Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

Post by sanex » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 12:38 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #32

curiousObject wrote: post #18

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.

Post by weird-eye-issue » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 12:40 PM UTC

nemomarx wrote: post #37

shiftingleft wrote: post #36

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…

I assume it's the filtering - detect the user is a bot, don't even load the ads, etc?

Post by viraptor » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 12:40 PM UTC

Closi wrote: post #25

viraptor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, their list of recommendations could use another point: expose the public data in a simple, structured way. I'm working right now on an inventory management system for a clinic which would really benefit from pulling the prices and availability from a very specialised online shop. I wish I could just get a large, fully cached status of all items in a json/CSV/whatever format. But they're extremely not interested…

The counterpoint is 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'? Sure you might be willing to build the bot to scrape it... but some other competitors won't go to this effort so it still means a bit of information asymmetry and stops some of your competitors poaching customers / employing various marketing tactics to exploit short term shortages or pricing charges etc.

Post by shiftingleft » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 12:43 PM UTC

V__ wrote: post #38

shiftingleft wrote: post #36

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…

I could imagine that blocking bot traffic, would improve their retargeting and make sure that the retargeting budget is spent on real people leading to an increase in conversion.

Post by boplicity » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 12:49 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #34

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…

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.