Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

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There are two distinct areas of online advertising: performance marketing, and brand advertising. I'm a performance marketer. I make a profit only when ads result in conversions - usually sales or signups for trial offers, but in some cases we do lead generation campaigns for clients as well. We spend high 5/low 6 figures per month, mostly on Facebook ads, with a monthly ROAS (return on ad spend) that beats Berkshire Hathaway's annual returns. The idea that online advertising cannot work is absurd.

The schemes mentioned in articles like this are almost exclusively targeted at brand marketers. My guess is the problem lies in the way that large brands incentivize the people running their campaigns, because the technology exists to knock out the vast majority of this type of fraud. Companies like Coke hire ad firms that send them reports about impressions, and they are thus incentivized to not pay attention to traffic quality, and just maximize impressions. That has to be the problem, because just my internal traffic quality tools that I have written would have shutdown ad delivery on the sites sending such obviously bad traffic within a few clicks from each referrer - and I don't claim to have written the most sophisticated filter out there. There are many ways to do reality checks on traffic, on a per-referrer basis, and cut out much of this stuff. Webview traffic (the kind being taken advantage of here) is among the easiest to detect.

As to your question about measuring ROAS it's simple for performance marketers. Take your ad spend and compare it to revenue. I'm not sure that brand marketers have a reasonable way of determining ROAS, either online or in the physical world. I suppose they could take brand recognition surveys and compare before/after a given campaign, but that is hardly an exact science.

And without doing experimental setup (RCTs), how do you know you are not just paying for organic conversions?

I had this presentation a few months ago: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/gregak/if-youre-not-measur... I would be interested to know what you think.

Very interesting presentation. The question your research is attempting to answer is certainly a valid one for major sites, where people might be on the site anyway without having clicked on a given ad. In my specific case, most of the sites/offers we market through Facebook ads wouldn't have attracted many organic visitors, let alone conversions, on their own, so it's not a question I need to answer. These sites rely almost entirely on paid traffic, and if they don't get it they are out of business.

The importance of being able to figure out what actually led to conversions is not lost on me though. One unique technology I created allows us to do something that I have never seen anyone else in the online marketing world do: track conversions back to the initial click and ad campaign, even if someone just texts, emails, or uses an instant messenger to send the URL to a friend. So let's say someone visits the site, sees that the offer isn't for them but texts it to a friend. A month later, that friend finally gets around to looking at it, but decides it isn't for them either but knows someone else who might be interested, and they email it to someone else, who ultimately converts. We can track that conversion and all the steps in between back to the initial click and attribute it to the initial ad campaign, which gives us a much better sense of what each ad campaign is actually producing. The technology also lets us create custom Facebook audiences of anyone that has shared a link from the site - regardless of how they shared - text, email, Facebook - doesn't matter. We can then customize campaigns to encourage those people to share again.

If close to 0 of your traffic is organic, then you don’t have to care too much about the whole correlation vs. causality problem, yes.

What you describe is certainly interesting. I guess you are building a graph of unique IDs, with each shared URL containing the ID of the parent as a query param or something like that?

Something like that, yes. When you visit any URL on the site, we use javascript to rewrite the URL in the location bar with a shortened, unique, trackable URL. So we know both what URL you came in through, and the new URL that we then assigned to you. With this we can track every click all the way back up through the tree to the initial click, even if you just copy/paste the URL or hit the button on your phone to text the page to a given contact. Where possible, we also track any link preview engines that visit the URL, so we can usually tell not just that you shared, but how you shared (skype, telegram, iMessage, gmail, facebook, twitter, etc.).

I initially wrote this system so that I could retarget through Facebook ads people that had previously shared viral news articles, but now we have found great applications for it in ecommerce and lead gen as well.

You wouldn’t know who shared until someone doesn’t actually visit the shared link, right? Unless I’m misunderstanding something. Also I don’t see how you would build a custom audience on FB for the people who shared, e.g. by copy-pasting the URL from the location bar. I see how you would do it on some javascript event (e.g. page load, click on share button, etc.), but that’s not the same.

Correct, we don't know who shared until someone visits the link. But, we can build a custom audience after the fact because the Facebook retargeting pixel lets you pass an arbitrary ID of your choosing with each pixel load (the variable name is "extern_id" [1]). So when a click comes in on a given URL that we know had to have been shared, we know what extern_id we gave to Facebook for the original user that shared the link on the pixel fire back when they first visited the site. We can then build a custom audience using a list of those extern_id's for only people that have shared, after the fact.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences... - see "External Identifiers"

Thank you very much for you answer

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