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Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

samueljscott.com

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171–180 of 286 posts

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#171

Post by ffpip »

paulie_a wrote: post #154
ffpip wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anybody is considering using this for privacy reasons don't. If you want to piss off as dev or act like a bot, only then use it.

You can use it for privacy, by ruining the tracking data.

No it won't. Clicking on random ads doesn't increase privacy. It just changes what the advertiser thinks of your interests.

To load an ad, you have to allow trackers. If you allow a tracker, you might as well allow the ad instead of hiding it. AdNauseam just hides it.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#172

Post by drdeca »

beervirus wrote: post #170
vasco wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Hotjar and love it that you're getting value out of the product! We do try to not record bots that advertise known user agents, like Google, Bing and other common ones. Reasoning being that recording non-humans will usually not tell you much about how your UX is optimized for humans. It's really interesting that somehow the fact that we recorded these less known user agent bots actually made the product mor…

Sounds creepy af. It's stuff like this that makes me keep javascript disabled whenever possible.

On the one hand, I agree that the capability is concerning, but if it only records the behavior within a single visit and doesn't correlate it with an account, or across multiple visits, or across websites at all, I think that that probably wouldn't be much of an issue, for me at least.

However, I don't see a way to allow that without also making the aforementioned unwanted connections also possible.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#173

Post by swiley »

caymanjim wrote: post #21
chinathrow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect for small claims court if you are US based.

Only if you put no value on your own time and want to lose even more money just to be proven right.

Is it really that bad? I know land lords that have had to go to small claims court, they spent like a day dealing with things. I’m not totally sure you’ll break even but it’s not a total loss either.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#174

Post by pluc »

picodguyo wrote: post #111

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…

I mean in most cases Google controls both the Ad Network and the analytics people use to monitor those ads. It's easy to imagine some artificial inflation happening.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#175

Post by zaroth »

treis wrote: post #130
picodguyo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the ad clicks are making money for the apps/sites that are displaying the ads.

I have a memory of doing that 20 years ago as a pre-teen to make my friend like 50 cents.

Many of the adult-oriented ads paid upwards of $0.50/click.

Your parents would definitely wonder why you were receiving checks in the mail from Xpics.

Once I left the Visual Basic scripted web control running overnight by mistake...

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#176

Post by sailfast »

My profile is on LinkedIn because I feel like I’ll miss opportunities if I’m not on there.

I’d love to remove it and go somewhere that doesn’t do this.

Are there any non-terrible, more purely motivated sites for an individual to post their background and what they’re looking for so folks can view them?

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#177

Post by lmkg »

drdeca wrote: post #172
beervirus wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds creepy af. It's stuff like this that makes me keep javascript disabled whenever possible.

On the one hand, I agree that the capability is concerning, but if it only records the behavior within a single visit and doesn't correlate it with an account, or across multiple visits, or across websites at all, I think that that probably wouldn't be much of an issue, for me at least. However, I don't see a way to allow that without also making the aforementioned unwanted connections also possible.

Here's the documentation for passing a user identifier to Hotjar:

https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033640653-Ident...

This is a bit better than it used to be. At one point the documentation had a field for User Email Address, and only a footnote in some documentation suggested it be hashed. Still, for a company that chooses to use the feature, the session recording can be tied back to the user account and any data already associated with it.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#178

Post by mancerayder »

Some apps, and many webpages on Android have this dark pattern of miniscule transparent x's to close ads and popups, that somehow don't register very easily. I'm on a Pixel 3 and I've replaced the device for unrelated reasons, it's not my screen. And my fingers are normally-sized.

What that means is that people get this popup video playing, get a little X, try to hit the X but hit the thing behind it, or click on something else taking you elsewhere, or starting the video if by miracle autoplay ISN'T overridden...

And so forth. I could go on and talk about how I have to zoom in with two hands, crane my neck and open the little x so it's a bigger X, so I can close it...

But I'd rather focus on the question - how is this sustainable? That hostility makes users hostile, and it makes your entire ad infrastructure feel like a dirty enterprise, not the "it runs the Internet" philosophy that I'm guess adtech says to itself. Here's the thing - if I'm the company trying to advertise, do I even want to pay for clicks that are unwanted?

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#179

Post by fimoreth »

Those are very small sample sizes to make any assumptions from. 11 clicks for their test, and only 256 clicks for the larger referenced test. The larger test then makes a huge assumption in user behavior:

"So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing"

Uh, no. Just because the ad brought them to your site, doesn't mean the user wants to interact with your video. You got them there, you have to work to keep them.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#180

Post by canadianwriter »

picodguyo wrote: post #111

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…

In the location settings - did you choose "are in location" or "are in location or are searching for location"

Not defending google but the latter is on by default, switching to the former can massively help here.

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