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Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

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Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#31

Post by hagbardgroup »

dangrossman wrote: post #23

Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session. Eventually the common thread between all these sites was id…

SV will not care about this until another 2000-level crash. Then, they will be forced to care, because the revenue will stop coming in. Until then the community will do the see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil routine.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#32

Post by ljk »

dangrossman wrote: post #23

Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session. Eventually the common thread between all these sites was id…

Maybe some kind of malware in the form of toolbars that sneaks into other downloads by the non-tech-savvy users?

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#33

Post by seba_dos1 »

dangrossman wrote: post #23

Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session. Eventually the common thread between all these sites was id…

Recently (during last two weeks or so) a lot of such suspicious traffic started appearing in Google Analytics as various versions of Internet Explorer, not only 7. We were forced to filter out IE completely to just calculate stuff like conversion rate. Great that legitimate traffic from IE was negligible anyway, but who knows how much of this traffic is still hiding there as some other browsers?

Thankfully, as far as I know we don't do any retargeting campaigns right now (but I think we did in the past, and we were targeted by those IE7 bots in July as well), but it's still awful PITA to deal with it in analytics data.

So, I'm seconding your comment completely.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#34

Post by throwaway20148 »

dangrossman wrote: post #23

Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session. Eventually the common thread between all these sites was id…

Sometimes this stuff isn't even bot traffic, it's traffic purchased from someone who fulfills by incentivizing people who play online games with virtual currency for viewing videos or clicking through to sites that serve the buyers ads. I presume they've also got into the retargeting capture game, too.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#35

Post by legutierr »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #28
arbuge wrote: post #20

I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.

I am a pure CPA buyer, so, I agree, that I don't worry much about fraud. The big money is in brands. P&G goes on a 6-month blitz making sure every man knows about the fusion razor, and the person that cleans the house knows what a swiffer is. They use an ad blitz to secure shelf space and consumer interest, then print money hand over fist for the next decade. As a CPA buyer, I personally welcome rampant ad fraud beca…

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to begin doing CPA advertising? Where would you begin?

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#36

Post by tn13 »

This is a problem I have seen first hand. But this is not really as big a problem as it is made out to be. The real issue here is that it is hard to predict of the given impression is a bot impression or a genuine impression. As a consequence any CPM based dealing is difficult. Difficult only means falling CPMs. That is what I have observed.

The advertisers will not have to put in more efforts to measure conversions and accordingly bid for the traffic.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#37

Post by eli »

arbuge wrote: post #20

I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.

CPA simply doesn't make sense for all ad campaigns. When Lexus buys ads on a financial news site it's for branding -- they want to get their logo in front of their target demographic. The ads aren't optimized for clicks or leads -- sometimes there isn't even a clear call to action.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#38

Post by eli »

shostack wrote: post #22
arbuge wrote: post #20

I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.

I've been in the space for the same amount of time and I'm not at all surprised by this. It all comes down to risk tolerance for both parties involved. On one end of the spectrum, CPM models put ALL of the risk onto the advertiser, and CPA is at the other, putting ALL of the risk onto the publisher. CPC falls in the middle. Depending on who has more leverage in the negotiation, what is possible for one advertiser may…

Exactly right. Publisher's don't want to take a hit because of a crummy landing page they have no control over.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#39

Post by x0x0 »

arbuge wrote: post #20

I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.

tracking conversions isn't easy given cookie churn. lots of advertisers end up paying in a last-view attribution model, so that drives a lot of dirt cheap ad purchases. and regardless of whether most advertising is sold on a cpa model, much of it is evaluated on a cpa model. the structure of ad agencies seems to be that they run $x worth of advertising and take a fraction, so they're heavily incented (and hence incent the dsps) to spend all the money. nonetheless, the campaign is evaluated to determine next quarter's spending on a cpa basis.

further, it's not clear what an action would be for a brand campaign

finally, you can demonstrate, eg by geo-fencing, that display ads work, even if many or most of them don't lead to attributable conversions

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#40

Post by x0x0 »

duaneb wrote: post #26
throwaway20148 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another example, ads that follow me. Oh god how I hate these. I visit a website, usually for a product that I already own, and the freaking ad from that company follows me wherever I go. This is money wasted. Wasted on you, probably not on the majority.

Does the average person like to purchase an item they already own if they see an advertisement for it? Of course not.

do ad campaign purchasers never calculate roas? You'd be incredibly dumb to think so
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