This is what frustrated me when I worked in e-commerce. They are blessed with the highest-quality signal ever – the purchase – but it's generated very rarely for anyone who is not Alibaba or Amazon.
Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
201–210 of 312 posts
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#202Earlier 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.
I think the way it goes is more "What is true? It's that if I bury this truth, I will have more money."
Interestingly, I think money is increasingly its own falsehood now. A lot of rich people are finding that they pay a lot to get what's basically a scam, like Sam Altman's swimming pool that leaked and ruined the rest of the house [1]. There's a reason that Billionaire's Bunker [2] is entering the cultural zeitgeist despite fairly terrible plotting, dialogue, and acting.
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/17/sam-altman-infinity-pool-mans...
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#203Hi 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…
> It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants to talk about because the whole system is propped up by it.
I was never really a punk-rebel kid, but a certain part of me rooted in the optimism of the early-internet kinda wants to see ad-models crash and burn.
Even advertising "working normally" always had a psychic odor of exploitation and deceit. Ex: "You absolutely need this product or else your peers will hate you."
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#204Hi 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 find it really interesting when you describe “good bot” traffic.
> During my investigation, a source from the e-commerce data industry provided a crucial piece of the puzzle. He explained that his former company was responsible for scraping 70 million retailer web pages every single day. This is a legitimate and massive source of automated traffic.
> Why do they do this? For vital business intelligence. Major retailers like Amazon do not always notify vendors when they run out of stock. So, brands pay for data scraping services to monitor their own products. These "good bots" check inventory levels, see who is winning the "buy box," ensure product descriptions are correct, and track search result rankings. They even scrape from different locations and mobile device profiles to analyze what banner ads are being shown to different audiences.
I think a lot of the players involved in this would say those are bad bots. Having your competitors scrape your site for data would probably be something most website owners wouldn’t like, but getting data about THEIR competitors would be something they WOULD like.
All bot traffic is good from SOMEONE’S perspective, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. Someone had to program the bot, someone has to be running it. They obviously think they are good bots.
The people running AI scraping bots think they are good bots. Many content creators think those are bad bots. Price comparison sites scraping retailers think their bots are good. The sites being scraped often think they are bad bots.
I just don’t think we can clearly separate good and bad bot traffic without specifying whose perspective we are talking about.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#205Interesting. You didn’t give specifics on what anti-bot measures sites implemented, so I’ll add: Bot prevention measures can be good, but the more hoops you make your users jump though (CAPTCHA etc), the more legitimate users will drop off. Those have significant impacts on conversion rates. I would think fixing this should involve the analytics and attribution side rather than adding friction to your e commerce flow…
There are two kinds of bots - one that the very act of them futzing with your site is degrading performance (think AI bot DDoS), and the other that is annoying but not harming you directly.
The second is best "blocked" by doing nothing at all and instead silently dropping them from analytics.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#206[dead]
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#207I remember reading an article years ago that argued with similar examples that the entire website ad market is almost entirely artificial/fraud/bots, but that a lot of jobs, a lot of companies, and basically the whole industry depends on simply pretending this is not true.
I remember that article as well. Initially I could have sworn this was a repost, but it's got a current date. There might be some Mandela effect at work.
We may have all collectively hallucinated it, but I've felt the advertising market has been bullshit for quite a while.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never intentionally clicked on an ad, ever. I've accidentally clicked a few, due to tricks or fat fingers.
Did you read the article? If so, you clicked on an ad. This blog post was an ad for datacops.
No, of course I've read longer form posts and then realized they were just there for product placement, or affilate links, etc.
I don't click display ads or links to Amazon or YouTube listings, etc. If I want to buy something I try to go directly to the manufacture's site and search for it there. If I have to go to a third party sales platform I'll go there and search for the thing I want.
I rarely click on YouTube recommedations, because they are more and more just AI slop. I subscribe to people whose content is interesting, and that's the vast majority of what I watch.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I mean it would rock the US economy as it would involve the largest companies.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#210I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to marketing and business influencers. Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked" enough to look real. Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from your traffic being fake? You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (…
It is the website owners that commit click fraud. It has been that way for the last 25 years. I mean the first thing I did as a kid was checking what will happen if I keep clicking on ad on my newly created homepage. > just name them Does Adsense even gives you information where exactly your ad is getting published?
I can see doing it just to verify that the ads being shown on my site are not leading to anything I don't want to be associated with, e.g. porn, shock/tabloid content, politics, etc.