Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement • Hacker News Board

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#181

Post by bluGill » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #144

whistle650 wrote: post #62

Earlier 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?

At google I would expect no. However I don't understand why other "portals" are not running their own ads (some are of course - but I think more should). If you are a portal your value is the eyeballs you sell to advertisers, so why are you out soucing this critical part of your business value? This needs to be a core competency you keep in house.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#182

Post by dpoloncsak » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

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 work in e-commerce and completely believe this could be true. The 'Cart Abandonment Bot' is actually something we just had a meeting on today, trying to figure out what's going on here.

With that said, what do you think the error is here? Could your script have had some false positives? Enough to move the dial?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#183

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

wholinator2 wrote: post #142

PedroBatista wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#184

Post by bluGill » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

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?

They are not your problem. You paid $10k for 47 sales (that is the original example numbers) - is this a good value is the question you need to ask. If this is not good value then you don't advertise there at all, if it is you pay the price.

It is the ad network's problem because they are showing ads to all those bots which costs them. It is also the ad networks problem in that they are not effective - maybe for your $10k for 47 sales is good enough, but for most it isn't and so they lose customers who pay attention to value. It is also their problem in that by giving a false number of views they lose some face, but this is always a proxy that isn't of much value to anyone.

The more important thing that is your problem is verifying the ads are worth it. How do you know the ad resulted in 47 sales. A large number of adds should be buy this in the future not today, and thus clicks are the wrong measure.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#185

Post by dpoloncsak » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

jt2190 wrote: post #31

> This is the hidden bot economy. I still have to hear a compelling argument about why I should use computers “by hand” and ignore these powerful tools. Price checking, comparison shopping, buy when released for sale… All of these things point me to using bots. This feels a lot less like “fraud” and a lot more like “the world has moved on”. Maybe it’s time to route traffic that looks like bots to a bot-optimized shop…

I don't think anyone was arguing against those? The post seems mostly focused on bots that are being used to facilitate ad-fraud or manipulate rankings on marketplace sites with 3rd party vendors. I guess to check a price, you would need to scrape the site, but repeatedly adding and abandoning items, abusing referral systems....

That feels a lot more like 'fraud' than 'the world evolving'

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#186

Post by bluGill » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

rockskon wrote: post #169

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.

A properly informed market is a more efficient market. The online ad market is extremely inefficient because it has no idea how much ad spend is even reaching people.

You should have a good idea. How to know if an ad reaches people had been extensively studied for a lot longer than the internet even existed. Newspapers don't have clicks, but you still need to know if you ad works. Even on the internet, a large part of the value of ads are see the ad, buy latter without clicking on the ad. We can track this: do it.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#187

Post by bpicolo » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

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?

That would be reminder/retentive advertising, which is also an intentional outcome of many ads.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#188

Post by Kye » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

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

Makes me think of the recent thing where YouTube stopped counting views with ad blockers. The Linus Tech Tips people worked out they were still seeing the same ad impressions and revenue despite views dropping by half. Unfortunately, sponsorship deals are often sold on viewership and I'm not sure even LTT has the clout to convince them nothing is functionally different.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#189

Post by mapt » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

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

This is essentially fraud. Your company was made aware that it was selling a product with wildly different characteristics than advertised, and chose to cover it up.

There are defensible business reasons for this, in having a contract already in place at the old CPM, so being unable to double the CPM and half the views mid-contract... but still pretty much fraud.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#190

Post by 1718627440 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

What I don't get, why are there not some companies bypassing Google and Co. and just pay the website owners directly? That would save a bunch of money for both sides and I don't think placing some old-school GIFs is that much less annoying for the website visitors, so that it would be less effective.