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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

#141

Post by ryandrake »

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…

> But I don't think they would dare.

I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#142

Post by wholinator2 »

PedroBatista wrote: post #75
seviu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He idea of "reality" and how things work, even if the idea is "they work bad", is more important than any other argument or reality. That's true at personal level and even truer at any organizational level.

Well yes but seems business has decided truth is worth less than money. Or now that i think of it, everything is worth less than money. Even, money is the only thing worth anything. They don't care about people, pride, products, or truth.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#143

Post by hermitcrab »

c-linkage wrote: post #127
wussboy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be straight up criminal fraud for which people could go to prison, isn't it (if they got caught)?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#144

Post by pixl97 »

whistle650 wrote: post #62
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.

This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a competitive market. If they don’t deliver the ROI because of bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an e-commerce site is…

Google is a competitive ad market?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#145

Post by dnpls »

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…

OP is selling their own web analytics product, so take the article with a grain of salt.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#146

Post by hermitcrab »

hahn-kev wrote: post #121
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?

This possibly counts for some of it, where you are just the collateral damage of somebody trying to disguise their bot as a real user. It feels unlikely to be the majority of bots though, but I could be wrong.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#147

Post by hdseggbj »

jklinger410 wrote: post #89
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 ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. Why not use Microsoft Clarity? > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care.

That's like saying why not just live on the dole?

Answer: pride, curiosity, inspiration, creativity, a sense of ownership, integrity, control, vision

I can't believe these concepts are so foreign to so many.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#148

Post by whistle650 »

arichard123 wrote: post #88
whistle650 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And imagine how much more you’d have to pay for each of those clicks if everyone could stop those fraudulent clicks. In equilibrium it shouldn’t change the total ad spend.

But if you're the only one doing it because the competition haven't figured it out, then you win in until they do. You can outbid on each ad.

That’s true. But you probably can’t. At least any more than others. It’s a systemic issue in the ad network ecosystem which you don’t have much control over. If you can figure it out, odds are lots of others can too. People do assess the quality of traffic sources and do check the return on ad spend. It’s that system wide process that keeps the return on ad spend roughly constant.

The point here, for me, is that a microeconomic perspective on this whole question is more salient than a purely technical one.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#149

Post by hermitcrab »

I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap. Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who was running the bots?

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#150

Post by pixl97 »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #93
jklinger410 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. Why not use Microsoft Clarity? > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care.

> You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care. Not just not care, but don't they have incentive to report higher traffic?

At this point Google is just committing fraud to justify high stock prices.
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