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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

#61

Post by sanex »

kijin wrote: post #53
sanex wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting. Drive ad value to zero or force them to start blocking crappy traffic. I think the issue is this could take us down the device attestation drm for the web path to discern legitimate traffic which is bad for the open web.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#62

Post by whistle650 »

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.

This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a competitive market. If they don’t deliver the ROI because of bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an e-commerce site is profitable (enough) after the ad spend, period. If they are not, why do they spend what they spend on the ads?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#63

Post by dangus »

paulcole wrote: post #54
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.

> 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.

The point is, if $10k brings in 47 sales and that’s not enough then you stop buying those ads. It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. You take your marketing spend elsewhere.

You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom. How much of ESPN’s viewership happens at bars where nobody is watching?

At some point it’s not reasonable to expect ad networks to be able to stop sophisticated bots or exclude them from your billed impressions.

They should definitely try to minimize it if they want to maintain the value of their impressions but I think there is a good argument that OP just isn’t the right customer for this type of advertisement.

If you’re trying to sell a t-shirt you don’t hire a salesperson to cold call people, maybe OP shouldn’t be using web ads in the first place. If fraud was cut down by half would their situation really be that much better?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#64

Post by zurfer »

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.

Yes it matters because Google ad spend is just one way to market and it's harder to attribute sales if there is a lot of fraud making it more inefficient.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#65

Post by mschuster91 »

viraptor wrote: post #14
sixthDot wrote: post #8

What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly, bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that in 2025".

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…

At that point, why not join forces with other clinics, remove the middleman and purchase directly from vendors?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#66

Post by zdragnar »

chrismorgan wrote: post #17

I’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…

The last startup I worked at invested a ton of money- much of their marketing team's time plus a good chunk of development time for a few months- trying to "fix the funnel" in terms of conversions from these so-called leads.

They had plenty of other problems, including an unworkable business plan, but maybe they would have had more time to pivot before selling out for pennies if they'd not been chasing their tail so much.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#67

Post by emacdona »

I'm not sure... but... maybe in this one single instance, I'm rooting for the bots.

I mean, it's burning ad dollars and causing advertisers to rethink their strategy. Who knows, maybe that will eventually lead to the realization that web pages that are 20% content and 80% ads are just luring bots and not customers.

On the other hand, the money being burnt is going to Google, Meta, etc... and helping fund massive surveillance infrastructure. To be honest, I'd prefer it if it all just went to shareholders. Heh, maybe that'll be the sign that we've hit peak surveillance infrastructure: Google and Meta dividend payments go up :-)

But I have trouble sympathizing with someone who writes this:

> Mouse Movements: Did the cursor move in natural, human-like arcs, or did it snap between points?

> Scrolling Patterns: Was the scrolling speed variable, with pauses and upward scrolls, or was it a perfectly smooth, mechanical glide?

> Time Between Interactions: How long did a "user" wait between clicking a link, hovering over an image, or adding an item to the cart?

I read that as: "We're tracking every movement, every hesitation... so that we can feed it to our models and determine how best to keep you addicted".

I knew it was happening, and I know I'm editorializing there... but they are getting closer and closer to just coming out and saying it.

edit: Added newlines in quoted part.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#68

Post by seviu »

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 once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry.

We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%.

In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

Bots are real people after all

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#69

Post by vmaurin »

I did work in the ad tech industry for almost 15y and big corp like Google/FB scam their user:

- they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers

- if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range

- and for most of the traffic they might send you, they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic. So they get this "amazing" performance by claiming people that would have bought on your site anyway

I have seen and been working in companies trying do to the impact metrics well, but these are outliers

- websites showing ads are annoying their user and get no benefit of it

- stores/brands/people that want to advert pays a bug chunk of money for nothing - only the middle men are getting benefits

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#70

Post by boringg »

chrismorgan wrote: post #17

I’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.
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