(Fr)audience Networks Drive Massive Volume to Eat Up Your Budgets
Thanks Jim Knapp for the inspo -- "(fr)audience networks"
In the pairs of donut charts below -- left side, no audience extension or audience networks; right side, with audience networks. These are measured on-site (on the landing page) with FouAnalytics, so we can see the relative quality of the clicks arriving from these various paid sources. Red means bots/fraud; dark blue means humans/good clicks. Don't worry too much about the specifics; just note the relative amounts of blue on the left side (without audience extension) compared to the relative amounts of red on the right side (with audience extension)
TL;DR (too long, didn't read)
What is audience extension? Examples
What happens when you buy video ads DIRECT from Samsung? They do audience extension, without telling the client, to drive most of the volume. Your video ads did NOT run on large Samsung connected TVs. They ran on crappy MFA sites like the ones listed below. We discovered this by tagging the ads with FouAnalytics in-ad tags. This is just like the recent issue uncovered on YouTube -- that the vast majority of INVALID TrueView ads were run on sites and apps outside of YouTube.
Be sure to ask Samsung to turn off audience extension (there's no way to do this yourself). If they refuse, then stop buying from them. This is an example of a media seller/publisher giving into the temptation and going into the gray area -- "if advertisers don't care about fraud, and just want more volume, why not take advantage and take their money?"
Another example is TikTok, with their audience extension network called Pangle. These are all the other mobile apps that run ads using TikTok's platform. Even if you buy direct from TikTok, if you forget to turn off audience extension, it will eat up your budget. One commenter wrote below: "Unfortunately I've seen an instance with Pangle when a new trader did not opt out of it on TikTok. Pangle took all the budget in a day, for irrelevant apps, when the campaign was set to run for weeks." Here's the evidence that corroborates that. The client used FouAnalytics on the landing page and looked for urls that contained utm_source=TikTok to identify clicks coming from their TikTok campaign. What we noticed was that all of the clicks did not come from TikTok but from strange apps, listed below. None of the clicks resulted in any conversions or further action on the site (e.g. they showed high bounce rate and low time on site, even in Google Analytics).
How to turn off audience networks in various platforms
Turn off GVP (Google Video Partners) in YouTube campaigns to avoid 90% of the fraud and misrepresented ads. Select "Only on YouTube." If you don't see that option, contact Google and ask them to help you turn off GVP. Or use an inclusion list of YouTube channels and partner sites.
Turn off Facebook Audience Network (FAN) in Facebook campaigns to avoid 90% of the fraud and waste (ads going to fake sites and apps). Select "Manual Placements" radio button to reveal the Platforms checkboxes. Uncheck Audience Network.
Turn off LinkedIn Audience Network in LinkedIn campaigns to prevent ads from going to outside sites and apps.
When I run campaigns with audience extension/audience networks turned OFF
If you can't measure it with your own independent tools (i.e. FouAnalytics), don't buy it. Otherwise you are relying on the vendor to grade their own homework. What are they going to tell you other than "everything is awesome, keep spending?" Remember, when Google cites IAS and DoubleVerify, they are lying to you. It is not "independent" because Google gives them the data through Ads Data Hub (ADH) and IAS and DV "perform calculations" and "provide reporting" only. They do not measure anything with a javascript tag on YouTube or on GVP (video partners). But this is all moot if you choose to turn off audience networks and audience extension. You will simply avoid all of the fraud and misrepresented ads, which are prevalent on partner sites and apps, with a few clicks and at no extra cost.
"Go forth and be a hero in your company. Solve 90% of the ad fraud in under a minute, with a few clicks to uncheck the checkboxes that waste your money via audience extension and audience networks."
Watch more:?https://www.youtube.com/@augustinefou
Head of Marketing ? AVAD Baltic
11 个月You might find this interesting, if not new Mantas Povelauskas Karolis Antanas Stankevi?ius ??
Co-Founder of Generate Digital
1 年This is awesome. Can you say what time period the Twitter data is from in particular? Interesed to know whether the quality if inventory there has declined - esp compared to Tiktok which is growing as fast as Twitter is seemingly in decline
Transformation Leader | Driving Growth and Leading Change Across Marketing & Media | MBA | Amazon & Disney
1 年I definitely had the same experience! That's why the SPO process is essential and requires interactions with every facet of the Programmatic supply chain. We have a long way to go when it comes to cultivating?transparency. Thanks for the great visuals!
FouAnalytics - "see Fou yourself" with better analytics
1 年there's much more than meets the eye with MFA sites here's what you can see with FouAnalytics and determine for yourself if the site is an MFA site Beyond MFA New Details in FouAnalytics (Viewer Discretion Advised) https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/beyond-mfa-new-details-fouanalytics-viewer-discretion-fou