We ran into this problem when running ads for an iOS App only to iOS traffic. Somehow 80% of our iOS only targeted traffic clickthrough was Android... Went to UGC and never looked back.
What’s ugc?
Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
51–60 of 312 posts
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#52Would be great if more data were made available by OP to peer review some of this. That said, making money with failure starts looking like a business model - highly unethical. Why make customers succeed when you loose money doing so.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
By clicking on all the ads you're raising prices in the long run and just funneling money to google and meta, forcing the toilet paper companies to make scratchier tp to try and squeeze out more margin. My bhole would thank you for not doing this.
Or maybe if everyone does it, market forces will suppress the cost per click and we'll be back to square zero.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#54Hi 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.
> Does it really matter if it's all fraud
Uh, yes.
If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent clicks.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#55> This is the hidden bot economy. 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 shop…
So are you saying it needs a an agent.txt along the robots.txt?
I’m just the idea guy… I’ll let the market decide on the exact implementation. ;-) (That’s not a bad idea BTW.)
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#56Who is profiting from the ad fraud?
Site owners and ad market places?
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#57I 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?
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#58Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#59Hi 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.
I was about to say something similar to this.
You aren’t paying for conversion rate, you are paying for a link being put on a website when a query is made. You can’t control whether a bot follows that link. You can’t control how sophisticated that bot is. You can’t expect an advertiser to filter out every type of illegitimate traffic (although it sounds like they probably have the capability to filter out more but don’t have any incentive to do so).
I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to not bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad services. It’s basically like paying for a cold lead, you’re attracting one of the least interested types of customers.
The recommendation I’ve always seen is that it’s better to build legitimate interest in your product by producing content. Or perhaps move to an advertising platform where there’s more of a guarantee of reaching human users.
But still, I’ve heard that trying to spend customer acquisition dollars on one-time purchases is a losing battle.
If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without buying ads you can go without AdWords, too.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#60I’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…
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