Engaging random marketing consultants is a good way to waste money on ads.
However, anyone engineering for advertising from the start of your distribution plans should be able to measure these things. It’s not hard to track which signups came from ad clicks versus organic traffic. The problem is that most companies start out focused on their apps and simply assume advertising is a totally independent function that happens elsewhere in the company. Invest some time into including advertising as part of your signup process and it’s really not that difficult to track LTV of customers who signed up via ads.
In fact, that’s how Uber confirmed this fraud. They noticed that some of these fake customers were clicking on the ads and getting signed up within seconds, which is something only bots can pull off. If the customers you’re getting from ad signups aren’t actually spending money in the app, you should know about this from basic analytics.
Even if you do this the ad-people will claim that showing people ads repeatedly will make them buy your product eventually. Maybe when they actually need such a product.
At this point you cannot connect the events anymore.
This effect is probably weak but not falsifiable.
However, anyone engineering for advertising from the start of your distribution plans should be able to measure these things. It’s not hard to track which signups came from ad clicks versus organic traffic. The problem is that most companies start out focused on their apps and simply assume advertising is a totally independent function that happens elsewhere in the company. Invest some time into including advertising as part of your signup process and it’s really not that difficult to track LTV of customers who signed up via ads.
In fact, that’s how Uber confirmed this fraud. They noticed that some of these fake customers were clicking on the ads and getting signed up within seconds, which is something only bots can pull off. If the customers you’re getting from ad signups aren’t actually spending money in the app, you should know about this from basic analytics.