Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
You can A&#x2F;B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another.<p>You don&#x27;t have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty.<p>All big companies do this.<p>Sure, you&#x27;re never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually found your product and bought it.<p>But that honestly doesn&#x27;t seem that important compared to the other metrics - which most functioning large companies have decent data on.<p>You&#x27;re also never going to know how many of your customers ate Green Eggs and Ham for breakfast. It&#x27;s irrelevant. You have decent insight into your direct-online ROAS, and that&#x27;s unique to direct online advertising, and it&#x27;s important!!<p>Yes, you&#x27;re never going to know if that million dollars you invested in online ads was the best use of that million dollars. But that&#x27;s not much different than building a new factory, either.<p>Edit:<p>Specifically to Uber&#x27;s case - they did NOT turn off 66% of ALL ads randomly to no adverse effect (implying that all ads are worthless).<p>They DISCOVERED that a certain type of ad (paying for installs on dubious ad networks) was mostly fraud. After turning off 100% of this type of ad - they found no adverse effect.<p>This is a fail on their analytics team. They should&#x27;ve been measuring this type of ad better - especially given how big a portion of the total spend it was - and had insight into something not being right. They should have been able to do this - and if they couldn&#x27;t, because the network somehow didn&#x27;t give them enough data to do it, they probably shouldn&#x27;t have been spending this much money for exactly these reasons!