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Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

samueljscott.com

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Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#191

Post by bananaface »

rapnie wrote: post #58
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…

For some reason or other LinkedIn keeps thinking I must be very interested in Shell and Raytheon, though that couldn't be farther off the mark. Having selected "I find this ad annoying or not interesting" numerous times without any effect. What is this algorithm behind that thinking? Certainly not a good way to get some ad revenue from me (tbh I'm a lost cause anyway in that regard.. can count the no. of ad clicks I…

"Not interested" counts as an engagement. It means you found the ad emotionally stimulating enough to want to hide it.

Dunno if they actually use that info though.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#192

Post by GordonS »

zaroth wrote: post #175
treis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I used to do the same thing, but I don't think any of them were adult sites. It was all done through some kind of ads broker, and the cheques came directly from them.

Looking back, it was pretty shitty behaviour by me, but as a 14 year old boy, it just didn't even feel like a crime, even a victimsless one; it almost felt entrepreneurial.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#194

Post by bluGill »

Macha wrote: post #187
dhimes wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every been to a big break and motor store and they asked for your zip code? That is because they have someone in the back office to wants to see if the ads - dead tree paper - they spent to your zip code worked. It isn't hard to work the numbers from there, but it is tedious and requires some statistics.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#195

Post by Scoundreller »

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.

> Sometimes it's just priced in.

Agreed. The real losers are the genuine content creators, as the adcash isn’t flowing to them. They can’t just average it out.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#196

Post by tananaev »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #146
derwiki wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of reason is exactly why I started using one time credit cards (privacy) for new service signups.

+1 for privacy.com What you lose in credit card points, you 10X in savings on: 1. Unexpected "recurring" charges and 2. Time spent avoiding unintelligible unsubscribe UXs Plus, I feel a lot more comfortable trying services that require a credit card for a free trial which has led me to some extra value that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Just set the budget on the card to $1. Some people might feel bad for all the…

I think you can probably use PayPal Key for for the same purpose and get the best of both worlds (points + virtual card).

As an owner of a small SaaS business I can say that our payment processor has fairly strict requirements to allow recurring charges:

- Product description has to be very clear that it's a recurring payment

- Terms and conditions have to have a section with details on how to cancel the subscription

- We have to send email notifications in advance before every recurring charge

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#197

Post by Scoundreller »

bluGill wrote: post #194
Macha wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every been to a big break and motor store and they asked for your zip code? That is because they have someone in the back office to wants to see if the ads - dead tree paper - they spent to your zip code worked. It isn't hard to work the numbers from there, but it is tedious and requires some statistics.

Heh, I always find it funny when I buy a non-recurring thing, but keep seeing ads for it.

Best was when I kept seeing ads for a thing I was selling. I visited some big box sites about it to copy the specs on it.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#198

Post by thrownaway954 »

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…

you sure you setup your campaign correctly? from what it sounds like, you didn't limit your campaign to search. also it would be VERY interesting to see how you not only setup your ad group but also what keywords you used for each group. typically when we see people complain about ad fraud we see alot of basic mistakes that they made when setting up their campaign. i hate to say it, but 99% of the people out that claim they know how to setup and manage a google ads campaign are amateurs at best and don't know the basic foundations of the way google ads works.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#199

Post by AlexandrB »

picodguyo wrote: post #168
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…

I promise I'm not a shill, but yes I do indeed love HotJar and find it essential for getting new sites off the ground. I've uncovered countless UX improvements by watching HotJar recordings. And thanks for your generous free tier!

I wonder what your users would think of the fact that their every click was being recorded. I suspect the reason most people are not worried about this kind of stuff is that they're not aware how creepy it actually is.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#200

Post by mumblemumble »

qppo wrote: post #141
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.

Sounds a bit like the "systemic failures" that brought down the housing market in 2008. It's always been a surprise to me how much money is flowing from ads and how any business can be so reliant on it, since this makes it sound like it's fundamentally flawed. One would think the jig would eventually be up.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the jig is finally up, since there's so much stuff we're used to getting for free that is currently financed by all of this: email, maps and GPS navigation, staying in contact with college friends, ...
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