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Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

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Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#71

Post by brandnewlow »

hyperpape wrote: post #61
eli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPA simply doesn't make sense for all ad campaigns. When Lexus buys ads on a financial news site it's for branding -- they want to get their logo in front of their target demographic. The ads aren't optimized for clicks or leads -- sometimes there isn't even a clear call to action.

Yup, but then why bother with CPM? Just buy display ads for a fixed price in publications they believe their customers might read. Sure, it's not an improvement over what they did in the 50s but they don't have to worry about fraud.

Those ads are freakishly expensive. Like 10x more expensive than buying ads on FB/Google/Twitter.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#72

Post by brandnewlow »

shostack wrote: post #59
mianos wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also working in ad yield analytics, so while I wait for a DFP report to run, I'll also say, it's also in the network's interest to address this issue. In the meantime we'll just see more CPA line items and a drop in price for CPD and CPM. Being an auction, I'm sure Appnexus already sees this. When the issue is addressed we'll see a rise in CPM that reflects the increase in value with less bots. There is money in…

Just wait until cross-channel attribution (particularly dynamic attribution vs. fixed model which is more commonly available) really takes off. CPA-based buys are going to come under a LOT more scrutiny when Joe Advertiser suddenly realizes that his retargeting campaign didn't actually add a ton of value to the path for the vast majority of his conversions, especially if he's giving 100% credit to view-throughs.

It's funny how much business we've won just by making it easy for clients to take control over their view through attribution settings and counting.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#74

Post by shostack »

brandnewlow wrote: post #72
shostack wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until cross-channel attribution (particularly dynamic attribution vs. fixed model which is more commonly available) really takes off. CPA-based buys are going to come under a LOT more scrutiny when Joe Advertiser suddenly realizes that his retargeting campaign didn't actually add a ton of value to the path for the vast majority of his conversions, especially if he's giving 100% credit to view-throughs.

It's funny how much business we've won just by making it easy for clients to take control over their view through attribution settings and counting.

That's awesome that PerfectAudience does that, and more and more DSPs are definitely waking up to that as well which is great.

What do you do to help inform what the settings should be? Unless an advertiser has a solution like VisualIQ, Convertro, Adometry, etc. (and they've all been bought up so who knows what will happen to them), or GA Premium, they likely don't have a dynamic attribution solution in place to help inform them as to what those values should be and how they are shifting over time (because in reality those weights are anything but static).

I really wish DSPs did more in the way of thought leadership on how to properly value view-throughs and other ways of measuring contribution as view-throughs are the majority of what they drive, and that metric is coming under increasing scrutiny (as it should).

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#76

Post by sambrand »

eli wrote: post #37
arbuge wrote: post #20

I've been in the online advertising world for 10 years and it still befuddles me to see that most ad dollars still haven't switched to cost-per-action (CPA), i.e. only paying for actual conversions. One big benefit of advertising online after all is that tracking conversions and their referrers is much easier than with offline.

CPA simply doesn't make sense for all ad campaigns. When Lexus buys ads on a financial news site it's for branding -- they want to get their logo in front of their target demographic. The ads aren't optimized for clicks or leads -- sometimes there isn't even a clear call to action.

Also with CPA, if I'm a seller, I'm not going to sell to you unless I know your landing page converts. That's asking me to do a lot of due diligence or assume a lot of risk.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#77

Post by SixSigma »

> Do you hate how easy it is for your computer to become slow and riddled with malware?

No, I can't say I do. If such crime is so rampant, one would think it was ripe for law enforcement to do more about it. I wonder if reporting it to the police every time one visits a relative and removes crap from their computer would start a disruption.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#78

Post by andybak »

SixSigma wrote: post #77

> Do you hate how easy it is for your computer to become slow and riddled with malware? No, I can't say I do. If such crime is so rampant, one would think it was ripe for law enforcement to do more about it. I wonder if reporting it to the police every time one visits a relative and removes crap from their computer would start a disruption.

Do pop back here and let us know how that works out for you.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#79

Post by LeonD »

vinbreau wrote: post #3

I envision a future where a significant share of the advertising market is comprised of automated ad-bots pitching services and wares to automated web-crawlers. There's something obtusely philosophical about that and what it says about us, though I am not sure what that is.

That is already happening to an extent, except the wares being promoted are the ads themselves and they're being sold in sub-second auctions where the bidders are different algorithms operating on behalf of various companies.

Re: Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets

#80

Post by netrus »

ljk wrote: post #32
dangrossman wrote: post #23

Back in July, hundreds (thousands?) of sites noticed a surge in traffic in their analytics. Hundreds to thousands of additional visits per day above their normal traffic rates. Curiously, all this traffic identified as Internet Explorer 7 on various version of Windows, but each visit came from a different residential IP, and viewed only one page per session. Eventually the common thread between all these sites was id…

Maybe some kind of malware in the form of toolbars that sneaks into other downloads by the non-tech-savvy users?

There are a thousand more or less easy ways to pull this, but it is hard to stay unnoticed at this scale. You'd guess that every plugin/toolbox/freeware used by hundreds of thousands of people is running on some test-boxes/honeypots set up by security companies/browser-vendors.
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