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Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

samueljscott.com

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181–190 of 286 posts

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#181

Post by echlebek »

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.

Funny you should say that, I just blacklisted hotjar this morning in noscript!

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#182

Post by dhimes »

Macha wrote: post #165
radicaldreamer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.

Sometimes it's just priced in. If partner A has a 10% fraud rate and partner B has a 5% rate but partner A is 10% cheaper than partner B, while you'll probably complain to partner A it's still the sensible choice.

It's hard to get the numbers, though. I mean, I guess we could ask....

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#183

Post by nickff »

kzrdude wrote: post #123
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like pay-per-click and similar models should just be discontinued, they don't work since they can be exploited. An independently verifiable metric needs to be used (if the price for the ad should be traffic or interaction based) - or something completely different. Fixed prices?

All the metrics for advertisement sales have been gamed for as long as I know of (at least 20 years); this goes for paper, online, television, and radio. Smart advertisers know what's going on, and they take the 'gaming' into account.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#184

Post by mmhsieh »

motohagiography wrote: post #148
caymanjim wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, they are a public company.

Except as a product, the company (MSFT) is insulated from their crappy behavior, where if it were a stand alone company, there would be more accountability. Maybe that's a new platform company strategy: build a bunch of low-volatility/low-margin enterprise products for long term revenue generation, then fund a bunch of shadey operations as products to be pools for off-the-books bonuses and incentives.

this could very well be the case. in which case, using oculus as a model -- the company's promises to you as the user are only as good as the last company who acquired them.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#185

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#186

Post by TeMPOraL »

Macha wrote: post #165
radicaldreamer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.

Sometimes it's just priced in. If partner A has a 10% fraud rate and partner B has a 5% rate but partner A is 10% cheaper than partner B, while you'll probably complain to partner A it's still the sensible choice.

It's not just clickfraud. Attribution is a hard problem that leaves a lot of space to bullshit people. A/B tests require degree-level understanding of statistics to conduct properly, which isn't common in companies, particularly when correctness doesn't matter if the test is just used to confirm preconceptions or justify budgets. Etc.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#187

Post by Macha »

dhimes wrote: post #182
Macha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it's just priced in. If partner A has a 10% fraud rate and partner B has a 5% rate but partner A is 10% cheaper than partner B, while you'll probably complain to partner A it's still the sensible choice.

It's hard to get the numbers, though. I mean, I guess we could ask....

Well, at my last employer we had our own systems analyzing traffic, we had integrations with third parties (DoubleVerify being the biggest) to detect fraud, our clients often had their own third party integrations to detect fraud and would complain if we hadn't found it but they did at too high a rate, etc.

Honestly after the ad images/video, all the fraud detection javascript from the advertiser, the publisher, the advertiser's system of choice, the publisher's system of choice all doing "trust but verify" with each other is the largest contributor to how big ads are.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#188

Post by [deleted] »

3np wrote: post #28
marcinzm wrote: post #5

Hard to know how much is ad fraud and how much is people just not being interested in what is being advertised. Don't see why I should care about yet another webinar especially if I'm already a successful CEO and get five thousand webinar requests a day. Might click for more info but then after 10 seconds on the page (and seeing it's more BS) I'll probably bail. Same as this quote: >“You’ll see the call to action is…

"LinkedIn says 11, our server logs show 10, our actual reporting software's only showing 8 people. The only reason that we would not see them pop up in this logging tool is that they were on the site and bounced so quickly that the logging tool was unable to load and capture anything of their session [We've went back and forth will the session recording company multiple times to confirm that]" Seems awareness of ad/t…

[deleted]

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#189

Post by datenhorst »

gk1 wrote: post #80

Sooo, I've spent hundreds of thousands on LinkedIn Ads on behalf of clients. Here is my take: Ad platforms work in varying degrees for different products and companies. You should not dismiss an ad platform based on poor performance alone without understanding why it performed poorly. It's sort of like with airlines: If you boycott an airline for every minor offense, pretty soon you'll have no option but to take the…

> it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed.

This is especially true in a mobile browser. The website is incredibly slow and borderline unusable on a mobile phone.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#190

Post by privateprofile »

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.

It's also blocked by default by uBlock Origin, fortunately.
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