The state of marketing departments in companies must be a joke if this is how Facebook and Twitter are milking them.

I imagine billions of dollars are being wasted in companies with no return value in the name of "marketing".

And if anyone ever thinks Facebook and Twitter are actual competition to Google in ad market they must be out of their minds.

I can understand why Google gets bidding wars over people searching for "vacuum cleaner" or "cheap web hosting", but for most other things I can't quite imagine the use case. I either don't want to buy something, or I know who I'm buying from.

Facebook seems much better placed to show things like "hey, you liked this band and you live in this town, did you know they're coming next month?" On very rare occasions, FB actually manages to achieve the theoretical role of ads as "notifying people about mutually beneficial transactions". And when they don't, I can at least see that the ads are having effects like "making me aware of a consulting firm" that a marketer might value. Meanwhile, I've never seen a Google search ad I valued, and I don't know if I've ever seen an Ad Words ad I valued.

(Actually, I've benefited from Youtube ads occasionally also. But only ever for learning about new-release music, movies, or games.)

But there's been too many reports of bot activity, fake likes, fake followers in those platforms that I'm sure many companies and marketing departments fall for them.

Not everyone does as good job as you Im sure.

Google, as far as I know, was never caught in dark ui patterns or fake number reports to generate revenue. They don't seem to need it.

Autoplay videos with ads?

It's far different from let them click on this by mistake

I feel like YouTube by now is more similar to TV advertising, you take in consideration that people could just have the tv on in the background while doing something else or going around the house. Unless you don't know what you are doing with your advertising budget of course.

Of course I run a malware blocker, I mean ad blocker, so I'm not seeing those ads served by malware networks.

With hindsight advertisers must be aware of fake likes and such too.

Are you serious? Google uses dark patterns all the time.

It's not like TV where the money is spent and you have no way to measure the results. Many people are seeing results with Facebook and Instagram ads. So they are spending.

Google AdWords is the king of selling you something you are looking for. But Facebook and Instagram are highly effective at selling you stuff you didn't know you wanted. Not to mention political and spend.

It gets especially worse when there are redirect after redirect to other ad servers, and you lose your tracking macros because the trafficker hasn't configured their landing page tracking macros correctly for each ad server redirect.

Yes this is very wrong, but not because your tracking loses accuracy.

You realize that this sort of careless trail you send your users along is exactly how people get served malware from ads right? I mean you admit yourself you lose track of where they end up so who knows what they get served or redirected to.

Seems like it might show requests that failed to get to the point of processing the analytics JS as well as those running adblockers.

Off-the-shelf analytics solutions have a ton of heuristics and in-house knowledge built up over decades that help deal with inherently janky data. For example: over half of all internet traffic these days is bots. All modern analytics solutions know how to discriminate bot traffic (to an acceptable extent), you would have to re-create that or get heavily skewed data. As another example, inferring geography from IP: Google, Adobe, etc maintain their own in-house databases for this sort of thing.

Analytics solutions can be configured to send data for interactions that don't involve a page load. There are a lot of interactions that won't put anything into the logfile unless you re-invent tracking beacons. The situation gets more complicated for Single-Page Applications for both types of tracking, but generally the solutions for off-the-shelf technologies are more understood and can be applied more generally.

For another thing, cost and ease of access. Google Analytics has a free version. And for businesses, many of the people who want data work in marketing or UX, not the sort of people who have various types of expertise to dig around in logfiles. At the level of effort it would take for someone to build a logfile tool or learn to dig through the data, GA would offer more benefit at lower cost.

For a solo dev or small team running a not-too-complicated website, logfile parsing may make sense. For a large-enough organization, a custom solution that addresses their specific needs may make sense. But aside from a few sweet spots, most off-the-shelf tools are going to give a better benefit at lower cost. This is especially true of companies that have different teams with different needs and skills, and that benefit from integrations with other tools (like testing or personalization platforms).

Also, slightly-less related... analytics load time is not always a dominant factor in not recording clicks. Most clicks on ads go through a chain of redirects through a half-dozen different services that set cookies, read cookies, attach data, increment counters, etc. There's a large window where a user can cancel navigation before a request is made to the website. Analytics should run pretty fast, unless there is a long time in-between when your server receives the initial request and when the user begins to receive HTML.

I understand the reasons better, it’s unfortunate and slightly depressing to me that the community hasn’t been able to come up with a better solution. Particularly as the google analytics approaches involves giving data up to a 3rd party for processing.

So did you ever stop to ask yourself, if it's free then who exactly is the product? And did they consent to be being sold?

Google has an Analytics product so that website owners can see how much money they make from AdWords, thus encouraging them to spend more money on AdWords. GA is a strategic complement to Google's advertising services, and that is how they derive value from it.

Google does not dip into GA data for their own uses. Post-GDPR this is extra-explicit because they take pains to clarify how much they are not a Controller and only a Processor, but this has always been in their TOS. Frankly, most people's GA implementations are dumpster fires and trying to make use of that data would be more cost and less benefit than punching themselves in the dick.

Google does look at GA data on occasion, but only for the purposes of debugging and for ensuring compliance with the TOS (e.g. they will flag accounts that contain PII).

I accept that GA will be off +/-10% because it’s clientside. Don’t need total accuracy to make marketing decisions.

I guess with serverless you should be able to see this either with your own logging or perhaps on AWS with Cloudwatch? (no idea as I’ve not used it).

It almost seems that the tracking of users has to be looped through as many third parties as possible.

I don't know, whatever, it makes it easier to block.

Tap and hold on a link. A sheet will pop up asking how to treat the link. The link address will be listed at the top.

For example cloudflare reports 1000 unique users, GA only 300 to 500.

I do this a lot on Wikipedia on my phone. My workflow is to open a new browser tab (Wikipedia is the homepage) and hit the magnifying glass in the corner to search. But shortly after the page loads, it reconfigures itself so I end up hitting a link to somewhere else. (Wikimedia, I think.)

It is incredibly annoying.

The equivalent on a desktop is a badly behaved site (such as... gmail) which first loads a bunch of stuff and then, only then, focuses a text field, so you end up typing the second half of your password into the field that just got focused.

I am not in favor of letting webpages suddenly adjust their own layout or move your focus once they've already loaded or you've already picked a focus.

> I do exactly that behavior all the time.

> Can't disagree with Twitter's reasoning there, anecdotally I myself have done that many times.

> I spoke with a someone recently who uses gmail on his Android device. An ad at the top that resembles an email appears about a second after his real emails appear, timed perfectly to interrupt his attempt to tap and read his first email. Of course he immediately goes back if he makes the mistake

> I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it

It happens all the time. This is an issue with dysfunctional webpage design/layout.

(This doesn't happen on my phone but I am more likely to have configured it than your average user.)

I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it, which with slow internet takes more time too and probably doesn't look as much like a bounce.

It's the perfect cover for Google. All the techies who would get outraged by something like this generally have fast internet and ad-blockers.

gmail on Android has ads? and they're disguised as email messages?

... no wonder they're killing Inbox

If some scripting is involved to log scrolling, and logging it over ajax, it will not help for the fact that when the page is being rendered, footer may for a split second appear within the viewport.

The later, is what makes the lion share of contention around video ads.

We had a similar problem and it was all down to Twitter Display. Once we turned those off, the metrics improved immensely.

I think the problem is, as an advertiser, treating it like I do the other social channels. I don't feel like it's similar to Facebook at all and has become even more different over time. Pinterest has similarly fragmented.

I see using content as remarketing ads to be effective there. But that's the hardest ad-use-case to prove ROI on, in my experience.

Facebook to actually advertise to my customer base.

Perfect for measuring raw HTTP requests, sure, but if you post a link to a brand new, zero-follower account you'll still get a few dozen bots that are doing link analysis against the Twitter firehose (well, a random sampling of it).

We have people in this very thread openly talking about deploying third party ad scripts that send their users on chains of redirects that they admit to losing track of, and the only thing they see wrong with this is that they can't accurately track their users, not that they very probably sent their users down whatever rabbit/shithole serving malware, miners or drive-by downloaders.

Online advertising is a disgusting wasteland and many people coming out of the woodworks in this thread, working in the industry, are knowingly, unknowingly or usually willingly blindly working to create this situation as it is. Dollar bills make for very good blinders, especially if it's your living.