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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

#301

Post by kmeisthax »

steveBK123 wrote: post #151
tomhallett wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc). But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in…

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…

I do the same thing, but in my case it's guinea pig eyeballs. But I'm a Premium subscriber so I don't get ads anyway.

Kids videos on YouTube[0] is another vector of techincally-not-fraudulent-but-very-low-value ad inventory. The stats on those videos also tend to be highly suspicious - i.e. basically no comments but millions of views and likes. Normally you'd call this bots, but then you realize that small children are literally incapable of commenting on all those Pregnant Elsa & Spiderman videos they are subjecting themselves to.

[0] Not to be confused with YouTube Kids, a subbrand/app intended for small children to satisfy US COPPA

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

#302

Post by seti0Cha »

myth2018 wrote: post #282
seti0Cha wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bounce rate went up. That's still consistent with your target audience losing interest. It may be that they care enough to click on your ad but don't engage with your content. It could also be that the ratio of bots increased at the same rate as customer interest wained, or it could be the ads were never effective. It kind of doesn't matter. As an ad buyer, the only thing you to need worry about is whether the v…

They cared enough to keep searching for my keywords, to click on my ads, but then they realized they were not interested and bounced? Also, like I said, the traffic the ads generated was good (it generated prospects fitting the profile I was targeting, and I was happy with the numbers), so yes, the ads were effective.

My point is, either the traffic got worse or your ad is no longer effective and a higher bounce rate can indicate either. Bots don't shoulder aside regular users, so regardless of whether there are more bots, there are less users. Otherwise you'd have seen traffic increasing but not conversion. If traffic is flat and interaction is down, you've lost interested users and you need to look at your creative, or your targeting, or possibly consider whether any design or content changes on your landing page could be responsible. It could also be that you are getting outbid and your placement is now not catching the best customers. The fact that what worked before doesn't work now is totally normal. Customer tastes change, competitor behavior changes, the traffic supplier is changing. Ad buying is a constant battle.

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

#303

Post by omgomgomgomg »

nottorp wrote: post #58

> 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…

I do think they are a good example, however , maybe they ran those less quantifyable brand name campaigns.

There are many reports out there confirming the same.

Dont give the ad networks a carte blanche sometimes they themselves are hijacked by bad operators.

It seems there is very little done a mitigation or prevention of bad traffic and a lot of sending beginner sales persons to the front lines.

I mean, they do provide some estimates for conversion rates, but never will they put that on paper. Where are their numbers for traffic cost even coming from if they do not know?

When they say lets run a test campaign for 1 or 2 k before I commit to 5 times that, I ask them what have my comoetitors done, do you have feedback?( I do, am on friendly terms with competitors) they always say they have no insight(is that so?). All I know that some of them create either zero or so much fake traffic that I have to justify the 400 percent page views month to month to some payment partners.

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

#304

Post by calrueb »

kylebyproxy wrote: post #86
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...…

I'm just amazed ads work at all. Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. I'd have hoped enough likeminded people in the world would naturally defeat the ad sector, but evidently I'm an outlier. I'll never understand why the average consumer rewards and reinforces ad spend

Actually curious, do you hold the same standard for print media (a newspaper/magazine ad), out-of-home (billboard), and television advertising?

How do you primarily discover businesses and products?

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

#305

Post by forgotmypw17 »

alberth wrote: post #230
jermaustin1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this deserves a blog post, but I'm lazy. So here is the back story from 10,000 feet. I worked for a company that basically gave me 80% time. 20% of my time was supporting the products we already launched, the other 80% was experimenting and coming up with new products. I was blogging kind of regularly back then (once every week or so), on a subdomain without any actual backlinks other than from a few "no-index"…

> So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window. Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5 minutes on that domain and navigated a…

One way they can tell is whether they see you on the search results page again, or if they see you click another result on the search results page.

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

#306

Post by omgomgomgomg »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #104
JCM9 wrote: post #84

Years ago our company was running an ad campaign on social media. Curious on the results I spent time looking into a randomly selected pool of the “users” that had been clicking on our ads. It quickly became clear that at least half (if not a lot more) of the clicks were from what appeared to be fake users or bots. We shut the whole ad spend there off immediately.

I sometimes when an advertisement annoys me, I punish it clicking on it, clicking around on the website, maybe adding items to the cart or going through half of the click funnel, and then I close the tab and never come back. It's great.

You could automate this with a script running at certain intervals.

Some will throw you a captcha sometimes, but not all and not always early enough.

I did not abuse this, I have observed this when developing a scraper.

Test headless before deploying was my most valuable take away.

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

#307

Post by driverdan »

aliqot wrote: post #126
kylebyproxy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just amazed ads work at all. Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. I'd have hoped enough likeminded people in the world would naturally defeat the ad sector, but evidently I'm an outlier. I'll never understand why the average consumer rewards and reinforces ad spend

> Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. Can we see your list? Is it in Git somewhere?

I do something similar. I block every account that shows me ads on Twitter and Instagram. I wouldn't say I boycott them but 99% are companies I wouldn't buy anything from in the first place.

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

#308

Post by fyvhbhn »

rr888 wrote: post #147
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...…

> 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! I agree there is lots of wasted time out there. But the advertising paid for Google, Facebook etc. It pays for Chrome, Android, React, PyTorch etc.

The software would be cheaper if financed without ads

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

#309

Post by fyvhbhn »

kritiko wrote: post #202
max51 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they have an utility, people will pay for it (they don't even have to pay as much as they pay indirectly via advertising). If not, not gonna miss it

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

#310

Post by walrus01 »

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…

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