Cue the "always has been" meme
Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
71–80 of 312 posts
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#72Earlier 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.
And imagine how much more you’d have to pay for each of those clicks if everyone could stop those fraudulent clicks. In equilibrium it shouldn’t change the total ad spend.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#73I 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" perform…
Google ads are often like paying someone to stand in front of your business and hand out flyers to everyone going inside.
Sure, a lot of your visitors were handed a flyer by google before they showed up in your store, but were any of them new customers?
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#74Hi 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.
Of course. It means you're being scammed by your advertising partner (Google).
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#75Hi 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
He idea of "reality" and how things work, even if the idea is "they work bad", is more important than any other argument or reality. That's true at personal level and even truer at any organizational level.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#76“I spoke to a startup founder who raised $2 million in funding based on "user growth" metrics that he later discovered were 80% bots. He is now trapped, forced to pretend everything is fine because admitting the truth could jeopardize his company and his relationship with his investors.”
If you feel trapped now, just wait until you're in prison!
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#77I remember reading an article years ago that argued with similar examples that the entire website ad market is almost entirely artificial/fraud/bots, but that a lot of jobs, a lot of companies, and basically the whole industry depends on simply pretending this is not true.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#78Would like to see the script. From reading it's impossible to tell if the methodology is sound. Would legitimate users with adblockers or disabling JS get counted is false positives, for example? That said, 73% doesn't come as a surprise. If anything I expect it to be higher. I guess this quote sums up the situation > When I tried to bring this up with a few major ad platforms, the conversation always followed a pred…
> One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."
Lawsuit time?
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#79I 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" perform…
Google ads are often like paying someone to stand in front of your business and hand out flyers to everyone going inside. Sure, a lot of your visitors were handed a flyer by google before they showed up in your store, but were any of them new customers?
It's worse, you're paying them so your competitor isn't standing in front of your store convincing them not to be your costumer.
You can either buy the top spot on queries that are looking for you or google will sell it to your competitor.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
50k to 47 conversions seems like a noticeable increase in fakeness to me at least. that's going from more than half fraud to essentially only fraud with a rounding error amount of real users
This is the ‘gold’ that agentic/generative AI really produces. For most consumers, it’s entertainment, but for industrial use it’s great for this kind of fraud. And very difficult to detect at scale, since the only cost effective tools for this kind of analysis are also ML/AI, and hence can be fooled more predictably/trained against.
> This is the ‘gold’ that agentic/generative AI really produces.
And here's me thinking it was producing a tonne more data scraping.