I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped countries. Then there was the behavior of the "users" when they visited the site. A large percentage of them went straight to the search box (which literally no humans do on the site) and typed in something topical but completely unrelated to the site's topic, e.g. "covid". Another large percentage just scrolled up and down randomly. It was interesting to see the size and relative sophistication of the fraud going on but not exactly $500 well spent.
Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
111–120 of 286 posts
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#112So the same as every other ad network then? Only half joking.
Our niche SaaS sees 90% of Google Ad spend going to India, Russia and South America unless we create a short-list of countries to specifically target. And Google is full of dark-patterns around your targeted countries, by default it selects "people in, or interested in, your targeted locations" unless you drill down and find an obscure setting to change this. Then you only need to deal with the domestic and/or more sophisticated ad fraudsters, which will still probably end up as the majority of the spend.
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a chargeback for that matter.
If they advertise increased click-through rate and they increase it, what stops them from claiming they fulfilled their end of the bargain? It could even be click bots.
I don't really know if a chargeback would work here, but the basis would be "I agreed to pay X and LinkedIn charged me Y", not "LinkedIn did not deliver the services advertised".
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#114I have never clicked on a Ad from linkedin purposely. The thing is, everytime I go to check my profile (which is on the left top part of the screen - I'm dextrous) I end up clicking on a Ad with the palm of my hand (smartphone).
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#115I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped…
Wow, I had the same issue. I'm an ad-noob in the fullest sense of the word, but I tried the Google "Smart Ad". It turned out the same way you mentioned. I looked at where my clicks were coming from, and they were all pretty much from Hindi oriented Youtube channels. I was baffled at how that happened as I targeted US/Canada as you did.
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#116I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped…
What would the goal of the “users” (bots?) have been in this case? Is there any monetary gain for them? Would a competitor do this to waste your ad spend?
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the landing page has a bunch of soft stuff like 'expands synergy' on it I am just going to assume I was not the target audience. I'm not a CEO, I'm a practitioner. Put something crunchy in there. Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao.
> Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao Ad nauseam did exactly this until the extension was banned from chrome store: https://adnauseam.io/
It still does exactly this for me because it is not banned from the internet (yet).
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#118I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped…
What would the goal of the “users” (bots?) have been in this case? Is there any monetary gain for them? Would a competitor do this to waste your ad spend?
I guess google pays a share of the money to owners of youtube channels/websites where the ads are displayed?
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#119I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped…
What would the goal of the “users” (bots?) have been in this case? Is there any monetary gain for them? Would a competitor do this to waste your ad spend?
Presumably the ad clicks are making money for the apps/sites that are displaying the ads.
Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you use to generate the one-time numbers?
Most of the banks offer it online as part of the service?
Not all. A major US Bank (rhymes w/ Pace Bank) used to provide this feature back in the 2000s and then rolled it back. I discovered this ~4 months ago when I wanted to buy something online but didn't fully trust the vendor. Then ended up going with Privacy.com.
I'm a huge fan and would def recommend them to anyone looking for better control over subscription charges