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gruezyesterday at 7:55 PM2 repliesview on HN

I'm not sure what this blog is complaining about.

>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads

Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.

>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking

Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.


Replies

crowcroftyesterday at 10:28 PM

The issue is that problem one is real, but not in a way that's beneficial to other advertising products.

Search, social and app store ads are over rated in that a lot of brands should probably decrease their investment, but things like programmatic display ads are absolutely not under rated. The correct number of dollars that should be spent on those placements is close to zero.

Ajedi32yesterday at 8:09 PM

Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing. Still, the author has some interesting points I hadn't considered before.

I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.

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