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I used to work at a AdTech company. At the start of a campaign, we would put a lot of work into getting the ad campaign to show up on a highly curated set of a
by Tistel 10y ago
I used to work at a AdTech company. At the start of a campaign, we would put a lot of work into getting the ad campaign to show up on a highly curated set of apps that had desirable user for the campaign (men like sports score apps, women like whatever). But, near the end of the campaign, if we were getting paid for X clicks (or horror of horrors, paid per conversion) and the campaign was not projected to pull off the deal, we had to open it open to a sea of garbage apps to hit the target.
There is so much fraud. There are apps out there that are known to be mostly bot users. I was trying to free up some drive space by removing art assets from campaigns that had ended months earlier. Several campaigns had the banner art turned off so there is nothing to click that were getting hundreds of clicks per day. There was just a bug in the click fraud bot that forgot to check if the art assets was still live that was just hitting the click URL blindly.
I skip all the ads too.
- snarf21 10y agoI think this is the real issue. Companies would rather reach 100 real, interested potential customers than 100K "users" that are all fraud and views on click farm pages. At the end of the day, it is about how many people come out of the bottom of the funnel and become customers, not simply the number dropped in the top. At this point, it is hard for ad tech to take this approach because customers have come to view clicks as almost worthless so they hope a few real people fall down through all the fraud. There is a huge opportunity for someone to disrupt this space but it will take a new approach. It is hard to evaluate context when a lot of the web is just crap and screen scrapes of other sites and they all look the same. I think companies would actually pay more for the right system if it really moved the bottom line.