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Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers

(news.yahoo.com)
618 points elorant | 1 comments | 19 Feb 21 14:34 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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marketingtech ◴[19 Feb 21 17:18 UTC] No.26195341[source]▶
No major advertisers rely on Facebook or any other ad platform's reported numbers. The platforms are grading their own homework, and even their abilities to do that are increasingly limited.

Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms because they know, directionally, that some amount of the advertising is effective. Sales go up when they advertise, sales go down when they stop.

They use the reported metrics from the platforms to see which of their ad campaigns is relatively more effective than the next. No experienced marketers rely on these metrics to be accurate when making budget decisions.

replies(1): >>26195773 #
ishjoh ◴[19 Feb 21 17:53 UTC] No.26195773[source]▶
> Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms

I agree with your point on the large companies that can spend millions of dollars.

The folks that really get hurt by this stuff are the smaller businesses. It can be an expensive lesson when you think you're getting value from these services because they're providing bogus metrics. It's even more difficult if you can't correlate it to online sales, things like restaurants/retail locations this is especially difficult.

replies(1): >>26196647 #
bquest2 ◴[19 Feb 21 19:03 UTC] No.26196647[source]▶
One thing that would help these small businesses would be SDK of sorts that would help them do proper attribution themselves.

Something that would help tie an ad click to an actual purchase or an app download.

replies(2): >>26196788 #>>26198928 #
1. marketingtech ◴[19 Feb 21 19:14 UTC] No.26196788[source]▶
Right now, that's extremely difficult to do without leaking private data. Google and Facebook experimented with it for a while, but both killed the test products because it would require them to trust advertisers with data that could easily be de-anonymized. It's kind of a funny twist that Google and Facebook are able to avoid offering this in the name of user privacy, while the advertising industry is begging them to share more user data.

That said, they're all part of an industry consortium that's working on differential privacy algorithms that will ideally allow businesses to check each other's attribution without actually sharing the personal data involved. https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developer...