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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

joindatacops.com

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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#101

Post by Nasrudith »

protonbob wrote: post #90

> I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior. > This was not the obvious spam that gets filtered out. This was sophisticated bot traffic designed to fool standard analytics platforms. > Humans are messy; these bots were clinically precise. AI slop writing is so tiresome. At least it is somewhat noticeable.

That just looks like 'writer over-educated in grammar above and beyond fluency, to the point they know how to use semicolons properly'. AI writer detection is just a new manifestation of superstition's origins as spurious pattern matching.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#103

Post by micromacrofoot »

Conversion rates have almost always been in the 1% or less range for a significant number of advertisers on the web and I've been ranting about how absurd this is for decades at this point.

I sincerely wish we could get past this phase of advertising... imagine any other product where you're trying to extract money from 1% by annoying 99% of your audience. We don't have to tolerate this, and many aren't anymore (thanks to ad blockers)

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#104

Post by ccortes »

dangus wrote: post #63
paulcole wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it really matter if it's all fraud Uh, yes. If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent clicks.

The point is, if $10k brings in 47 sales and that’s not enough then you stop buying those ads. It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. You take your marketing spend elsewhere. You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom. How much of ESPN’s viewership happens at bars where nobody is watching? At some point it’s not reasonable to…

> It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working.

It does, because it changes the strategy.

If you think the ads are working and have 10k potential customers then you start thinking about how to increase your conversion rate thinking you could get a chunk of those 10k, you might think distribution is solved.

But if it turns out only 2.5k are real humans then your conversion rate might not even be an issue and it’s just the marketing strategy that needs tweaking.

The whole point is that they are giving you fraudulent traffic which you use as real data to figure out the next steps. If you don’t know it’s fraudulent or how much of the clicks are fraudulent then you are taking decisions under the wrong assumptions.

> You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom

That’s not even a good analogy, we are taking clicks, not impressions.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#105

Post by jpadkins »

SoftTalker wrote: post #85
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“All clicks are click fraud” isn’t that far from the truth.

I've never intentionally clicked on an ad, ever. I've accidentally clicked a few, due to tricks or fat fingers.

Did you read the article? If so, you clicked on an ad. This blog post was an ad for datacops.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#106

Post by marcosdumay »

criddell wrote: post #34
simul007 wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real. The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre pat…

Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to figure out if it was a successful campaign or not. When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that matters is impact on the bottom line.

You may be able to cancel out the numbers if the rate of fraud to real clicks is stable.

But it's incredibly unlikely that the amount of fraud is stable, any attention from a small player can generate enough volume to eclipse all of the background. Thus no, you can't just account for it on your calculation.

When a company puts up a billboard, it doesn't get taken down because a flock of birds passed by before anyone could look at it.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#107

Post by miriam_catira »

chrismorgan wrote: post #17

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…

Some of us knew it, but it's getting worse. And I've worked adjacent to or on marketing teams for the the last decade... and I can't explain why but my theory is they all trust the numbers implicitly, esp. the ad spend. Having to justify your department's continued existence via KPIs that need to exponentially increase year over year means bloated numbers are a good thing. They can just blame sales for never closing deals.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#108

Post by shmeeed »

Waterluvian wrote: post #77

I remember reading an article years ago that argued with similar examples that the entire website ad market is almost entirely artificial/fraud/bots, but that a lot of jobs, a lot of companies, and basically the whole industry depends on simply pretending this is not true.

I remember that article as well. Initially I could have sworn this was a repost, but it's got a current date. There might be some Mandela effect at work.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#109

Post by f4uCL9dNSnQm »

awongh wrote: post #27

I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to marketing and business influencers. Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked" enough to look real. Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from your traffic being fake? You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (…

It is the website owners that commit click fraud. It has been that way for the last 25 years. I mean the first thing I did as a kid was checking what will happen if I keep clicking on ad on my newly created homepage.

> just name them Does Adsense even gives you information where exactly your ad is getting published?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#110

Post by Cthulhu_ »

criddell wrote: post #34
simul007 wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real. The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre pat…

Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to figure out if it was a successful campaign or not. When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that matters is impact on the bottom line.

It depends on whether the ad engagement / views were real people or bots - if you're a competitor, then using bots to use up your competitor's ad budget is a strategy.

If you display ads on your website, then sure, it doesn't matter if a bot or real person viewed/clicked on your ad if you get paid regardless - to the point where there's a big industry of putting ads on sites then having bots engage with the site and its ads.

Billboards are a bit different because that's paid per week / month, but internet ads are paid per impression or click.

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