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Comment by changoplatanero | Hacker News Reader

Don't most advertisers invest in their own methods to tell if the ads they are buying are giving them value or not? I imagine that advertisers should have a pretty good idea of the quality of what they are buying.

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Thats correct, in my previous company, we had a full internal infrastructure that provides daily or hourly perforamnce of advertisements that hits all major social media APIs.

Did prev company then compare with performance claimed by google, facebook, etc?

I work in adtech and yeah if there is a discrepancy the advertiser will 100% contact their account manager about it. Same goes for the supply side, publishers maintain what they expect to be paid and will raise any discrepancies as well.

and does account manager help sometimes, or just retrieve standard template response?

Usually it is just a misunderstanding of the metrics, but if there is an issue they will always open a ticket with the engineering teams. They also expect some level of discrepancy since the volume of data is so large.

No. There's a century-old quote for it: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker

I believe the context for that quote is that it was referencing TV ads, which makes sense. How can a TV advertiser know who is watching?

Online ads were supposed to fix this problem.

Ad attribution is extremely difficult across any ad medium, especially while respecting user privacy.

You may see an online ad two weeks ago and buy the product today, how do you attribute that?

You use promotional codes for attribution, then you have complete knowledge. So it's extremely easy, and a solved problem. No need for analytics, no need to infringe on privacy.

I watch a youtube video and the youtuber shills me some product along with a promo code. A week later I decide to buy the product, but I don't remember what video had the ad or what the promo code was so I just don't bother with it. How are you going to attribute this sale to the youtuber?

In those cases you can't attribute, but that's okay. With normal ads you have zero certainty of attribution.

If you can figure out the attribution, I'd say you've infringed on privacy.

You know what the buyer was looking at

That's not an infringement of privacy in any way. Likewise then you know what the buyer purchased, since you sold it to her.

And nobody is forced to use a discount code.

That quote's from around 1900 but your point stands for print. Nielsen actually got really good numbers for TV using statistics, self-filled form sheets and crisp one-dollar bills.

exactly how are the buyers supposed to do that? they have no access to any kind of logs from Googs' servers. it's a perfect setup for Googs. there is no trust but verify. at least with the old school systems of buying radio/tv ads, you can get each market to provide you with an air check showing exactly when/where the ad ran. with print, you could just get a copy of the printed thing. when advertisers were sitting around wondering how they could do less for more, Googs says, hold my beer

Sure, if you're a medium-large company with a whole marketing department. But Google has a massive long tail of small businesses who have no chance of doing that kind of analysis.

My uncle ran a small business out of his garage where he got all his customers from advertising. Pretty sure he kept track of his return on each campaign and would only run them if they were profitable to him.

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