The lies contained in advertising, now fueled by the lies about the viewership of advertising, prop up much of the modern economy.
Advertising: it's lies all the way down.
Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
241–250 of 312 posts
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#242I’m puzzled by this: I thought it was well-understood, at least in the industry, that traffic numbers were at least mostly nonsense, and that ad click metrics especially were suuuper shady, typically more than half fraud; yet OP, in the business of “accurate ad spend analytics”, only just discovered this!? It just doesn’t ring true. That aspect of the story isn’t novel at all, and someone in that line of work should…
This is well understood for well over a decade at this point -- the blogpost is a marketing effort by datacops.
Then it is securities fraud. Advertisers' shareholder money is being wasted in a process that is "well understood" to be lies, funneling money to tech industry.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#243I’m puzzled by this: I thought it was well-understood, at least in the industry, that traffic numbers were at least mostly nonsense, and that ad click metrics especially were suuuper shady, typically more than half fraud; yet OP, in the business of “accurate ad spend analytics”, only just discovered this!? It just doesn’t ring true. That aspect of the story isn’t novel at all, and someone in that line of work should…
OP is selling their own web analytics product, so take the article with a grain of salt.
I have no idea who OP is, but as someone who worked in the ad measurement pipeline, it tracks.
This is a thing that the R&D folks at my company had lots of evidence for, but since we wanted to partner with Meta and Google to be the measurement company of record for FB/Insta and YouTube CPG advertising, we weren't allowed to discuss.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#244I'm not a big fan of AI, but if it kills off online advertising and marketting, maybe there's a silver lining...
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#245It’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 ar…
The really ironic thing is that this article demonstrates the correct, purposeful human usage of these stock phrases and is getting skewered for it because it superficially sounds like AI. It's not exemplifying what it's criticizing, it's exemplifying the exact reverse of what it's criticizing.
"It's not X, it's Y" is for when you know your reader will think X, and you want them to understand the difference between the X they are expecting and the Y that is actually the case.
Here are the two "not just" passages in the article:
> Driven by this discrepancy, I built a simple tracking script. It was not a sophisticated piece of software, just a tool designed to observe how "users" actually interacted with the website. I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior.
> The bots operating today are disturbingly good. They are not just hitting your site and leaving; they are programmed to mimic engagement, making your marketing ROI calculations dangerously inaccurate. I began to categorize them.
Both of these passages are using the "not just X, but Y" trope in a purposeful, meaningful way, anticipating what a typical audience member might assume and signaling for them to adjust their expectation. Not just trying to maximize the usage of the trope with random non-sequitur values of X and Y, as GPT does.
(Oh dear, I just said it too.)
It would be interesting to assemble a corpus of meaningful human text with superficial use of AI tropes, put it side-by-side with true AI slop, and see who can tell the difference. I suspect that, in the coming years, this will be a test posed in higher education and job interviews.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#246Hi 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…
> developers, founders, or marketers
I'm none of those things, 10x or otherwise, and would be ashamed if I were. I do run a personal website, though, and most of the traffic is bots that ignore robots.txt. I wish those developers, founders, and marketers would stop doing that to me.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#247> 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?
They have atrocious FBA fees. Then there's etsy, overstock, wayfair, shopify, but nothing gives you the rush of showing that buybox I guess. It's like an optimization game for them at this point.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I don't think they would dare. I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.
Hopefully you would be talking about prison time for that sort of blatant fraud. But that might naive of me.
I think that prison would be an exceptional case. Typically, white collar criminals do not face justice for their crimes in the same way as common people.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. Why not use Microsoft Clarity? > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care.
That's like saying why not just live on the dole? Answer: pride, curiosity, inspiration, creativity, a sense of ownership, integrity, control, vision I can't believe these concepts are so foreign to so many.
Okay, well I'm asking the author why they developed their own analytics tool rather than using an industry standard hoping there's some reason beyond motivational phrases.
Like, asking if there's a real technical reason.
But, go off I guess.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#250Hi 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 do web analytics consulting. One of my first projects at a digital marketing agency in 2021 was investigating weird traffic patterns for a global logistics firm. The findings are summarized in this blog post[1].
Bot traffic has been an issue for years. It has given rise to a new cottage industry of ad fraud detection services, none of which I’ve found particularly valuable. It always comes down to “so what do we do about it?” and no one seems to know how to get bots to stop viewing or clicking on paid media placements. Consumers use Google search and are on FB, IG, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc., and there aren’t really competing ad networks with “fewer bots”. So they keep buying fake traffic knowing that a significant chunk of it is invalid.
I don’t see anything changing unless big tech companies making billions in ad revenue have a large enough incentive to do so. At the moment they have plenty of incentives to keep things as they are.
“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” - John Wanamaker
[1] https://jimalytics.com/industry/youre-buying-bots-an-inconve...