31–40 of 312 posts
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 shopping experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal?
if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal? Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because fake sign ups are possible). But you’re right. Purchase conversions are one incentive
I'd love to have an agent that goes online whenever I'm running low on toilet paper or something, browses all the stores and clicks all the ads, and automatically orders the best deal it can find.
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…
This is so common, I find it strange to see a whole article framing it as a shocking phenomenon. Like, have you heard of PostHog?
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…
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.
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 (…
Despite the “LinkedIn influencer” writing style of the article, the results don’t seem that shocking or unexpected.
After we implemented advanced bot traffic detection and filtering, their reported traffic plummeted by 71%. [...]
But then the sales report came in. Their actual sales went up by 34%.
Their real conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts had been working all along, but the results were buried under an avalanche of fake clicks. They were not bad at marketing; they were just spending thousands of dollars advertising to robots programmed never to buy anything. Their marketing ROI went from "terrible" to "excellent" overnight.
Can you just tell e.g. Google Ads that you don't want to pay for certain clicks?
Did they modify their targeting to try to avoid bots?
After we implemented advanced bot traffic detection and filtering, their reported traffic plummeted by 71%. [...] But then the sales report came in. Their actual sales went up by 34%. Their real conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts had been working all along, but the results were buried under an avalanche of fake clicks. They were not bad at marketing; they were just spending thousands of dollars advertising to…
After we implemented advanced bot traffic detection and filtering, their reported traffic plummeted by 71%. [...] But then the sales report came in. Their actual sales went up by 34%. Their real conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts had been working all along, but the results were buried under an avalanche of fake clicks. They were not bad at marketing; they were just spending thousands of dollars advertising to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal? Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because fake sign ups are possible). But you’re right. Purchase conversions are one incentive
Next thing you know, the bots will learn how to purchase products, and we'll have come full circle. I'd love to have an agent that goes online whenever I'm running low on toilet paper or something, browses all the stores and clicks all the ads, and automatically orders the best deal it can find.
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…
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.