up.
It's not a perfect measure of the lift, but it's pretty solid and underestimates things if anything, which makes it good enough for basing ad buying decisions off of. You could do fancier geographic segmenting + statistics, but why bother when the direct method works?
It's actually easier for large brands, since they can afford to put engineering effort into building bespoke tracking and analysis software. The trickiest would be smaller brands, especially those who advertise via agencies - they can't do anything that isn't commercial off-the-shelf, and as of now there isn't anything great in this space.
To solve this and out of our own frustration of working with ad agencies for no ROI, we created a tool to run influencer campaigns that pay each influencer a commission of sale generated. Once a campaign is created, influencers join this campaign and start sharing. They earn commissions automatically each time followers buy from their unique affiliate link. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackbell-promote/id14241791... / https://www.blackbell.com/influencermarketing We recently started speaking with small ad agencies about it, most are afraid to start using our tool and philosophy for one reason: it can disrupt themselves, they are happy charging fees to manage FB / Google ads with bad and blind ROI, especially as most take % of ad spending…
For the huge marketing groups ( Omnicom, Publicis Groupe etc ) my personal meetings with top decision makers paints the same picture from yesterday Axios article: > Between the lines: Financial struggles and minimal oversight at some of the biggest global agencies have for years led to bad practices, like kickbacks and bid-rigging, that have led marketers to question whether their dollars are being wasted. https://www.axios.com/businesses-moving-media-advertising-in...
However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website, wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get the bot traffic (which went for a CPC of about $0.001). They were buying $10-20k per day from us of fraudulent traffic. Turns out they were relying on the audience engagement platforms (alexa, hitwise, quantcast, comscore, etc) to track their audience size and those platforms incorrectly counted our bot traffic as legitimate.
As the majority of their advertisers were brand marketing (e.g. Nintendo paying for a full-site background spread for the latest Zelda) and there was no direct way to measure success, advertisers would be swayed by the third-party audience profiles and agree it was good idea to spend massive amounts of money on ad campaigns there.
Our ad server code only supported 3 decimal places. It wasn't until later that we figured out the how/why behind their desire for what we outright informed them was most likely bot traffic. And yeah, I didn't stay much longer at that company. The entire industry is incredibly sketchy and that apparently hasn't changed much.
The only thing that's true is the data you are measuring yourself, which would be web traffic, conversions etc. Although it's not inconceivable that a fraudulent actor would send bit traffic with (e.g. Facebook) referrer tags to your site to make you think you were getting greater reach with your ads than you were.
However it's unlikely that you'd see too much as I have to imagine most of the inflation is happening in the broader targeting efforts. "males 18-31 with these interests" etc.
Well, they look good to the company and the bosses eat up the voodoo science they are preaching.
I've yet to ever see true ROI or accurate numbers of any kind coming out of Facebook or Instagram for content or marketing campaigns. Instagram is mostly a bot problem. Facebook has loose impression and view numbers. YouTube hasn't ever been a red flag in my experience, but I've never been involved with any ad work there, just content.
Something is really off with the numbers on Facebook (in my opinion on Google too, but there I'm not so sure)
Hauling Facebook's CEO into legislative inquiries worldwide totally misses the Mark. Masquerading Facebook as the Face of this reality is totally disingenuous and more of a reflection of discomfort and fatigue people already had with that service than a genuine expression against the data brokers.
and if this happened could you imagine the influx of engineers available
(From a social/demographic outlook, its replacement is inevitable.)
> Revenue and users are both increasing year over year.
They wouldn't lie, of course.
Of course, companies come up with their own metrics all the time, but they have to be published alongside GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) metrics.