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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

#121

Post by hahn-kev »

hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? 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 sophistic…

Maybe it's bots trying to look like real people? So not targeting you specifically, but just trying to fake being real users?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#122

Post by wussboy »

hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? 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 sophistic…

My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court challenge against any competitor because they have almost unlimited resources.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#123

Post by candiddevmike »

kingstnap wrote: post #81
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.

You can't just "ignore" fraudulent clicks as though those aren't baked into the original price. The only thing you should care about is your own sales vs your own ad spend. Your calculations make as much sense as pouring out 90% of a can of beer, claiming you have just made vodka, and simultaneously trying to pay only for the 10% of beer that is left.

Why are fraudulent clicks my problem? Why should I pay for them?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#124

Post by hombre_fatal »

jpadkins wrote: post #105
SoftTalker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if you've ever scrolled social media or used the internet at all, you've read and clicked ads.

Only considering old school "Ads by google" banners as ads and then patting yourself on the back for never clicking them is pretty faint praise for your ad evasion skills.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#125

Post by hermitcrab »

malfist wrote: post #73
vmaurin wrote: post #69

I did work in the ad tech industry for almost 15y and big corp like Google/FB scam their user: - they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers - if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range - and for most of the traffic they might send you, they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic. So they get this "amazing" perform…

Google ads are often like paying someone to stand in front of your business and hand out flyers to everyone going inside. Sure, a lot of your visitors were handed a flyer by google before they showed up in your store, but were any of them new customers?

Very true. So you end up on paying for a lot of clicks from existing customers who type your product name into Google and click on the first thing that comes up, which is increasingly an ad.

I used to advertise in Adwords on the name of my products, but I no longer bother.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#126

Post by hackthemack »

I feel like this was known years ago, but never gained traction. Here is a 2022 article in wired about bots.

https://www.wired.com/story/bots-online-advertising/

And before that, in the 2010s, an employee of ebay discovered the perverse incentives of online advertising. Freakonomics did a podcast on the subject. It is a two parter, but really worth your time if you want to get some of the behind the scenes thoughts and machinations of the advertising industry.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#127

Post by c-linkage »

wussboy wrote: post #122
hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? 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 sophistic…

My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court challenge against any competitor because they have almost unlimited resources.

Facebook could also pay a subsidiary to fraudulently click on the ads.

While this might sound extreme and paranoid, this is exactly the kind of thing corporations do to transfer risk and create plausible deniability.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#128

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

Ah... I remember back when Anandtech would run a monthly roundup of hard drives that would usually insist that you pay another $150-$200 for a hard drive because hypothetically the more esoteric consumer SKUs were 3db softer or consumed 0.2W less than the mass-produced least-cost enterprise Seagates. [1] They unquestioningly quoted the spec sheets and never did any tests whereas everyone knows you can't trust spec sheets when it comes to noise and power.

The thing was that site kept reflowing the layout over and over again and I think the point was that they were hoping you were going to click on something you saw on the sidebar and then it would reflow and an ad would be there right at the second when you clicked and then... Ka-Ching!

[1] Funny reversal that the enterprise product is mass market and the consumer product is overpriced if not gold-plated.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#129

Post by bestatsiege_01 »

jklinger410 wrote: post #95
vmaurin wrote: post #69

I did work in the ad tech industry for almost 15y and big corp like Google/FB scam their user: - they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers - if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range - and for most of the traffic they might send you, they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic. So they get this "amazing" perform…

> they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party analytics tools you can use to track the website. > if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic. These megacorps don't have VPNs? >…

With respect to:

>> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic

>Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense.

I have only ever been a buyer; so my technical understanding of the back end implementation is incomplete.

However, I think the point OP is trying to make is that the back end of the ad targeting infrastructure ends up attributing "spend" to folks who would have otherwise been organic traffic and found your site anyway. ie placing your ad in effective organic pathways and/or in front of well targeted users.

This of course makes sense. A well targeted ad is going to be presented to lots of people who would have otherwise been organic traffic.

This is just a problem with measuring ROI on ad's in general though. I think what has changed is improved attribution of digital ad's has confused people. They see 10 clicks, $5 spend, 1 sale @ $10 and think a 200% ROAS.

In the old days (and still sometimes for non digital) ad effectiveness was measured as a lift over baseline. Different media had different decay rates.

Depending on your digital property, a similar model may need to be applied to your digital campaigns. As I understand though, this is harder to do in modern times with digital ad's.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#130

Post by stackskipton »

hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? 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 sophistic…

With AI and data scrappers, so much traffic is bots scraping for various purposes and they were following Facebook Ads and crawling the store as well but obviously never made a purchase.
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