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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#191

Post by bombcar »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #182
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?

Some sites won't give you the price or the shipping until you add to cart, but that shouldn't map to an automatic removal of item from cart (unless there IS a timer somewhere set to 4 minutes on the server side).

Strange that the item cost $47 and the number of sales was 47.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#193

Post by crdrost »

pmarreck wrote: post #177
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

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.

That is worse. Now you have a bunch of companies wondering why their engagement is falling over a whole year, some dude's getting fired for not doing his job, etc. etc.

The correct thing to do, probably, is to just provide the new data to the customer without changing what they were already looking at. So a new widget appears on their dashboard, "52% bot traffic", they click on that, and they see their familiar line chart of "impressions over time" broken down as a stacked line chart, bottom is "human impressions over time," top is "bot impressions over time," and the percentage that they were looking at is reported either above or beneath the graph for the same time intervals. Thus calling attention to the bottom graph, "human impressions over time," and they can ask your sales people "how do I get THAT number on my normal dashboard?" and they can hem and haw about how you have to upgrade to the Extended Analytics Experience tier for us to display that info and other business nonsense...

Point is, you stimulate curiosity with loud interference rather than quietly interfering with the status quo.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#194

Post by bombcar »

burnte wrote: post #159
KaiserPro wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale? I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?

> But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? I agree, I have a hard time understanding the motivation for this behavior. It's obviously happening, I just don't know how someone benefits from a bot pretending to browse the internet.

Isn't the idea that you run google ads on your site, and then have your botnet click the ads on your site, and you get paid for the traffic?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#195

Post by Gigachad »

Kye wrote: post #188
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

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.

YouTube didn’t stop counting views with ad blockers. It was one blocker extension that added the view counter api to the block list.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#196

Post by bombcar »

hermitcrab wrote: post #125
malfist wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very true. So you end up on paying for a lot of clicks from existing customers who type your product name into Google and click on the first thing that comes up, which is increasingly an ad. I used to advertise in Adwords on the name of my products, but I no longer bother.

The vast majority of people who search product name want product name not knockoff product similar - and so let the competitors buy the name for ads.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#197

Post by randunel »

KaiserPro wrote: post #156
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…

But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale? I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?

Scrape data and package+sell it, either on demand or pre scraped.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#198

Post by bombcar »

bestatsiege_01 wrote: post #129
jklinger410 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party analytics tools you can use to track the website. > if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic. These megacorps don't have VPNs? >…

With respect to: >> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic >Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense. I have only ever been a buyer; so my technical understanding of the back end implementation is incomplete. However, I think the point OP is trying to make is that the back end of the ad targeting infrastructure ends up attributing "spend" to fo…

> Depending on your digital property, a similar model may need to be applied to your digital campaigns. As I understand though, this is harder to do in modern times with digital ad's.

This is insanely important to do now, and the people who know how to successfully do it are old and retiring.

But nobody really wants to know the number of advertising dollars spent to get customers who were already going to spend on your product to ... spend on your product.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#199

Post by bombcar »

ttoinou wrote: post #166
jerf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The religion of Science is being taught all over the world and the only thing people can remember from that teaching is that Numbers are good, are true, are the only thing we should take into account and are computed by kind smart rational workers.

It's always important to remember: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

And what is advertising sold on but statistics, hmmm.

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