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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

Like many takedowns of the digital ad industry, this paints an incomplete picture.

We use 3rd party impression and click tracking, along with pairing purchases to user/session ids to make sure our ads our working. If a user tries to mask their data from us, they simply come in as direct traffic, and we don't attribute that to our ad campaign.

If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.

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Most of the ad industry believes that because they use a 3rd party impression or click tracking they are safe from these attacks. This article outlines how ad fraud operations find vulnerabilities in those technologies that the ad industry trusts. 3rd party verification does not mean you have avoided fraud.

I didn't just leave it at impression and click tracking though.

To track from impression to purchase you would probably be using one 3rd party service. Google has the best capabilities but you are still relying on them to not have any vulnerabilities and their incentives of selling adds and verifying them for you aligned.

>If this fraud stuff trips you up you aren't doing it right.

That mentality, across the entire ad industry, is how I retired before 40. Assumptions of security, understanding, and operating knowledge create huge blindspots, and those were my flow state.

I tend to agree but this article doesn't address the blindspots that I think are relevant.

Yup, but that's the thing: "you aren't doing it right" is more the norm than otherwise.

You should add your retention rates into the picture though. The ad network can bring you really shitty users who had incentives to click (usually from within games) but are absolutely not interested in your product. These can be real users, not bots, but they will ruin your retention stats later.

> along with pairing purchases to user/session id

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