4 ms·

As someone who's built a few sites that relied on "buying traffic" to increase user growth, we always called it "buying traffic" and I don't really think it sou

by eric_h 9y ago

As someone who's built a few sites that relied on "buying traffic" to increase user growth, we always called it "buying traffic" and I don't really think it sounds all that bad. The problem is when you're paying per impression in advertising, as that's the easiest to game - the number of shitty impressions I've seen coming from small, not-well-known data centers has taught me that cost per impression is so prone to advertising fraud as to not be worth it.

soared 9y ago
Yeah, so blacklist that data center. You can't just spend money and assume everyone will give you a good deal. Optimize your campaign to buy good traffic.
- eric_h 9y ago
  > Yeah, so blacklist that data center. The most egregious fraudulent traffic came from at least a dozen different no-name data centers, and it was actually easier for us to cut out the fraudsters selling us the traffic than to blacklist the traffic itself (even though it was several steps away from the original source the traffic was purchased from). The traffic itself was actually rather easy to identify independently of its actual network source, because they were using Selenium locked to a specific, outdated version of Firefox that also happened to consistently throw some errors that our standard infrastructure monitoring caught and alerted us to. I still think that cost per impression is a difficult traffic source to properly verify (especially if you end up with a traffic source that is botting from compromised PCs) and as such should be treated with skepticism. Cost per conversion/install/etc. generally seem to be slightly less gameable (excluding, of course, the farms spread around economically disadvantaged areas where workers have hundreds of actual devices on which they are installing apps to game the cost per install ad traffic)
  - soared 9y ago
    Yeah cpa is less gameable for sure. I don't have any exposure to that.. I've only ever seen cpm. (Or cpm converterted to ecpa after the fact)
dingaling 9y ago
I guess I'm naive but how did you think that a "traffic provider" could, er, provide traffic? Go out in the street and give people $2 each to view the website?

by eric_h 9y ago

soared 9y ago

Yeah, so blacklist that data center. You can't just spend money and assume everyone will give you a good deal. Optimize your campaign to buy good traffic.

eric_h 9y ago
> Yeah, so blacklist that data center. The most egregious fraudulent traffic came from at least a dozen different no-name data centers, and it was actually easier for us to cut out the fraudsters selling us the traffic than to blacklist the traffic itself (even though it was several steps away from the original source the traffic was purchased from). The traffic itself was actually rather easy to identify independently of its actual network source, because they were using Selenium locked to a specific, outdated version of Firefox that also happened to consistently throw some errors that our standard infrastructure monitoring caught and alerted us to. I still think that cost per impression is a difficult traffic source to properly verify (especially if you end up with a traffic source that is botting from compromised PCs) and as such should be treated with skepticism. Cost per conversion/install/etc. generally seem to be slightly less gameable (excluding, of course, the farms spread around economically disadvantaged areas where workers have hundreds of actual devices on which they are installing apps to game the cost per install ad traffic)
- soared 9y ago
  Yeah cpa is less gameable for sure. I don't have any exposure to that.. I've only ever seen cpm. (Or cpm converterted to ecpa after the fact)

dingaling 9y ago

I guess I'm naive but how did you think that a "traffic provider" could, er, provide traffic? Go out in the street and give people $2 each to view the website?