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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

> they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers

Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party analytics tools you can use to track the website.

> if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range

I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic. These megacorps don't have VPNs?

> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic

Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense.

As someone who has also been in the industry for 10+ years, none of what you said passes the smell test. Maybe after 15 years you still never understood the industry or technology?

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With respect to:

>> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic

>Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense.

I have only ever been a buyer; so my technical understanding of the back end implementation is incomplete.

However, I think the point OP is trying to make is that the back end of the ad targeting infrastructure ends up attributing "spend" to folks who would have otherwise been organic traffic and found your site anyway. ie placing your ad in effective organic pathways and/or in front of well targeted users.

This of course makes sense. A well targeted ad is going to be presented to lots of people who would have otherwise been organic traffic.

This is just a problem with measuring ROI on ad's in general though. I think what has changed is improved attribution of digital ad's has confused people. They see 10 clicks, $5 spend, 1 sale @ $10 and think a 200% ROAS.

In the old days (and still sometimes for non digital) ad effectiveness was measured as a lift over baseline. Different media had different decay rates.

Depending on your digital property, a similar model may need to be applied to your digital campaigns. As I understand though, this is harder to do in modern times with digital ad's.

> Depending on your digital property, a similar model may need to be applied to your digital campaigns. As I understand though, this is harder to do in modern times with digital ad's.

This is insanely important to do now, and the people who know how to successfully do it are old and retiring.

But nobody really wants to know the number of advertising dollars spent to get customers who were already going to spend on your product to ... spend on your product.

No I'm with him it still makes no sense to me. There's a massive assumption that because you fit the profile you'd have heard of the service if there wasn't advertising. A major part of advertising is to find people who like your product. You advertise to let people know about your product and keep it in their minds. Lift over baseline is relevant yes for ROI, but it doesn't imply the service is worthless!

I left the industry 4y ago, but at the time, it was impossible to track impressions on FB ads. So when FB tells you "We did display 1000 time your ads", you just have to believe them. For the IP of the click, I have seen it from my own eyes in 2013, from Facebook. About analytic tools, I let you check who is the leader in this market, and about their independence in the click market ... If you have a website that pointed by a FB ad campaign, just look at the IP of the incoming clicks.

> Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense.

Well, that what is happening in practice. It is an attribution game, ad companies try to have the best conversion numbers more than increasing the overall sales of a store.

I have been working in a drive to (physical) store company, we were measuring performances with an expose group + a control group and we were showing 3% visit in store increase during a campaign, while our competitors were claiming things around 10%. We knew that their tracking technology was just about "we shown an ad, they visited the store, it is because of us"

I'm going to stop going back and forth on this. But let me just say this: verifying paid traffic, within the ad platforms as well as on your website is totally possible.

If you want to second guess the psychology of whether or not the ad "drove" the user to make a purchase or not, that is up for discussion. Or whether Google/META do shady shit in their bidding environment. Absolutely.

But this idea that you can't track everything is bullshit.

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