11–20 of 312 posts
Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0] from its stats and analytics? I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic. [0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views
Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0] from its stats and analytics? I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic. [0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views
One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."Bot prevention measures can be good, but the more hoops you make your users jump though (CAPTCHA etc), the more legitimate users will drop off. Those have significant impacts on conversion rates.
I would think fixing this should involve the analytics and attribution side rather than adding friction to your e commerce flow.
Especially as bot tech continues to get better and more indistinguishable from real traffic.
What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly, bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that in 2025".
I'm working right now on an inventory management system for a clinic which would really benefit from pulling the prices and availability from a very specialised online shop. I wish I could just get a large, fully cached status of all items in a json/CSV/whatever format. But they're extremely not interested, so I'm scraping the html from 50 separate categories instead. They'll get a few daily bot hits and neither of us will be happy about it.
If people are scraping data that you're not selling, they're not going to stop - just make it trivially accessible instead in a way that doesn't waste resources and destroy metrics.
That said, 73% doesn't come as a surprise. If anything I expect it to be higher.
I guess this quote sums up the situation
> When I tried to bring this up with a few major ad platforms, the conversation always followed a predictable script. The sales reps were incredibly friendly until I mentioned click fraud or bot traffic. Then, the tone shifted instantly to corporate-speak: "Our AI detection is industry leading" and "We take ad fraud very seriously." It was a polite but firm wall, a clear signal to stop asking questions.
> One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."
Not really surprised. I spend a ridiculous amount on time banning bots every week.
It just doesn’t ring true. That aspect of the story isn’t novel at all, and someone in that line of work should surely have known all this, right?
Now the section on categorising different bot patterns, that’s more interesting, and I haven’t seen so much said about it.
Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0] from its stats and analytics? I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic. [0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views
In theory if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal?
Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions
Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because fake sign ups are possible).
But you’re right. Purchase conversions are one incentive
I’m puzzled by this: I thought it was well-understood, at least in the industry, that traffic numbers were at least mostly nonsense, and that ad click metrics especially were suuuper shady, typically more than half fraud; yet OP, in the business of “accurate ad spend analytics”, only just discovered this!? It just doesn’t ring true. That aspect of the story isn’t novel at all, and someone in that line of work should…
What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly, bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that in 2025".
Yeah, their list of recommendations could use another point: expose the public data in a simple, structured way. I'm working right now on an inventory management system for a clinic which would really benefit from pulling the prices and availability from a very specialised online shop. I wish I could just get a large, fully cached status of all items in a json/CSV/whatever format. But they're extremely not interested…