In total, 80% of the entire Vber advertising budget turned out to be ineffective.
Co-founder of services Check My ADS and Sleeping Giants Nandini Giammy remembered Twitter "A large marketing story about which no one speaks." She told her former head of the Performance Marketing Department Uber Kevin Fish in 2020.
In the Marketing Today, Fish explained how accidentally discovered that from $ 150 million Uber budget for performances-marketing about $ 100 million were obtained by fraudsters through partner advertising networks. He managed to find them and reduce costs of $ 120 million - without affecting the number of application settings.
It all started with the fact that the head of the Uber Trevis Calanik told the Fishh that social activists complain about Uber and urged to remove it from smartphones due to service advertising at the Breutbart News ultrasound. Although he was in the Black List of Uber.
Fish suspected advertising networks in ignoring the blacklist and, for sure to block Breubart, began to turn off the networks gradually, which could be relevant to Breubart.
Tracts on these networks accounted for about $ 15 million - 10% of all annual UBER expenses for attracting passengers. Fish expected that the number of Uber application settings will be reduced, but this did not happen. He continued experiments by requesting logs and using an analytical team to audit advertising suppliers.
It turned out that partner advertising networks overestimated indicators that "did not make any sense." Another method - they created false installations on android-smartphones infected with viruses or those where there were root rights of the Superademan.
For example, advertising networks uploaded applications to Google Play like "track the battery charge and extend the service life." They had an Uber advertising, and the network received money if the user clicked on the banner.
And if the user had no Uber and he searched for him on Google Play, another script was working. The fraudulent service masked direct download for the click on advertising inside when the user gained in the search "Uber" - in the letter R.
So the application with a thousand active users per month could "generate" about 20 thousand Uber settings. And then the advertising network requested from Uber $ 20 for each download.
According to the Fish, the advertising networks did not particularly mask fraud and discover it was easy. The main thing is not to rely only on the agency reports.
"We saw that many installations that we thought came through paid promotion, in fact they came across ordinary channels. There were irregularities, but the total number of users has not changed, "Fish admitted in the podcast.
After that, the Uber in 2017 filed the first major claim for fraud, and Fish optimized expenses even more - by $ 20 million. As a result, the company could fulfill its KPI to increase in about 10% of the budget spent.
If it were not for the problem with Breitbart, Uber would never know about deception. Externally, everything looked fine for everyone - from the board of directors to the marketing department, agencies and advertising networks. The company paid money and received installations, Uber "robbed, and everyone was happy."
But even after the disclosure of fraud, the company did not want to save, Fish admitted.
At the end of the story, FISH advises companies to always rely not only to the reports of the "highest level" or agency, and assume that half of the indicators are fraudulent. And constantly analyze them yourself, and not hope to agency or people from their team.
And the main weapon against scammers is only vigilance.
#uber # advertising test
A source