If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions. Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product.
That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your payments per conversion into payments per click and then payments per impression, but importantly this shifts the incentive to get rid of bots to them, not you - you no longer care. The provider also has an incentive to send you customers who will actually buy your product, and to send the bots and web scrapers to their other clients.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions
Others have already pointed out that this is actually impossible. The big ad platforms charge on impressions you can setup any targeting you want but they charge on impressions that's it.
Conversion isn't the best metric though for many ads. The big advertisers don't care about conversion because they are not trying for customers today, they are trying for mind share so when someone thinks about buying they are on the list.
Conversion is a lot easier to measure than "buys your car sometime in the next 3 years", and is worth measuring. However it is often only a proxy for the real metric.
Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's personal data that is involved in the purchase?
They don't. But if you don't pay them enough, ad-companies will stop sending you any customers at all, and instead put their efforts into catering to other higher-paying clients. So you are incentivized to make a good ad campaign that generates a lot of sales.
Usually there's a magic pixel that you embed on the checkout success page or a callback you invoke. I suppose people could cheat, but if your ad never converts, the network has no incentive to run it.
This is why all websites have big cookie consent modals that appear before you can view content now. Most people just accept all. (And even when doing that, things like Apple Tracking Transparency have broken fingerprinting for a lot of adtech.)
None of those consent modals are compliant. GDPR compliance requires those modals to make it as easy to decline as it is to accept, and not skew the choice via a pre-ticked checkbox or making one option more prominent than the other. Which again reinforces my point that nobody is interested in seriously enforcing the GDPR.
Also, how effectively can the GDPR be enforced on companies with zero European assets? They can say “stuff it” when the fines are levied. Will the EU force blocking at the ISP level?
Conversion is not even sufficient. Conversions tell you how many people went through your ad and successfully bought something, but the value of ads is *how many people who weren't already going to buy something bought something through the ad*.
E.g. people might be seeing an ad for Target after typing "target" in Google. The number of conversions through that doesn't matter and should be discounted. People might be seeing an ad or hitting an affiliate link for a website they already use regularly, if they go there hours later it doesn't mean your ad is effective.
Even before online, newspaper would "distribute" their papers to hotels and college dorms to "invisible" subscribers to increase the count of their subscriptions. And let's not even get into how radio and TV viewers are counted via Nelson.
Even if it would be easy only pay per conversion, you would create a different type of perverse incentive in which ad platforms would exclusively want to target consumers their models attach a high preexisting (before exposure to ads) probability of conversion. That is OK for lower funnel tactics but it would severely reduce your ability to put your brand in front of a new audience.
Yeah, I long thought that these kinds of fraud are ultimately filtered by measuring the return. Paid to Zonama web shop to show your wares, but all visits are from people comparing prices with the in-house brand? Well drop the shop. Bought an ad campaign, see zero conversion? Why would anyone continue buying it.
After speaking to many sales reps for ad networks I have decided to to so,however, these Cpa deals have negative value, say if you provide a service that will or with not have better customer life time value than the cost for the cpa, what would be a useful idea about that?
Would be curious to here, too, as far ad networks go.
There are many affiliates for online casinos, crypto exchanges etc, they usually have a cpa + revshare deal.
They scrap the non converting audience, its vastly more expensive, but I imagine converting an impression from an add somewhere on an app or such to a paying depositor with life time values north of 200usd is just not going to be economically viable.
So far, all I have spoken to ended up a cpm model slightly shuffled.
That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your payments per conversion into payments per click and then payments per impression, but importantly this shifts the incentive to get rid of bots to them, not you - you no longer care. The provider also has an incentive to send you customers who will actually buy your product, and to send the bots and web scrapers to their other clients.