111–120 of 312 posts
I find the article's topic interesting, but the writing style is just... no. It reads like a True Crime transcript or really bad marketing copy. Which makes a certain kind of sense, I guess.
The irony of complaining about bot traffic with bot copy is too funny.
> It was not a sophisticated piece of software, just a tool designed to observe how "users" actually interacted with the website. I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior
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…
The word "revenue" above doesn't sound right. Did you mean "ad impressions", "clicks", "visits", or something else?
If the bot traffic is giving you 40% more revenue, well that's excellent news, right? If it's revenue, then keep doing it.
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…
> "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown." The word "revenue" above doesn't sound right. Did you mean "ad impressions", "clicks", "visits", or something else? If the bot traffic is giving you 40% more revenue , well that's excellent news, right? If it's revenue , then keep doing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 (…
> You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely) Unlikely?
Eh, you know what, let's just not think too much about it.
Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught.
A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistication than most companies have. And are they really going to pay some shady outfit to do it for them? It seems unlikely?
An ad agency? It will quickly become obvious that you are getting crap return on your spend, so that seems unlikely as well.
Someone else? What is their motivation?
Wayyyy back in 2000 I ran ad ops for Lycos which included a ton of other sites that they had acquired. We did an audit that uncovered the fact that 25-75% of traffic/pageviews/visitors/ad impressions were due to bots. We did our best at the moment to block some more of them, but it was losing game then, as now.
Advertising, especially online advertising, is a largely a waste of money. Overall, it's obsolete and while it may generate what seems like economic activity, it's a net loss as a use of our time and money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was about to say something similar to this. You aren’t paying for conversion rate, you are paying for a link being put on a website when a query is made. You can’t control whether a bot follows that link. You can’t control how sophisticated that bot is. You can’t expect an advertiser to filter out every type of illegitimate traffic (although it sounds like they probably have the capability to filter out more but do…
Google Ads used to be very effective. You are catching the punter as they are actually looking for a solution to their problem. However Google have inflated bids and increased the complexity to the point where very few people can make a decent return now.
>The recommendation I’ve always seen is that it’s better to build legitimate interest in your product by producing content.
That is becoming rapidly less true as AIs steal all the traffic.
>If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without buying ads you can go without AdWords, too.
We can't all be Teslas.