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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

wired.com

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Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#11

Post by londons_explore »

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions. Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product.

That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your payments per conversion into payments per click and then payments per impression, but importantly this shifts the incentive to get rid of bots to them, not you - you no longer care. The provider also has an incentive to send you customers who will actually buy your product, and to send the bots and web scrapers to their other clients.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#12

Post by bosie »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…

> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers.

your firm's higher ups received bonsues/incentives from publishers and/or big advertisers directly?

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#14

Post by amelius »

londons_explore wrote: post #11

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…

Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's personal data that is involved in the purchase?

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#15

Post by jamespo »

londons_explore wrote: post #11

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…

This has been around for a long time, but which major ad providers offer this?

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#16

Post by stormdennis »

ahartmetz wrote: post #7
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #4

"How xxx Corrupted Advertising" is a really strange titlre. It seems to assume that Advertising being corrupted is a new thing? And that the Elon guy is somehow a genius for noticing a part of the problem? The whole history of advertising seems to indicate that in fact Advertising was designed to make us buy things we don't need, not designed to talk to the better angels of our nature. Edward Bernays, aka Freud nephe…

Strange choice to stress misogyny. Women see attractive models in advertising, they think "unachievable beauty ideals, I feel pressured". I see the same, I think "it exploited my biology to grab my attention, damn it worked again". Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone, let's make money?

I'm pretty certain that the advertising of women's things using beautiful, scantily dressed, women must work, it's being going on for long enough.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#17

Post by tpetry »

bosie wrote: post #12
EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…

> Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. your firm's higher ups received bonsues/incentives from publishers and/or big advertisers directly?

No. When the ad spent increases the sales person, manager etc. get a bonus. And you don‘t do anything to improve quality which would reduce ad spend.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#18

Post by abofh »

amelius wrote: post #14
londons_explore wrote: post #11

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…

Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's personal data that is involved in the purchase?

Usually there's a magic pixel that you embed on the checkout success page or a callback you invoke. I suppose people could cheat, but if your ad never converts, the network has no incentive to run it.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#19

Post by mikeodds »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields. The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact…

If those MBAs could read they’d be very upset
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