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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

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

#51

Post by jeltz »

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?

They generally just trust you.

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

#52

Post by somedude895 »

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?

Noone, except scammy "affiliate" post view rackets.

You can set max cpa bid strategies, but that's still paying cpms.

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

#53

Post by dan-robertson »

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…

A problem is that deciding whether or not a customer was converted from an ad viewer is done by the people you pay for ads. Perhaps the conversion numbers are slightly inflated but in general it’s just really hard to tell. If you show a lot of ads to potential customers then chances are, most people who buy things from you saw your ads. Does that mean they came to you because of the ad? I think even if you had perfect information it would be hard to decide. There is some chance that you just have an added sales tax where you send $6 to each advertiser every time you make a sale. I don’t know how much (eg) google care about deciding whether conversion numbers are correct. But how do they even decide if the numbers are correct and what stops them from being biased towards reporting higher conversion rates?

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

#54

Post by LatteLazy »

Companies should be doing testing to check the efficiency of their ad spending. If they're happy with the Spend/Sales ratio then it is irrelevant whether they pay $x for 1000 impressions->10 real views->1 sale or $x for 10 impressions->10 real views->1 sale.

If they are not doing their homework, that is on them.

And frankly, 90%+ of advertising is a blight on the environment whether it's online or broadcast or physical so who cares.

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

#55

Post by LatteLazy »

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?

Audit: They click 10 ads and buy themselves and then check you compensate them for all 10 sales.

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

#56

Post by seydor »

That's not my problem. Advertisers are part of the problem, they take in huge sums of money and feed the Google+fb monopoly, without ever knowing how their money is wasted, they "trust" them. There is nothing more opaque than google, the company that controls both the supply and demand of search ads. If you willingly participate in that market,i m sorry, not sorry

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

#57

Post by tjoff »

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…

So obviously it is better doing nothing since it benefits us??

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

#58

Post by nottorp »

> The case started when Uber pulled all online advertising and discovered barely any drop in app installs or sales.

Uber is a bad example I think. Not only they've been in the news so many times advertising is probably irellevant, there is an actual "natural" ceiling for demand for Uber in an area.

They may have to compete with ads in places where they have competition, but not overall.

> The technology to detect and block bots already exists

Yeah, right. When I close the site because i can't be arsed to look for palm trees in 120x80 photos, I'm a bot.

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

#59

Post by robertlagrant »

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.

Such as?
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