Game companies that buy ads for mobile installs-- a huge advertising market-- pay per install. Of course fraudulent companies create fake installs from fake accounts. But when you get an app installed a thousand times it is possible to judge the quality of those installs. Where they are, if they are real people, etc. It is clear that the results vary wildly and from my subjective perspective ad fraud is at least as bad as it has ever been.
Yeah, I always find it bizarre when people make these naive claims. Of course number of impressions are a proxy for reality, but when the rubber hits the road advertisers know what value they are getting. They are leveraging the microtargeting and the cookie tracking an God knows what else zuck has cooked up. Facebook, Google etc are fundamentally profitable places to advertise -when done intelligently. Smart, repeat advertisers pay Facebook a lot of money for this privilege.
Arguments like this always strike me the same way as the arguments about real-estate around 2007: “Smart bankers would never invest billions in bad loans”.
Maybe advertisers know what they’re getting. Or maybe they think they know but are actually willfully ignorant of something important because it goes against “common knowledge”.
Without some kind of third party auditing it’s impossible to tell, and I haven’t seen anything like that from Facebook.
The problem is you cannot audit as much as you would like. The important part is a real human sees the ad. (human with the desirable characteristic is a secondary factor). However you cannot measure the effects of an ad easily because there are too many confounding factors: people who buy because of a previous ad, people who would buy anyway, people who will buy in a few years.
We do know the companies that have cut advertising too much have lost market share. However when you have a lot of ads it is hard to figure out which ad made the difference.
