Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology.
If Google shows everyone how ineffective ads actually are, they’d crumble.
The two main options advertisers have are:
* Brand Lift Studies: split audience into treatment and control, use surveys on a small fraction of participants to measure impact
* Conversion Lift: again split audience into treatment and control, compare downstream actions like purchases ("conversions")
These both work on YouTube IIRC.
Anyways, I was mostly referring to sales at physical locations; I assume it's pretty viable to build a system to figure out if someone who previously bought a lot of shein is now buying a lot of temu.
Offline purchases are harder, of course, but pretty sure you can still do this: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9994849
(Once I understand your claim I'll be better able to respond: I think "there's effectively no way to be caught" is not true under both of the interpretations I see)
Such as?
I agree, and find it even wilder that first party metrics from Meta and Google are trusted by most major advertisers (including ad agencies). I'm talking about six-seven figure budgets spent without any third party validation.
I've seen some studies on click fraud[0], but when advertisers are effectively choosing from a duopoly that has limited incentives not to lie in their metrics, I find it strange that there are no popular, widespread and accessible independent validation tools.
Many of the advertisers that sell on these platforms are quite familiar with buying ads directly from "old school" media companies. So they have the competence and familiarity to be put off by the metrics but are apparently not in a position to force Google and Facebook to match standards used in other contexts.