Bots everywhere
Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
171–180 of 312 posts
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown." Lawsuit time?
I mean how much money are you going to spend going after them? Multi billion dollar companies love to take decades to sue. If the SEC weren't weak maybe they could go after them for fraudulent numbers.
IANAL (or an ad industry expert) but wouldn't a successful class action on this be staggeringly vast?
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#173Ads have been around for a long time. If your great-...-grandpa bought a newspaper ad in 1820 he would have been looking to see if the ad worked (back then 90+% of people were farmers who didn't buy ads, but lets assume you had an ancestor then who was a shopkeeper and thus had potential value in ads). He probably didn't have have modern statistics, but he would pay attention to sales and try to figure out how much value the ad generated. (or he liked the guy who ran the newspaper and wanted to buy anyway...
If you are running ads you should be running statistics on them. You should know that you spent $X on ads, and got $Y on sales. This despite how messy the data is (Car manufactures want you to buy a new car every 3 years, so most ads are buy in the future not today - which makes getting answers hard). What matters isn't engagement, clicks, or any other data analysis can give you - they are (or trying to be) a proxy for what matters: how did advertisements affect sales. There are other ways to get that data, those ways have long been known. You shouldn't ignore them - if only to verify that that analysis is still working.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant.
These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign.
Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game.
It happened way too many times in the past decade.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#175Hi 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.
> 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.
Billboards sell for flat rates, online advertising is sold on the basis of impressions.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#176Is there a market for software that will use whatever tools are available to detect human users from bots and thereby gain some "real" metrics?
Because I could probably write that, and I'm currently (mostly) on the bench
EDIT: It seems that people actually reject this filtering for business-incentive reasons. Well here's what I propose: In order to get out of this "debt", we "pay it off" at some rate. So for example, every week we subtract an additional 1% of the traffic detected as "fake", in order to hopefully get back to some real numbers at some point
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#177Hi 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
Could you have... maybe eased it in over time? So for example, every 4 days, filter out an additional 1% of the traffic detected as fake.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There are certainly competition concerns about Google's advertising programs.
But within their advertising market, you compete for placement with other advertisers. If everyone is getting lots of fraud traffic, presumably they adjust their bids for it, if you're getting outbid consistently, it's reasonable to expect that the other advertisers are either getting a better ROI or they have a lower ROI target than you do.
About a million years ago, I was on a team that had a significant ad program, and it was primarily data driven, we'd come up with keywords to advertise on, measure the results and adjust our bids. With a little bit of manual work to filter out inappropriate keywords or to allow a lower ROI on "important" keywords. Of course, our revenue was largely also from advertising, so it was a bit circular.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#179Earlier 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.
When you talk to Google sales they want to know how much you make per customer, so theyre able to figure out exactly how much they could charge to take 80% of the margin. The cream on top is taken by Google in the form of fake bot clicks.
IF you have things right - which Google has incentive to see to it that you don't - this makes no difference. Because the real measure isn't how much you make per customer, (including those who come by other means) - it people who didn't click on the ad even though seeing it was a part of their decision to buy (they saw the ad on their phone and told their wife who bought it). If you are doing proper add effectiveness measurement you get this data (it is messy data).
Remember what matters is how the ad affects the bottom line. Everything else is just a proxy - you need to check to see if your proxies are good enough.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#180Hi 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 bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement
I've nicked that sentence to use as the title above, since it's more neutral and representative of what the article is about.