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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

#31

Post by tialaramex »

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?

> Is it misogyny or is it mis-everyone

The word you might want here is misanthropy "a dislike of humankind".

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

#32

Post by [deleted] »

jamespo wrote: post #15
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?

[deleted]

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

#33

Post by csmpltn »

axlee wrote: post #24
tpetry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.

> "What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code."

OP works for an advertising company. They get paid by clients to run advertising campaigns. Employees of the advertising company get bonuses for closing high-profile deals with clients. The employees are incentivized to continue bringing in more revenue streams and continue closing more high-profile deals.

The deals couldn't have been made in the first place without some form of trust between the parties. As long as the clients are seeing results (aka return-on-investment, ROI), the trust is maintained, and the deals are renewed. Different clients have different budgets, and have different ways of measuring their ROI (sales are one parameter, but there can be more). No one would be buying those advertising services if they wouldn't be seeing ROI.

It is generally acknowledged that "advertising works". In reality though, there are lots of factors at play.

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

#34

Post by jefftk »

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…

> 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

Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when trying to defraud advertisers on networks that take fraud seriously (which it sounds like your company didn't).

(Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by gergov »

axlee wrote: post #24
tpetry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.

Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping. That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss.

There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as expected waste.

Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot, which have dubious correlations with reality but they look nice on dashboards.

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #26
abofh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has major privacy and GDPR implications though.

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by secondcoming »

axlee wrote: post #24
tpetry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.

In adtech you have to spend all the budget a client gives you. They get very pissy if you don't and it's not unheard of for clients to penalise you several multiples of the unspent budget.

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

#39

Post by tehlike »

jefftk wrote: post #34
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…

> 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 Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when…

What he said, same disclaimer

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

#40

Post by dekken_ »

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…

Ads are cancer.
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