Why can’t Google do this? Surely their data is better than yours.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing
and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.
Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.
I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
It’s also built into approximately everyone’s phone.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
In the ad marketplace there are four participants: the advertiser, the user, the network (Google), and the publisher (also Google for AdWords, other websites for AdSense and so on, and effectively the channel owner for YouTube).
In the click spam or botnet case, the bad actor is the user, who is usually associated with a publisher trying to get extra money (although not always - there's reasons like auction manipulation where some advertisers run click bots too). In the bad-ads case, the bad actor is the advertiser.
At Google, each of those problems has their own well funded team, but they do also share some data to help catch rings of bad guys.
Suppose 50% of used laptops are good and worth $1,000, while 50% are bad and worth $400. Since you cannot tell which one you are buying, the average value is 0.5x1000 + 0.5x400 = $700, so you will not want to pay more than about $700.
But owners of good laptops may refuse to sell for $700, so more good laptops leave the market and the chance of buying a bad one increases. And the only guy selling for $700 is the lemons.
Problem 2: The theory assumes buyers already know how many bad products are in the market, but in real life they often do not.
Its obvious this market for lemons can’t be true
Your "point 1" is literally the argument of the paper. If that scenario arises, the market collapses and no further sales can be made. That's the whole problem. As someone who takes a percentage of every sale, you want to keep the lemon-sellers out even though in the short run they make you extra money.
Your "point 2", if it's meant to be a rebuttal, isn't much of one. Buyers don't need to accurately know exactly what fraction of sellers are fraudulent; if they believe that it's 50-50, the same thing happens, even if the true rate is 80-20 in favor of good sellers. Conversely, if buyers are overly optimistic about quality, the market can persist despite a level of fraud that's higher than should be tolerated. But in any case, things like reviews and external reporting should eventually give them good information.