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by aslewofmice 4141 days ago
The problem with display advertising is that too much of the industry is focused on clicks. Anti-fraud companies can come up with ways to try to mitigate click fraud but it won't do much of anything as they can, and will be, gamed by black hats - there's too much money at stake.

I deal with it every day and the best method is to educate the client by explaining why a click is a poor indicator of performance. Work with the client to come up with measurable goals to track click-through/view-through conversions on these goals and ultimately try to measure impact on ROI. It's really not THAT difficult for most campaigns.

The most difficult part is that the client becomes aware of all those wasted dollars on previous campaigns that they thought were high performance because of a high CTR.

2 comments

> "Work with the client to come up with measurable goals to track click-through/view-through conversions on these goals and ultimately try to measure impact on ROI. It's really not THAT difficult for most campaigns."

Strongly disagree here. It really is THAT difficult for most campaigns. What you are talking about is attribution, and display attribution in particular is still in the dark ages compared to anything click-based. It is IMHO by far and away the toughest problem to tackle in the industry right now. Even more so thank fraud, because if you have a clear sense of what is actually driving revenue, the fraud just becomes another factor for bid algorithms to consider.

Coming up with the value of a view-through conversion, etc. is non-trivial. Further, even getting revenue data from view-throughs is not easy for most advertisers that don't have an ad server in place (think everyone using the vanilla AdWords tracking on the GDN). Specifically, Google gives you view-through conversions, but not view-through revenue, even though they clearly have the data.

I agree that too much of the industry is focused on clicks, and publishers are still loving branding clients that go after impressions because they see it as an easy commission that is super simple to automate management for.

That said, I wish any company with a display offering would do more to prove the value of it from an attribution standpoint. Why do I need to have DFA for accessing full exposure-to-conversion path data? Wouldn't that make it much easier for me to sell in the value of display to my org/clients so I would spend even more?

Personally, I'm dying to see what Google does with Adometry, and what FB does with Atlas in terms of proving the value of display from a data-driven dynamic attribution standpoint. Static models are broken and display is a much more difficult beast to tackle.

Aren't most advertising campaigns focused on acquisitions these days?
No, and they are not focused on clicks either. The majority of the adspend* cares about impressions, viewability and lift.

*display adspend

> Aren't most advertising campaigns focused on acquisitions these days?

Nope, much of it is branding. Some are focused on clicks, some are focused on viewability... it's sort of a turning point in the industry...

> No, and they are not focused on clicks either. The majority of the adspend* cares about impressions, viewability and lift. *display adspend

Most or not, it's still a significant amount. The clients you mention may be more concerned with impressions/viewability/lift, but they're still vulnerable to be gamed the same way as someone who cares about clicks. Viewability is already being manipulated by the same bots that generate fraudulent clicks. It's a great metric in theory, but take it with a grain of salt.

If anything, these companies (Moat, IAS, Oxford...) are the ones who should be most concerned about combating bots.

> The clients you mention may be more concerned with impressions/viewability/lift, but they're still vulnerable to be gamed the same way as someone who cares about clicks.

No arguing there. I was just pointing out facts to the previous comenters.

I don't know about the turning point tho...