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Comment by prasadjoglekar | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix models are still the only way to understand the relative performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled garden" that doesn't exchange data with others.

FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.

The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.

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Exactly, as a small business we are completely dependent on the ad platforms internal attribution tools, if they don't work or can't be trusted we won't use them.

It's unfortunate that the incredably invasive tracking and profile building has become conflated with ad attribution. For us attribution is essential and we have little interest or use for invasive tracking. We just want to know from which ad a customer converted.

Personally we avoid the more invasive remarking tools as I hate it myself when you are chased across the web by a product you have looked at once.

What do you mean by conflated? The tracking and profile building is how they correlate results with ad impressions. That this data is then also used for training the models and identifying the user coefficients is just a different use of the same correlation data (a website visit is just another type of ad conversion, after all).

We shouldn’t identify the user. We should identify the content. “I want to be shown next to car pictures, because maybe the guy is missing carpets for his car” instead of “We want to be shown to guys 24-30 with interest in cars.” First is tracking the content, second is tracking the user.

Conversion tracking is all about tracking the user, though, to realize the same user that saw an add "converted", whatever that means.

This is contextual targeting, but GP is explicitly asking for conversion tracking. You can’t do that with contextual targeting.

I work in adtech and hear "We don't want to track people, we just want to know what events led to conversion" all the damn time. (Or conversely, from the sell side, "we don't want to track people, we just want to learn/verify our audience's composition.).

Sorry to break it to you, but that's what tracking is.

You're saying you don't want remarking, but - you want to know something that requires marking. "Remarking" is just persistent marking. What you don't want is "retargeting", which is when the user gets to learn someone is building a profile of them. But that's just whether the "marked" profile is used to also "target" - the profile gets built either way.

Can you not just point the ad at https://your.website.example/item012628?from=facebookad20210... or whatever and save those from parameters in a cookie or something so you can see at checkout what ads were clicked before purchase? How could ATT possible factor in to this?

Sensible question. See my answer at the link below, but basically Facebook/Instagram IAB don't share cookies with your main browser.

Plus it’s supper useful to feed that attribution data back into the ad platforms management tools.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30205629

FB attracts big ad dollars as they will continue to claim to have huge audience reach

>if a user does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in the company's Account Center, those accounts will be considered as two separate people for ad planning and measurement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211031105427/https://adage.com...

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