[carlosjobim]

I think it is an awful idea, and it is justifiable to physically destroy those billboards and connected contraptions. In case you where actually serious with your post.

The thing is that tracking sales through advertising is already a solved problem since long ago, since before the internet. What you do is that you give people a discount/promotional code in the ad, that they can give when they make a purchase. Use different codes for different advertising channels. Then for every person who makes a purchase using the code, you will know that they saw that particular advertisement or heard from somebody who saw the advertisement.

With this way you have 0 false positives, you know that somebody using the promotion code did it because of the advertising. You don't have to do any analytics of website visitors, track people, or anything else. There is no uncertainty.

But business owners prefer to play the casino game of low-cost "bets" with ads on social media and Google - hoping that one of them is the right one. Trusting Facebook when they tell them that tens of thousands of people saw the ad but nobody bought. Hmmmm, better throw in another $50 in the ad-casino with some changed parameters.

Online advertising is a scam industry and I hope it gets crushed during this economic depression.