Tag Archives: digital measurement

Response to Openly Selling Counterfeit “bAds”

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Thanks to Dr. Augustine Fou for articulating in his latest post Openly Selling Counterfeit bAds, that clearly programmatic media has an ongoing IVT/NVT problem. In my experience, a toxic mix of weak technology, sloppy process and biased analytics are often to blame.

The bAds framework is clever, yet as presented it is Manichean: options are either a) $35 CPM “real pubs” or b) $3 CPM Cucci/Bluberry. The problem is that reality is more nuanced and this line of thinking risks “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
To keep it simple there are three (at least) categories: 1) established media brands
2) legit mid-tier/indie “long-tail” sites and 3) clickbaity content farm type sites (“scammers”).

The subtle implication that advertisers “get what they pay for” might suggest to some that they are misguided, cheap and even penny-wise/pound-foolish. As uncomfortable truth as far too many certainly are! However, advertisers must manage the considerable digital ad execution risk, which in practice they do by preferring lower CPM programmatic media – if they can show it works. For some it does and for some others they are just going through the motions.

As an advertiser, that $35 CPM may or may not be overpriced. Value is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to programmatic advertising. Just because a given ad is being served up by a big brand “real pub” is not justification enough for paying 10x more especially since it can still be a bAd. Given the recent glitches that we’ve heard about (USAToday, Facebook, etc…) these “real pubs” have plenty of work to do on the basics let alone Fou Analytics-level housecleaning. Scarier is what we have not heard about!

While not an exact analog, in a prior life for a major retailer, we had occasion to compare performance of high CPM “real pubs” and a far lower CPM ad network (still around today). At the time we were piloting Adometry (pre-Google) to understand multi-touch attribution. Additionally, we leveraged an advanced integration between Adobe Analytics and the Doublclick ad server instance of our media agency (Digitas Chicago). It turned out that the “real pub” digital ad inventory (foisted upon us as part of TV buy) performed awfully compared to this ad network. As in, an order of magnitude difference in both traffic and ecommerce revenue (clickers plus viewthrough – even after calibrating for incrementality). As a second measure, we used algorithmic attribution (Adometry used Shapley value) where the story was even starker. We were able to see the actual contribution of various media relative to each other and the big brand media only made sense if the CPM rates could be renegotiated to a fraction of what they were getting.

With all that said, it seems dicey to blanket advocate that advertisers should spend more on $35 big media brands. Essentially, a “flight to quality” risk mitigation strategy. Still, it all comes down to nuance (again) while doing the hard work of defrauding programmatic media and defining upfront measurable objectives. Given the same ceteris paribus target audience and a choice of $35 CPM “real pubs” vs $3 CPM “TBD,” the choice is obvious.

Going beyond bAd/bAudience quality, most of these “real pubs” are arguably compromised by bContent across both news and entertainment categories. You might expect that bottom-of-the-barrel from “scammers” but the sad truth is that many big media are no better than mid-tier and in some ways are worse when it comes to “quality.” Big media news brands were built on years of journalistic integrity by being objective and presenting both sides of a story. That is a quaint relic of yesterday as most have sacrificed their brands at the partisan alter.

In any case, let’s hope that more real marketers do stand-up for better measurement.

And in the mean time, the question is: Do “real pubs” deserve a premium?

PS: Discerning digital marketers can up their game by immersing themselves in
Fou Analytic’s wealth of articles; make sure you have plenty of coffee or tea!

Part III – Big G & Media Minion Maneuvers

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3rd Post in a 6-Part Series About the Behavioral Data Land Grab

Big G and many of their media minions are quick to point out that by using the new global site tag, they can then get around ITP’s 3rd party tracking limitations. The reason is that the GTM tag architecture tricks the user’s Web browser to treating it as 1st party by changing the context. The legacy DFA Floodlight tag cannot do this as it is a plain and simple 3rd party tracker in a 3rd party context. That DoubleClick impression cookie served up on ad delivery (on media publisher site) and then later checked for by the DFA Floodlight (on the advertisers site) is notorious enough at this point to be easily black-listed by blockers and anti-virus platforms.

Voted Most Likely to be Blocked, Deleted or Purged

Manufactured Crisis?

The global site tag (gtag.js) request often comes from the media agency team as a panicked rush to install the new code snippet – toute suite. The implication is that if these new global site tags are *not* used, then campaign measurement and therefore campaign performance will dramatically suffer or to become questionable. The implied benefit of the new global site tag is that at minimum, current paid search measurement accuracy will be better. What this really means is that Big G AdWords conversions (clickthough and (post-clickthrough) can be more accurately counted.

Most advertisers and their agencies will miss the nuance. They may not realize that simply showing more conversions in AdWords reports does not mean that Big G paid search actually caused more of them to happen. Questionable incrementality is a broader problem with paid search attribution and Big G’s walled garden of search performance data. That aside, showing the universe of conversions that an advertiser is already receiving more accurately only means that Big G’s AdWords reporting approaches the conversion tracking accuracy of site analytics like Adobe’s. Stated differently, Big G fixed their conversion tracking problem (caused by 3rd party blocking by ITP, plug-ins and anti-virus deleters) which before the global site tag relied on a predicted count. That is what has been reported out for years in AdWords. It is all about Big G more confidently taking greater credit for more of the conversions in their analytics system (not advertisers’).

Dropping the Ball: Who Do They Work for Anyway?

Instead of pushing back to Big G on behalf of their clients or suggesting alternative solutions, too many media agencies are not doing their diligence. They are pressuring clients to just go along with the request and merely parroting that Big G recommends this without much question. The implication is that the global site tag is needed for the media agency to measure better and there fore to do their very job. At the same time, most digital advertisers today do not want to provide their media agency with another reason for bad analytics and poor measurement. Meanwhile Apple ITP is conveniently blamed for the problem.

Judas Goat Leads the Sheep Up to Slaughter at Chicago Stockyards

Expected to be stewards of their client’s digital media business, this is an unabashed agency fail. All told, the new global tag combined with an expanded tag footprint on the Web site is a shifty way for Big G to also ingest more highly valuable behavioral data at the expense of digital advertisers. Even more unseemly is that this is a clever end-run to thwart advertisers that sought to limit Big G’s behavioral data access by not using their Analytics/Tag Manager products in the first place. Worse, the end result is dysfunction with analytics teams and hidden operational costs of a maintaining a redundant de facto tag management system.

Such conduct by those representing themselves as agents of marketers is disappointing. Unfortunately, it is consistent with the unflattering issues of undisclosed incentives and rebates from tech companies, media vendors and others that was revealed in the ANA Media Transparency Report of 2015. Digital advertiser clients themselves are not blameless: the buck needs to stop with them.

Next: Part IV – A Trojan Horse for Digital Marketers

Part I – Keeping Big G Out of The Digital Cookie Jar

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Part 1 – Introduction

This will be a multi-part post about recent developments that should be of concern for serious digital marketers. In particular, large digital advertisers that use Adobe Analytics (or other non-Big G Analytics platforms) and whose media agencies (or internal digital media buying teams) also use Big G Ads/Search/AdWords beware.

The Problem

Apple’s most recent Safari release in September 2018, which effectively blocked all 3rd party tracking cookies is being blamed for what amounts to a clandestine behavioral data land grab by Big G. In going along with this charade, digital marketers everywhere risk the de facto relinquishment of digital measurement and customer behavioral data to others with different and not non-transparent interests that create a competitive disadvantage.

Through major brands’ own media agencies, Big G has been cannily pushing everyone to use a new kind of Web site tracking tag that circumvents Safari’s strict privacy features.  The new code snippet replaces the legacy DoubleClick Floodlight tags that have been historically appended the brand’s destination Web site on key actions, e.g. order thank you page. The loading of that page and associated 3rd party tags signal a successful “conversion” event for analytics and ad targeting optimization purposes.

Who Has the Behavioral Data?

Floodlight 101

The DoubleClick Floodlight tag was created as an adjunct to the agency ad server (a/k/a 3rd party ad server) which was initially developed to enable ad impression delivery in the user’s browser to be associated with later events on the advertiser’s Web sites. In this way, a kind of campaign measurement could be performed showing cause (ad delivery) and effect (purchase event). However, the method relies a 3rd party cookie from doubleclick.net set at time of ad delivery to be safe and secure in the user’s browser and recognized by the Floodlight tag when the user subsequently interacts on the advertiser Web site.

Additionally, the Floodlight tag has the capability to piggyback other tags from media vendors like ad networks so that they could also measure and optimize their campaigns in flight based on actual performance, e.g. order confirmation pages firing. Similarly, ad analytics uses include brand lift studies and multi-touch attribution. Not surprisingly, over the years Big G has shoved more and more back-end server-side functionality into the Floodlight tag to help their other businesses like AdWords, Bid Manager and Dynamic Creative Optimization.

The problem with the new code snippet is that the tag is no longer the kludgey Floodlight but the much more powerful Big G tag manager. The latter was engineered to sending data back to Big G faking 1st party even though it is not really (similar to Big G Analytics). Compounding the challenge for digital marketers is the aggressive recommendation to install the new GTM code snippet onto *all Web site pages* instead of just swapping out existing Floodlight tags.

The Bait and Switch

Within the new code snippet itself, note that the comment text still says “DoubleClick” but the actual server being called is not doubleclick.net anymore but is googletagmanager.com. Big G’s timing of the recent name change dropping the DoubleClick brand from everything is interesting and has further caused confusion with the site operations and ad operations team that work with these technologies.

Before: Legacy Floodlight code snippet
After: New global gtag.js code snippet

Major digital advertisers that are not already using Big G Analytics/Tag Manager are particularly susceptible to the false sense of urgency in this crafty switcheroo. Especially those from industries with limited digital competency. In the end, Big G gets better clickthrough conversion tracking for search and client-owned Web site analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics, Webtrends, IBM Digital Analytics or Matomo remain as is.

Clients should consider pushing back on what amounts to a digital behavioral data cookie grab.

COMING UP: Part II – Victim-blaming with Apple ITP.

NEW! Guardian Joins TechCrunch, Motherboard Vice, CBS as Latest Digital Tracking Posers

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UPDATED 2/11/19

And the beat goes on…

The UK-based Guardian’s John Naughton joins a growing line of sanctimonious journalists carping about digital advertising tracking in, “The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.” The article rehashes Shoshanna Zuboff’s tropey new book Surveillance Capitalism once again just as Motherboard did a couple of months back (mentioned earlier in this post). For an ex-Harvard Business School professor, the book sounds like a post-modern Das Kapital.

With at least 54 trackers at the time of this blog post Guardian joins many other digital ad tracking hipocrites. John Naughton is not likely working for free and Guardian is generating plenty of ad revenue as a result.  One can see clearly see the banner ad at the top of the page and in case you don’t read the article there are another 11 ad positions on the page! Last, Guardian harangues site visitors begging for donations with a zeal comparable to the NPR and PBS fund drives. The strategy must be working as digital revenue is up at Guardian Media Group.

Trackers revealed per Ghostery plug-in

Similar to Motherboard, it should be no surprise that although Facebook and Google are thoroughly trashed by the author, there are in fact, multiple trackers from each on the article Web page. Apparently it is OK for Guardian and Naughton to make a buck from digital ad targeting but Facebook and Google should not?

Guardian.com Diagram shows Rampant Trackers

A quick look at the tracker diagram for that article shows the hipocrisy of Guardian, who is really filling up at the ad tracking trough. As you can see John Naughton’s publishers are certainly not working for free. How long would John and the Guardian last if they took up Shoshanna Hoffman’s advice and swore-off digital advertising money?

Last, it is interesting that Guardian is hawking Shoshanna Zuboff’s book itself with a link at the bottom at the end of the page. The holier than thou Guardian doesn’t mention any interest in this book which makes the article itself smell alot like undisclosed advertorial.

Message to komrades John and Shoshanna, so-called surveillance capitalism isn’t the biggest problem. As with the other digital tracking Pharisees, government surveillance is minimized to just two sentences. For people pining about democracy, there is no mention of multiple government agencies already feasting on backdoor access and optimized APIs to more easily glom data on users. The kind of industry-government coziness that enables massive spying on the citizenry would have made King George III squeal with delight. Paul Revere, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would never have had a chance.

Free is Not Without Cost

While, I’m no fan of Big G[oogle] and Baby G[Facebook] advertising practices they do provide useful services to consumers for free that nobody is being forced to use. It is puzzling that some users (Saying No to Free-riders) expect to enjoy the benefits of these services without paying for them or providing information about themselves in exchange.

More worrisome should be the perversion of the free market (a/k/a crony capitalism) that is happening when regulations are foisted upon an industry. Red-tape raises cost of entry and helps incumbents entrench themselves creating monopolies, duopolies, etc… Basic economics explains that reducing the number of suppliers (shifting supply curve S to S1 to the left) while holding demand constant increases prices.

Not a big surprise but disappointing then that some of the biggest players are welcoming the rent-seeking opportunity to be regulated. Railroads, pharma, insurance and banking come to mind as high-margin and high-regulation industries.

Of course bureaucrats and politicians gain but that is a feature not a bug.

UPDATED 1/23/19

Natasha Lomas is the latest writer/journalist that sure likes to get a paycheck but bemoans advertising tracking and the ad tech players that make it all happen. Just another in a string of digital tracking hypocrites in the rather verbose and rambling, The case against behavioral advertising is stacking up over at TechCrunch.

Lomas’ actual premise is an inch deep, e.g. the Digiday reference about the
NY Times International says that they are “still doing private marketplace deals.” Clearly, missing the fact that PMPs use the same programmatic techniques just different ad buying methods: guaranteed placement directly from NY Times assisted by ad sales reps vs. open exchanges buying remnant ad inventory in real-time. Sorry, the facts got in the way of the story!

Here are more facts: Lomas and her editors might be interested learn that Ghostery counts a whopping 86 trackers on the article itself; the tracking network diagram found even more.

The case against poor quality business writing is really stacking up too!

TechCrunch TrackersTechCrunch Ghostery

UPDATED 12/4/18

Not to be outdone, comes the steaming hot chicken-little indigence of Motherboard Vice with, Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World with a whopping 62 trackers, almost 3 times the capitalists-of-convenience at CBS.

Here is their tracker map diagram, which is pretty impressive in the level complexity and likely degraded user experience. It shows how dependent on digital tracking Motherboard Vice is for ad targeting and measurement.

While reading the article and waiting for the call for Workers of the World to Unite rally-cry, I struggled to find a link to the privacy policy on the forever expanding page. An interesting technique that served endless content and more display ad banners as you scroll down.

Eventually, I found Motherboard Vice’s privacy policy explained here – pretty long and complicated as per usual. I did find a link to an article on FAZ.net promoting retired HBS academic Shoshanna Zuboff’s new book about so-called “surveillance capitalism“…which…wait for it…ironically sported 24 trackers of it’s own!

Meanwhile no mention of the NSA, CIA, DOD and FBI surveillance by CBS or Motherboard Vice. Maybe Shoshanna Zuboff’s next book will be: Surveillance Government – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

You can’t make this up. In many ways, Web media publishers with ad-supported business models brought this on themselves – see Saying No to Free-riders. None of the above Web sites are using the open source Matomo analytics or Pwiwk Pro tag management product which is big in the EU.

UPDATED 12/4/18

John Stossel recently did a story on “The Creepy Line” a movie that rails against tracking and specifically Big G and Baby G.

A quick look with Ghostery shows the Web site uses both! Google Analytics and Doubleclick tracking was observed. Facebook Advertising and Connect are being used to facilitate social media promotion of the movie – ironic, no? Not to mention links to Amazon.com to see the movie. Disclaimer this blog is a Google-free zone but we’re making an exception here.

Coincidentally, it appears that Peter Schweizer is one of CBS’ producers in NYC…interesting! No mention of government tracking or spying.

Meanwhile, the tracker network diagram reveals even more clandestine tracking (130 total ) than Ghostery; this is likely due to server-side piggybacking.

ORIGINAL POST: 11/19/18

Last week, CBS 60 Minutes broadcast “Your Data” aiming to scare everyone about online ad targeting. The outrage of the story was palpable. How dare Google (Big G) and Facebook (Baby G) track people and target ads to us?

In an irony too good to pass up, a quick look at CBSNews.com’s 60 Minutes Web site showed some 23 different trackers doing the exact same thing!

In the mislabeled but scary “Your Data” episode last week, the hapless Steve has little clue about which he speaks fawning over GDPR the whole time. BTW, how can it be “Your Data” when people voluntarily access somebody else’s Web server for all you can eat news, social media fun and search engine content? Magic bunnies don’t build these Web sites for free.

Alas, CBSNews.com’s Privacy Policy looks just like everybody else’s. Perhaps TV media is threatened. Or perhaps morally superior for forcing people to trade their time instead of their Web browsing behavior in exchange for free all-you-can-eat media.

So many ironies so little time…here you can see the CBSNews.com actually filling up themselves at Big G and baby G’s data trough. Traditional media trying to claw back advertising revenue they lost or journalism at work…hmmm.

If you find any more good ones please reach out to me via LinkedIN.

The Encima Group Donates Tag Management Referrals, Maintains Neutrality

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The latest from Encima but a long-time in the making….hopefully more digital analysts and marketers will consider Piwik as an open source alternative to sharing their precious customer data with G. And of course, the DAA is doing some great things for the industry and we want to be a part of that. Special thanks to David Clunes for his vision and support on this initiative.

Encima Group LogoNewark, DE – August 18, 2014 – Analytics consultancy The Encima Group, is pleased to announce the donation of several thousand dollars in referral fees earned through the recent recommendation and subsequent implementation of Signal’s technology platform. Signal’s Tag Management system (formerly BrightTag) was chosen by two of Encima’s major pharmaceutical clients as the best-in-class tag management solution. For one Encima client, their prior tag management system took too much time to use and was expensive. It was replaced with Signal and the client is already seeing ongoing tag maintenance now taking less than 10% of the time that it did before. For another client, Signal was deployed together with an enterprise site analytics solution across several high-profile Web sites making ongoing tag maintenance a snap.

David Clunes, CEO and Founder of The Encima Group explains, “With technology vendors often jockeying on new capabilities, we prefer let them do what they do best without getting caught up. We purposefully do not recommend the technology platforms that make us the most money, instead we recommend what is best for our client’s long-term analytics success. Donations like this help us continue to maintain our neutrality – all while doing some good for the industry.”

The Encima Group, known best for its independent analytics and digital operations services often finds itself recommending platforms for clients. Sometimes viewed as another value-added reseller, The Encima Group sees itself as an extension of their clients’ organizations and vigorously maintains its “Switzerland” status. That sensibility extends from the firm’s analytics practice which uniquely eschews agency media buying and creative services to focus on providing clients with both objective performance reporting and unbiased campaign optimization recommendation.

Clunes continues, “When it comes to analytics, more objectivity is always a good thing. We feel that this is a great way of paying it forward and that hopefully other firms get the idea.” By sharing the referral fees that it earned, Encima is simultaneously investing in two worthy causes known to analytics professionals worldwide: The Digital Analytics Association, a global organization for digital analytics professionals and Piwik, the globally popular open source Web analytics platform.

“The Digital Analytics Association is thrilled by the Encima Group’s donation,” said DAA Board Chair, Jim Sterne. “The funds will be added to our general fund to benefit all members of the DAA. We hope that others in the space will follow Encima’s leadership in this area.” For Piwik, the funds will be used to facilitate continued development of this open-source platform. Available as an alternative to sharing with 3rd parties, Piwik allows digital marketers to control their Web site behavioral data. Maciej Zawadziński, of the Piwik Core Development Team says, “This is great and will help us to further develop an alternative free Web analytics platform.”

About The Encima Group

The Encima Group is an independent analytics consultancy that was recently recognized for its successful growth in the Inc. 5000 (ranking in top 25%). The Encima Group’s mission really is about actionable analytics and flawless execution. Offering an integrated suite of services around multi-channel measurement, tag management, dashboards, technology strategy consulting and marketing operational support, The Encima Group pioneered the notion of Data Stewardship. The Encima Group is based in Newark, DE with offices in Princeton, NJ and Chicago, IL. Its client roster includes leading pharmaceutical companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Shire Pharmaceuticals, Otsuka, AstraZeneca and Novo Nordisk.

For more information about The Encima Group, visit www.encimagroup.com. For more information about Signal visit www.signal.co, for Piwki visit www.piwik.org and for the Digital Analytics Association visit www.digitalanalyticsassociation.com.

Media Contact(s)

Jason Mo, Director of Business Development (jmo AT encimagroup DOT com); phone (919) 308-5309; Domenico Tassone, VP Digital Capabilities (dtassone AT encimagroup DOT com); Phone.

 

EFF Updates “Who Has Your Back” on Gov’t Data Requests

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A very individual citizen-focused look at who cares about user data when the Feds come knocking. The six-dimension scale includes: warrants, data requests, transparency reporting, has guidelines for law enforcement, frights for user privacy in US Courts and in US Congress.


EFF

Full EFF Report…

The scoring would be very different if this was entitled, “Who has advertiser’s back?” with regard to businesses user data.

Piwik: Alternative Analytics Presentation in Chicago

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Yours truly will be presenting, “Piwik: An Analytics Alternative,” a short presentation at this year’s Open Analytics Summit at the City Winery in Chicago on March 27th.

OAS is for Developers, Engineers, Data Scientists, CMOs, Data Analysts, CTOs, Architects, Brand Managers, and anyone passionate about open source technologies, big data, or data analytics. My presentation will be particularly interesting to digital marketers, enterprise technologists, Web analytics practitioners and others that are interested in a viable way to provide solid measurement while removing Google from their Web analytics stack.

Full Schedule and Register

If there is interest, I’ll post the presentation here as well.