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How much of your audience is fake?

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Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#51

Post by Negitivefrags »

marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

The whole problem is really just the age old issue that if you track the wrong metric, people will optimise for something you don't want.

It's like paying programmers per line of code written and then getting bloated and shitty code.

You need to be doing CPA (Cost per Acquisition) deals not CPM or CPC.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#52

Post by ecopoesis »

noxToken wrote: post #34
ecopoesis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example is actually pretty easy to track. That's why sites drop cookies and have look back logs. Harder to track is when someone clicks on a link on mobile, and then switches to desktop to complete the transaction. Unless everyone is logged in, you have no chance of tracking the funnel.

I know nothing about advertising, but isn't this method thwarted by users (likely small in number) that either do not allow cookies or dump cookies after a session? The latter type would only affect tracking if the transaction was completed in another session. I would think that IP tracking is somewhat useless due to shared public address among users. Really what I'm asking is that is it trivially possible to track a…

Yes, dumping cookies makes it much harder to track lookback conversions. Some networks will use fingerprinting (IP, user-agent-- panopticlick style stuff) to supplement their data, but it's much less reliable and a determined user, like someone blocking or dumping cookies, is going to defeat it.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#53

Post by TheCapn »

cwyers wrote: post #37
forgetsusername wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers fo…

From an advertiser's point of view, those fake profiles are still real humans, right? So your ad is still being seen, and those Facebook profiles probably share enough of the social graph with a real Facebook profile that you can still do demographic targeting, no?

Not necessarily. I'm not in the SEO or advertising game but intuition tells me that having the same person see an ad twice is less valuable than 2 people seeing the ad. Additionally, as a result "fake" accounts are likely to contain less information advertise to "target" so they're only hitting fake accounts with overly broad appeal and not really creating content that might interest the user on his/her fake profile.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#54

Post by geocar »

nosuchthing wrote: post #49
eecks wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Google make money off fake clicks on ads?

Yes, but they have fairly comprehensive effort to prevent automated ad clicks - http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-...

That sort of thing has nothing to do with the type of fraud in the article.

Boris Boris sells the contents of the iframe he bought on Doubleclick to Myspace (as "paid traffic"), which in-turn lets Myspace sell it on video exchanges.

Google don't care even a little bit about this, since they still make a fortune off the Boris's of the world.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#55

Post by geocar »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #51
marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

The whole problem is really just the age old issue that if you track the wrong metric, people will optimise for something you don't want. It's like paying programmers per line of code written and then getting bloated and shitty code. You need to be doing CPA (Cost per Acquisition) deals not CPM or CPC.

CPA is hard work.

I can count on one hand the number of people in this industry that like hard work.

It's not just the wrong metric, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of technology: for example the "viewable impression" as being anything other than software that is telling other software that it's on the screen...

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#56

Post by geocar »

nostromo wrote: post #35
marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

The deep pockets in online advertising aren't able to easily track the effectiveness of their ads. They're big brands, like Target, Old Navy, Tide, movies, etc. They don't even care if people click their ads. They just want the impressions.

The advertisers in this case are buying video from Myspace.

There's no expectation that people click on video.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#57

Post by xenadu02 »

Modern web advertising networks are an example of data telling lies we (or advertisers) want to hear.

The dream has always been to connect each advertising dollar spent to revenue generated. The reality is that data only exists in people's heads, is spread out over time, or is in their social interactions. My hunch is at least half, if not more, of all positive impact of ads (for the ad buyer) is generated this way. The data isn't low quality... it is literally impossible to collect.

For example: You research items on your desktop, then actually make the purchase on your phone while taking the train home. Maybe they can connect you to that purchase with enough tracking; So what if your neighbor or coworker asks about the product? Can't track that one.

Another example: You hear ads on a podcast for Igloo and when work starts asking about preferences for Confluence vs Jira you mention looking into Igloo. Your company ends up adopting it. Later you grow from 20 people to 3000. There's absolutely no way for Igloo to connect the dots leading to a 3000 user account. Let's say after discounts that's $300k/year. If Igloo paid $200/episode * 52 episodes/year * 20 podcasts = $208k. That's an absolute steal just to acquire that single customer.

Yet another example: You may be 24 with no kids living in an apartment but will you always be that way? Smart car makers understand that if you have a good experience with your first car in their brand you're much more likely to buy a larger car from them when you have kids, or a more luxurious car when your career advances. How can you figure out if the dollars spent advertising to the college kid with no money is wasted in that scenario?

So that's the great lie... that somehow all the tracking cookies, comScore profiles, etc will make advertising more effective or has some benefit period, regardless of fraud or click bots.

Advertising on the web right now is a fool's errand in many cases. I'm glad because it gives the small guys like me a chance to exploit the system to buy ads on lower-volume sites directly from the content creators and reach a good sized audience.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#58

Post by _delirium »

fideloper wrote: post #19
marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

The really crazy thing is that tracking from click to conversion is still not a truly solved problem! e.g. When a person clicks, and then closes the browser and/or views other web sites, only to come back as direct traffic later and convert. The funnel is very hard to track and very easy to lose. Not that I do this full time (I don't), but I've yet to really see a solution that lets me truly match up a person who cli…

In some cases it's not even the same person doing the purchase, which adds another layer of complexity. Especially common with services that might be purchased by a business. Lately I'm getting a bunch of seemingly targeted PaaS and IaaS ads. I click on them occasionally. If one turns up a service I find interesting, there's a good chance the sale it leads to will be initiated on a different computer, by a different person.

This even happens pretty regularly for consumer stuff. I've suggested travel-related things to my parents, for example, which have led to direct sales: I saw an ad for a sale at $hotel_chain, remembered that my parents are taking a trip in October, tell them about it, and they book. It's pretty hard to track back their purchase to the ad that was shown to me. (Not entirely impossible, though, e.g. giving out different coupon codes is one method that print advertising uses.)

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#59

Post by eterm »

xenadu02 wrote: post #57

Modern web advertising networks are an example of data telling lies we (or advertisers) want to hear. The dream has always been to connect each advertising dollar spent to revenue generated. The reality is that data only exists in people's heads, is spread out over time, or is in their social interactions. My hunch is at least half, if not more, of all positive impact of ads (for the ad buyer) is generated this way.…

You can track all of that stuff, you just need enough data to be able to draw inference from the statistics.

Ultimately, if lots of poor people are worth targetting in a hope they will one day be rich, the statistics will ultimately back that plan.

But I suspect that anomalies will fall out in the big picture.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#60

Post by snowwrestler »

marwann wrote: post #13

Any clever advertiser doesn't judge the success of a campaign by its number of clicks, but by its number of conversions (and ultimately, revenue). What's become a new pain in the advertising space are spam/ghost referrals, messing your analytics only for the sole purpose of making you visit their websites, also adding up to the stack of fake audience of your site (which the article fails to mention).

In Google Analytics you can get rid of most spam referrals by creating a filter that only passes traffic that landed on your actual hostnames.
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