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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads. Perhaps the conversion numbers are slightly inflated but in general it’s just really hard to tell. If you show a lot of ads to potential customers then chances are, most people who buy things from you saw your ads. Does that mean they came to you because of the ad? I think even if you had perfect information it would be hard to decide. There is some chance that you just have an added sales tax where you send $6 to each advertiser every time you make a sale. I don’t know how much (eg) google care about deciding whether conversion numbers are correct. But how do they even decide if the numbers are correct and what stops them from being biased towards reporting higher conversion rates?

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Most online businesses have multiple ways to track conversions... It will become pretty obvious if Google says you sold 130 widgets but your warehouse guys only delivered 60....

Likewise, lots of businesses have a different landing page for people coming from an ad vs people from organic search and people coming from referral links/shared URL's. The business counts how many people visited each of those.

They'll know if the ad providers stats are lying...

The issue is not that you sold 60 widgets but Google tells you it was 130. The issue is that you sold 60 widgets with ads but you would have sold 59 widgets without ads: are you making sales because of ads or are you showing ads to your would-be customers.

If I understand the premise, it should be simple enough to disaggregate my organic vs. paid-for conversions.

For brand lift campaigns though, without enough historical sales numbers, I can see how it’s harder to tell if your ad money is being well spent.

It’s very hard to attribute sales correctly.

I might see an ad today, think about it for a week, then come back and buy the product later. I might keep buying it for years afterwards. The ad is often just one step in the process that gets somebody to buy.

I think of how I got turned on to Monster Energy drinks because I saw them at the store and liked the product and the portion size compared to Red Bull. A few years later Monster started spending heavily on sponsorships and other marketing but by that point I had lost interest and moved on.

> I might see an ad today, think about it for a week, then come back and buy the product later.

In general, unless a specific sale can be affirmatively linked to a user who has clicked an ad for a specific product, then it is excluded. Basically, the ad providers stats won't count people like you who clear cookies regularly, so the business benefits from those sales and the ad provider loses out.

So, in general, stats collection and reporting errors are in favor of the business selling goods.

As parent said, you can see that one sale was made from ../product_google_landing_page and 59 sales were made from ../product_landing_page

People come back on different devices, different browsers, clear cookies, shop at a later date etc.

And that is whos problem? You dont pay for that either.

That is a multi party collaborarion problem.

Some affiliates make it very simple, affiliate links. Sure , there are some fraudulent tricks, on both sides, but it is manageable.

The ad networks are never interested in implementing any such thing, they only show how "configurable" their setrings are.

When asked where is the traffic coming from, "sorry,we cant disclose".which is funny, we would see later on anyway, right?

Then other networks provide you with a list upfront.

None or few of them have retargeting.

When asking them straight up "ok , you own my product, how would you use your network to generate conversions rather than impressions?" .It is all suddenly silent.

I have other,more qualified revenues, they are expensive but they deliver on cpa, else they are not paid. But they are the dearest, of course, so my boss is considering alternative revenue channels, even though they are the very least specifc and totally useless. He is the one impressed by rhe config options, I try to assign most spend away from such.

We are speaking spending 5k on some impressions campaign with absolutelly zero sign up or first time depositors.

For this money, you can pay a youtuber with regularly 200k legit views and say 30k my product views to create 8-10 10 minute videos, qhich actually converts.

That still perfectly solves the bot problem.

It doesn't the problem of optimizing your ads, but it's ok to only completely solve one problem and let the others on the same situation from the beginning.

you don't even need a different landing page, though that makes it easier. Depending on the ad platform, you can (in the US) cookie them and connect their behavior after the initial click. For the first session, UTM's are often sufficient.

> A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads.

If you rely on their reporting, yes, but you can aleays set up your own basic attribution (with some caveats around ios traffic due to the ATT changes, but in that case the reporting comes from Apple). There are also third-party providers that can do attribution for you, but somewhat costly.

This makes it sound so much easier than it actually is. Tracking where customers from on iOS device is extremely difficult. Now spread that difficulty over 10 different advertising channels (youtube, Facebook, direct visits, google, etc), each with millions of dollars in budget, and the problem quickly becomes impossible to track yourself.

Sounds like a legitimately good application for block chain - both parties can have access to the immutable transaction history. Similar to how Walmart applied block chain to inventory delivery disputes.

How do you verify the information being put into the blockchain is correct?

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