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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

joindatacops.com

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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#211

Post by SoftTalker »

nurettin wrote: post #22

> 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 prod…

Why doesn't Amazon provide this information? They just can't be bothered, knowing that they are the biggest retail platform and sellers "have" to be there regardless of how bad the experience is for them?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#212

Post by pmarreck »

crdrost wrote: post #193
pmarreck wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair enough, although in that circumstance I think you'd have to mark the non-human traffic as "unverified traffic" to soften the blow

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#213

Post by aorloff »

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…

We are now at the point where plausibly some bots could be at the behest of an AI agent controlled by a human.

This is not likely to distort the basic numbers in your story, but it makes the premise questionable

If your script can correctly segregate bot traffic from human traffic, and website operators can conclude that bot traffic does not make purchases, then what -- you still don't want to blackhole that traffic right ?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#215

Post by harshreality »

cortesoft wrote: post #204
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 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 retai…

"Good bots" would be ones that fuel a healthy, competitive economy. Whether or not they're good from the perspective of a retailer, data about products and supply chains is important.

"Bad bots" would be ones that primarily support grift. They siphon money from advertisers, or get other people to waste advertising $, or game product listing metrics so that the bots' owners products get better placement, or so that other manufacturers' products get worse placement. They're not creating any new value; they're removing value from the economy by causing bad allocation of resources.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#216

Post by dgfl »

It’s interesting that this matches _exactly_ the ChatGPT writing style. There’s clearly some human data and work behind, but the entire article has the usual “it’s not just X, it’s …”, bold emphasis on specific words, bullet points, and probably more that I’m just subconsciously picking up.

Nothing wrong with using ChatGPT for help of course, I just found it interesting and kind of ironic given the contents of the article. It would be even more interesting if this was the actual writing style of the author, since this must be what ChatGPT was fine tuned to adhere to. Is it the predominant style of communication in adtech?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#217

Post by criddell »

lurk2 wrote: post #175
criddell wrote: post #34

Earlier 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 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.

Billboard rates are based on impressions too. A billboard along a busy road is more expensive than one out in the sticks.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#219

Post by awongh »

brazukadev wrote: post #57
awongh wrote: post #27

I 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 (…

> You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely) Unlikely?

The distinction is between Google looking the other way if AdSense publishers are making them money, and Google generating their own fake traffic on their own search intent inventory.

I'd say it's unlikely they are generating fake clicks on search ads.

Mainly because they just don't need to in order to make money. They can still just charge you for impressions on searches that aren't the most well matched. No need to create fake traffic like this blog post conspiracy says.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#220

Post by georgel »

satisfice wrote: post #200

Did I understand you to say that you created a script that watches how random visitors move their mice and scroll? WTF? I’m pretty sure that’s either impossible or you have access to pretty scary malware.

There are tons of tools that collect stuff like this, hotjar.com has been a thing for over a decade.
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