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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#131

Post by bobbiechen »

baobun wrote: post #15

Would like to see the script. From reading it's impossible to tell if the methodology is sound. Would legitimate users with adblockers or disabling JS get counted is false positives, for example? 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 pred…

It's a problem even on the company side. If the people responsible for marketing are judged on vanity metrics, they'll assume a conversion problem is later in the funnel. And even for venture-backed startups, I feel there is an incentive to turn a blind eye to bot signups since it juices numbers for investors who aren't paying attention.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#132

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#133

Post by at-fates-hands »

seviu wrote: post #68
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…

I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry. We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%. In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. Bots are real people after all

>> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

Did something similar at a small company I was working at. The VP of marketing sat me down and told me to do the same thing.

After the meeting, I was told by another dev that the VP was tying a monetary value to specific clicks and if I was filtering out the bots, it would make his data look bad and reduce the amount of potential revenue for the company he was touting.

I think you can see how the bots were actually helping him promote how awesome a job he was doing with our web properties to the owners.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#134

Post by gs17 »

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…

I'd presume it's not Facebook themselves, but they simply have no incentive to react to the problem as long as people keep buying their ads.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#135

Post by dandellion »

Nasrudith wrote: post #101
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.

Well, as a foreign English speaker I have to thank you for calling me over-educated in grammar above and beyond fluency in a language that is not my own. But aside from that I can tell you that those sentences are either written by AI, and in the minuscule possibility that they weren't, the author must have been intentionally writing to sound like AI for the sake of being post-ironic. The second I saw the first sentence I knew it was AI and came straight to the comments to look for the thread of someone complaining so I could pile on.

PS: For what it's worth, I still think the article was moderately interesting, even if lazily and poorly written by delegating the task to an AI.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#136

Post by marcosdumay »

Dead_Lemon wrote: post #26

It makes the argument of the open internet being unable to function without advertising, quite hard to prop up. Especially when over 70% of traffic if just people gaming the system, to real users detriment.

It's a huge argument for dumb advertisement that doesn't track people or clicks.

You know, the kind that existed before Google created their thing.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#137

Post by [deleted] »

stronglikedan wrote: post #100
criddell wrote: post #34

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.

> they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs they also don't get charged retroactively for each dashcam and dog that looks at the billboard

[deleted]

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#138

Post by brazukadev »

shmeeed wrote: post #117
brazukadev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely) Unlikely?

Highly unlikely, because they obviously would never engage in fraudulent activity! I mean, what would even be their incenti- Eh, you know what, let's just not think too much about it.

If they know it is a bot, it is fraudulent. They know it is a bot when it is time to pay from their Adsense arm. It is insane that the same click that isn't paid to the publishers still goes to google's pockets.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#139

Post by jerf »

miriam_catira wrote: post #107
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…

There's the old story about Charles Babbage and his not understanding how you can feed garbage to a computer and people will believe the output, but in a sense it goes deeper than that; put a number in front of someone and I think a good 75% of the population at least will simply believe it. Not only believe it, but if someone comes along 15 seconds later with a different number, they'll argue with the new guy, even though in a parallel universe where the second guy got there first they'd have argued equally vociferously with the first guy! When objectively they have no real basis for either number, or any other.

I can also say that with every passing year I see that when the Bible talks about people who love lies it's a lot less metaphorical than I thought it was when I was younger. The stories in this very thread about managers demanding that the original, bot-inflated numbers be put back up on their internal metrics rather than have the correct and accurate one is just an example, and one particularly vivid and easy to see.

Though there is also a business opportunity there... I am also reminded of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons where the boss is viewing a defective spreadsheet that has a higher profit for the year the farther down he scrolls into it. Why not just multiply your click stats by e^(number of months since start / 20) or so? I mean, if the click counts don't have to match any particular reality, go for the gusto.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#140

Post by garciasn »

candiddevmike wrote: post #123
kingstnap wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my extensive experience, you take irrefutable evidence back to the ad platforms and they provide 'make goods' after the fact for those fraudulent visitors.

The entire premise of the article is quite accurate and most companies are spending money on third-parties to do what this guy has done to recoup fraudulent spends; so, none of this is new to the industry. Everyone knows it's happening and it's all part of the gig; it benefits everyone except those spending so little is truly done to correct it.

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