[vmaurin]

I left the industry 4y ago, but at the time, it was impossible to track impressions on FB ads. So when FB tells you "We did display 1000 time your ads", you just have to believe them. For the IP of the click, I have seen it from my own eyes in 2013, from Facebook. About analytic tools, I let you check who is the leader in this market, and about their independence in the click market ... If you have a website that pointed by a FB ad campaign, just look at the IP of the incoming clicks.

> Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense.

Well, that what is happening in practice. It is an attribution game, ad companies try to have the best conversion numbers more than increasing the overall sales of a store.

I have been working in a drive to (physical) store company, we were measuring performances with an expose group + a control group and we were showing 3% visit in store increase during a campaign, while our competitors were claiming things around 10%. We knew that their tracking technology was just about "we shown an ad, they visited the store, it is because of us"

[jklinger410]

I'm going to stop going back and forth on this. But let me just say this: verifying paid traffic, within the ad platforms as well as on your website is totally possible.

If you want to second guess the psychology of whether or not the ad "drove" the user to make a purchase or not, that is up for discussion. Or whether Google/META do shady shit in their bidding environment. Absolutely.

But this idea that you can't track everything is bullshit.