Numbers DO lie! Don’t trust your marketing data and ROI

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of presenting at the NOAH17 conference in Berlin – Europe’s leading conference for global digital leaders seeking to cooperate on industry innovation and discuss the latest trends with top executives.

In my talk, I discussed the risks that ROI can pose for most B2C companies. You’re probably asking yourself, what makes ROI so dangerous? In the past, both marketers and CEOs knew that their marketing results were not measurable. So they took this fact into account when making decisions about their marketing budget allocation.

Today, on the other hand, ROI makes some marketers enjoy a false sense of security. Now they face a different challenge – marketers don’t know that they don’t know their true ROI. What might seem like positive ROI could be heavily skewed by new and highly sophisticated forms of fraud, in addition to false positive attribution!

Check out my full talk in the short video below and see why, despite the fact that fraud is making companies bleed cash, no one in the mobile advertising ecosystem is truly incentivized to stop it.

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Here’s the deck for those who are interested.

Another critical reason why ROI is dangerous which I didn’t mention in my talk has to do with false positive attribution caused by loose attribution platforms. In a nutshell, these platforms allow IP-only and, even worse, partial IP-based attribution leading to millions of dollars in losses because of extremely inaccurate attribution.