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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

#201

Post by lovehashbrowns »

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…

When I worked at a company that got like almost 100% of their revenue from ads, we got a very serious warning from an ad agency to stop serving our ads to bots. They gave us like 7 days to fix our traffic or we'd get removed, effectively killing our company. Scary time to be an engineer that morning! That was like 6-7 years ago, though! It's kinda crazy that things have changed this much.

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

#202

Post by kritiko »

max51 wrote: post #158
kritiko wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events that delivers the content to all of your friends and family?

Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of them (including google) is supported by charging directly for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical phone, software subscription, etc.)

I'm referring here to Instagram / Facebook. How are you going to send your wedding or vacation or dog photos to your network? Mass email? The social platforms have a utility for most people at this point.

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

#203

Post by ameister14 »

londons_explore wrote: post #63
dan-robertson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perfec…

Most online businesses have multiple ways to track conversions... It will become pretty obvious if Google says you sold 130 widgets but your warehouse guys only delivered 60.... Likewise, lots of businesses have a different landing page for people coming from an ad vs people from organic search and people coming from referral links/shared URL's. The business counts how many people visited each of those. They'll know…

you don't even need a different landing page, though that makes it easier. Depending on the ad platform, you can (in the US) cookie them and connect their behavior after the initial click. For the first session, UTM's are often sufficient.

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

#204

Post by beardedetim »

jonnat wrote: post #200
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…

Even if it would be easy only pay per conversion, you would create a different type of perverse incentive in which ad platforms would exclusively want to target consumers their models attach a high preexisting (before exposure to ads) probability of conversion. That is OK for lower funnel tactics but it would severely reduce your ability to put your brand in front of a new audience.

Maybe there's two sets of ads being discussed here: exposure/top of tunnel and conversion/bottom of funnnel?

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

#205

Post by yamtaddle »

civilized wrote: post #118
c7b wrote: post #45

> Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks That is a funny reason for why this phenomenon might have grown so big in the first place. The people in the ad-buying company who are in the best position to 'smell' when the numbers are off are also the ones most likely to individually benefit from inflated numbers (KPIs, nu…

Reminds me of Graeber's bullshit jobs theory. We have people generating fake clicks so that the ad departments at big companies can feel important.

On top of that, IIRC he mentions advertising among the "zero-sum" variety of bullshit job. Not all of it, but a great deal is "we're spending more because [other big brand] started spending more, just to keep from losing market share".

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

#206

Post by myth2018 »

> “After all, who cares if big brands waste their money showing ads to bots?”

I'm not so sure this affects only big brands.

I've experienced that in march 2020. I ran ads in a very popular platform and was fairly happy about the results -- modest, but steady.

When the pandemics hit, my target-market shifted their focus away from my sort of product, and such shift happened almost overnight. Since I used to get a reasonable amount of real visitors, I thought "well, I believe the clicks on my ads will decrease sharply now".

Guess what? I kept getting the same amount of clicks on average, and my budget of course kept burning at the same rate. The only difference was that the "visits" started to last only a few seconds, the pages were not scrolled anymore, and the "visitors" never sent an inquiry.

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

#207

Post by user456324234 »

emaro wrote: post #49

If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane ! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it. I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still...…

Agree. And this is yet another proof that lots of meanningless jobs exist!

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

#208

Post by sharperguy »

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…

So how about starting by not actually blocking the bots, but publishing two numbers, the original calc including bots, and the adjusted with bots removed. Try to estimate said number for competitors as well. Then after some years try to move to using mainly the second set of numbers.

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

#209

Post by dylan604 »

emaginniss wrote: post #173
steveBK123 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans. I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically ta…

That's why my cat recently ordered a casper mattress

Next, the cat will upgrade that meager 55" to a 75". A new fridge with bottom freezer will follow. Kitty must be comfy, else kitty will find new home

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

#210

Post by api »

manigandham wrote: post #163
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…

12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem, not a tech problem. All the major solutions are well known but not implemented because of the massive effect it would have on business for everyone down the chain for advertisers. The entire industry meets every year. They can figure this out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives are not aligned for that to happen.

So basically the industry is incentivized to waste money and hide this from the boss, even within companies that are spending on ads?
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