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Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

samueljscott.com

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201–210 of 286 posts

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#201

Post by stiray »

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.

Naah, just install adnauseum [1] and thank advertisers for forcing you to use adblocker. Let them pay for all the manace they couse to you and help ad networks to build completely wrong profile on you.

[1] https://adnauseam.io/

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#202

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #198
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 cla…

You're right, we are amateurs. But the fact that I "target" US/Canada, and my ads are being shown to Hindi-folk is a case of bad ui and bad design.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#203

Post by AlexandrB »

thiscatis wrote: post #167
achairapart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any EU alternative for privacy.com or similar services?

Revolut offers virtual and disposable cards. I've been (unethically) using them for these 1GBP / month trials a certain online newspaper offers.

Revolut was featured on HN just this morning: https://thehftguy.com/2020/08/12/a-haven-for-fraud-and-stole...

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#204

Post by AlexandrB »

ffpip wrote: post #171
paulie_a wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It just changes what the advertiser thinks of your interests.

How is this not increasing privacy? The point is to keep my real interests private from creepy marketing departments.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#205

Post by Scoundreller »

a123b456c wrote: post #138
rtx wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Display network has been like that for atleast 10 years that I have been using it.

Why continue to use it?

The fraud really just steals from legit publishers.

If you’re an advertiser and the display market becomes 90% fraud, you just end up paying 1/10th the rate for 10x the traffic.

Legit publishers get 1/10th the revenue though.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#206

Post by Scoundreller »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #99
marcinzm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the pop-up filled marketing sites. "Come chat with us." "Click this big banner for a discount." "Come to this webinar if you can't find the small X to close this banner." "This site uses cookies." "Watch these fifty background animations play."

I remember this JS prank, where you tried chasing the close X all over the screen. Sadly, it is quite close to what actually happens.

Ctrl-w or cmd-w have saved me many times.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#207

Post by akulbe »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #129
kzrdude wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Are they all like this, in that they're easy to exploit and there are high occurrences of fraud?

I wonder what would be reliable ways to spend money for advertising, then? I'm new to this, but I was thinking about spending some money for some online marketing until reading this.

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#208

Post by nix23 »

stiray wrote: post #201
beervirus wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Naah, just install adnauseum [1] and thank advertisers for forcing you to use adblocker. Let them pay for all the manace they couse to you and help ad networks to build completely wrong profile on you. [1] https://adnauseam.io/

Hehe yes since i installed adnauseum i love ad's...and i love that they have to pay for it, atm at 5732$ ;)

Re: Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

#210

Post by rhizome »

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.

And that strategy still doesn't account for word of mouth.
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