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Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

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Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#181

Post by marcosdumay »

axlee wrote: post #24
tpetry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. When the ad spent increases the sales person, manager etc. get a bonus. And you don‘t do anything to improve quality which would reduce ad spend.

What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.

> What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?)

Is that a sarcastic question? I guess the part about humans creating a rational system is a dead give-away.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#182

Post by aasasd »

NoGravitas wrote: post #159

Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that everyone enjoys for free.

What incentive will the site authors have to produce content and design suitable for self-respecting humans?

Time and again people fail to realize that if they install an adblocker, they remove themselves from the target audience and thus from influencing the content and quality of web pages.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#183

Post by from »

robertlagrant wrote: post #60

If they're getting decent ROI on their ad spend, what does it matter? TV ads were normally shown to empty rooms while their occupants went to make themselves a drink. Still worth buying.

Because diverting money from actual productive businesses that employ lots of people into the pockets of people who are going to spend the money on Lamborghinis is net bad for society? Why care about insurance fraud if insurance is still profitable? Someone is paying for fraud and it’s basically the rest of society in the form of higher costs.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#184

Post by ad_versary »

jefftk wrote: post #68
tjoff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So obviously it is better doing nothing since it benefits us??

Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the wrong, and running an online advertising business with a "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.

> I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.

Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device.

And of course, as you are in this industry, you know that Apple devices are the highest quality, valuable, converting clicks in the ecosystem.

Then again, PAT would diminish inventory, prices would rise, and people would get better, but nonetheless similar, ROI that they get today.

It is intellectually dishonest to make predictions about ROI. Nobody really knows. Bot farms, fraud, those are all red herrings. Most advertising has shitty creatives.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#186

Post by marcosdumay »

blfr wrote: post #75
londons_explore wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most online businesses have multiple ways to track conversions... It will become pretty obvious if Google says you sold 130 widgets but your warehouse guys only delivered 60.... Likewise, lots of businesses have a different landing page for people coming from an ad vs people from organic search and people coming from referral links/shared URL's. The business counts how many people visited each of those. They'll know…

The issue is not that you sold 60 widgets but Google tells you it was 130. The issue is that you sold 60 widgets with ads but you would have sold 59 widgets without ads: are you making sales because of ads or are you showing ads to your would-be customers.

That still perfectly solves the bot problem.

It doesn't the problem of optimizing your ads, but it's ok to only completely solve one problem and let the others on the same situation from the beginning.

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#187

Post by nonasktell »

doix wrote: post #175
nonasktell wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions. Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out there? WTF? How long ago was that?

I run wireguard on an OVH box that I've had for years as my VPN. I just checked and I still get Google ads. So it's not even automatic on the largest ads network out there. Personally, I'd love it if using a VPN meant that advertisers didn't even try serving ads to me, but unfortunately that's not the case.

I mean yeah but Google doesn't count those clicks for ad revenue at all

or maybe just on OVH or smaller provider,but AWS ips are definitely flagged for advertising

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#188

Post by marcosdumay »

ta8645 wrote: post #22
amelius wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: how do they know if you're playing fairly and tell them of the conversion? Also, do they get the customer's personal data that is involved in the purchase?

They don't. But if you don't pay them enough, ad-companies will stop sending you any customers at all, and instead put their efforts into catering to other higher-paying clients. So you are incentivized to make a good ad campaign that generates a lot of sales.

That would be the correct answer. The ad-companies are auction based, so they shouldn't have any problem with it.

But somehow, people report differently. (Personally, I haven't looked for a while, so I don't know.)

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#189

Post by jacooper »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #130

I’m going to ask the dumb question: if you had a newsletter or some online store that you wanted to promote, and you had at least some budget for ads, what actually works in terms of ads? All anyone talks about is how ads never work, but I know a couple of people who, for example, thrive on Facebook ads. Are they outliers then?

I have a similar question.

I am running a FOSS community in my local language. And we have a contest where we pay the best 5 articles in our forums every month.

We would like to market our contest but how can one market their website without supporting bigtech?(keep in mind, not in English)

Twitter is our biggest platform and the one we are going to try first, but that's big tech and not privacy friendly anyway?

Re: Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

#190

Post by aasasd »

londons_explore wrote: post #11

If you are paying any bill for ads, make sure you only pay for conversions . Ie. unless the customer actually buys your product, then don't pay anything. Eg. instead of paying $0.002 per view of your ad, or $0.10 per click of your ad, pay $6 per person who clicks your ad and then buys your product. That way, ad fraud doesn't affect you. Plenty of ad providers allow such an option. Internally, they convert your paymen…

Yeah, I long thought that these kinds of fraud are ultimately filtered by measuring the return. Paid to Zonama web shop to show your wares, but all visits are from people comparing prices with the in-house brand? Well drop the shop. Bought an ad campaign, see zero conversion? Why would anyone continue buying it.
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