You Can't Show 'The Murky Programmatic Supply Chain' In A Waterfall Chart

Previously, we showed how the Loopholes In Google Analytics Put Marketers' Insights At Risk. Fraudsters have been consistently able to create "phantom traffic, phantom clicks" and even "phantom sales" — i.e. falsely claiming credit for sales that have already happened. Collectively, these have made the accuracy of marketers' insights suspect at best; and sadly they have systematically caused marketers to allocate more ad dollars to fraudsters through programmatic buying channels, because of the illusions of "better performance" (more clicks), "better cost efficiency" (lower prices), and "more reach" (larger quantities). If you thought that was bad; you should definitely be sitting down for the rest of this article.