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Ad Fraud on LinkedIn

488 points by sbachman 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago
I deleted my LinkedIn account because it attracted an endless number of bad business partners. I got sick and tired of all the "Joe Blow"(s) on LinkedIn who claim to be "Joe Blow Inc." (I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one person.) I've certainly found work on LinkedIn, but my experience is that for other kinds of sales and networking it is a terrible time sink. Based on the intense level of BS I can't imagine that advertising would have really worked there.
- pixl97 6y ago
  >I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one person. No, it is the limited liability. Don't want to lose your house because of a bad business deal.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Exactly - although most jurisdictions do require that a corporation have more than one person involved; in the UK you can have a corporation with one director but it must have a secretary as well.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I think that has changed - I believe single person companies are possible now: https://www.qualitycompanyformations.co.uk/blog/can-you-set-up-a-limited-company-with-one-person/ https://www.qualitycompanyformations.co.uk/blog/can-you-set-...
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      When I was contracting a lot of my peers got forced into having a limited company as their clients didn't want to be deemed their employer.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        When it comes to both taxes (in the UK you can be more tax efficient than trading as a sole trader) and limited liability, why wouldn't you want to have a limited company?
        fakedang 6y ago
        Considering all the new developments in the UK, all at the expense of the employee, there's a real business opportunity for someone who can help workers incorporate themselves as contractors under their individual limited companies. Especially when companieshouse has as much oversight on the database as I know about isolated Renshaw flux oscillation signatures.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      In india, they added OPC (one person company) which is an extension of limited liability for individuals. I think it's becoming quite common across countries.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    And then there's the Middle East, where one bad deal or going bankrupt means straight to jail.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  What works in your experience?
ffpip 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200908115120/https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200908115120/https://www.samue...
- Scandiravian 6y ago
  Thank you and well played (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193) For future people getting here - the site went down. Most likely from the massive attention from this post.
marcinzm 6y ago
Hard to know how much is ad fraud and how much is people just not being interested in what is being advertised. Don't see why I should care about yet another webinar especially if I'm already a successful CEO and get five thousand webinar requests a day. Might click for more info but then after 10 seconds on the page (and seeing it's more BS) I'll probably bail. Same as this quote: >“You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing. No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail. edit: Also at only 11 clicks, the metrics are pure noise. Sure they each cost $45 but it's still only 11 clicks. Can't even blame the CPC estimation for being off at such a low number.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  > No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail. Exactly. Even if I was thinking about requesting a demo when I clicked the ad, I then want to see a lot of information on the target site before proceeding. I'm not going to sign up for a demo unless I think there's a pretty good chance I'll want to buy. Most vendor websites don't provide nearly enough information for me to make that judgment. As someone who doesn't consider talking to sales people to be a recreational activity, that leaves me with little choice but to bail.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Same. I hate when I need to get on a call to just get pricing for something, or even worse, to just renew a yearly subscription. Plus this was analytics software which is a dime a dozen nowadays. So you need to make your value proposition known very well and very quickly. Even then you'll get a very low conversion rate unless you've done a very good branding campaign to get your name out there.
  - smnscu 6y ago
    No, thanks. Unless the person giving me the demo is the CEO, their entire salary and taxes are being taken out of my price, and it's most likely not the kind of company I want to do business with.
LeonM 6y ago
I advertised on LI about a year ago. I had reasonable success (in terms of new leads/signups). Here is what I remember from the experience. I found that the interface for managing ads was terribly buggy and shouldn't even be considered production ready. One bug that I remember is that it wasn't possible to remove ads, and the button to suspend an add didn't work most of the time. In typical LI fashion the interface was full of dark patterns, it was really tricky to limit the expenses. In the blink of an eye you could be spending hundreds of USD per day. Analytics were somewhat available, but basically useless. For no reason the CPC could jump to dollars per click, and no way to discover why. Advertising, especially for a tech SaaS, is hard. The tools available are usually terrible to use, expensive and often shady. In my experience, doing advertisements is one of the worst parts of starting a new service.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Sounds like a feature, not a bug, to me.
- mathattack 6y ago
  Strange. I always thought the reason they weren’t improving the Consumer end user GUI was because they focused monetization on Enterprise. I guess it was crap all around. (Perhaps they under invest because they have such a defensible position as the one place for online resumes)
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    Their Sales Navigator offering is utter crap, too. Borderline useless. I canceled after about a year because changes to the free version made it sufficient for my use. As a further warning, don't even consider utilizing the LinkedIn platform as a creator or community builder. For example, I manage some popular groups, and one day LinkedIn decided that I send too many messages by welcoming new members. Even though their documentation still stated that group managers could message their members without limit, my account kept getting suspended. What did their support tell me? (and I was still paying $100/month at the time) "If you keep sending messages, then you risk being permanently banned." Creating value on the platform, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users, has no weight at LinkedIn.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> “You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing. This guy is deluded. People click random things to get more info, and they might not have liked the more info they got so didn’t go ahead with the demo.
- dgellow 6y ago
  I stopped reading the content of marketing websites ages ago, I just click on whatever is big and orange or other flashy colors until I see something that looks like a list of features, or whatever I'm looking for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to be the only one to have this marketing blindness. I guess I'm a bot based on my behaviour?
  - jabroni_salad 6y ago
    If the landing page has a bunch of soft stuff like 'expands synergy' on it I am just going to assume I was not the target audience. I'm not a CEO, I'm a practitioner. Put something crunchy in there. Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      > Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao Ad nauseam did exactly this until the extension was banned from chrome store: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
      - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
        It still does exactly this for me because it is not banned from the internet (yet).
      - ffpip 6y ago
        If anybody is considering using this for privacy reasons don't. If you want to piss off as dev or act like a bot, only then use it.
motohagiography 6y ago
I lost a couple of thousand dollars using their services (literally 5x my ad budget) because they "refill" your ad account based on the ceiling you intend to spend - without an email notification or other notification in your main profile. It cycled through my ~$300 ad budget and charged me that amount multiple times before I caught it on my bill. Never received the refund they said they'd send either. People say that half of all advertising dollars are wasted, you just don't know which half, but this company has perfected it to 5-10x what you mean to spend on advertising is wasted, and you don't know until they've taken it from you and then shown you the fine print. In short, avoid.
- chinathrow 6y ago
  Perfect for small claims court if you are US based.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Or a chargeback for that matter.
    - penagwin 6y ago
      I was going to say - it's a lot easier to not let them take your money (even retroactively) - then it is to get it back through small claims court.
    - Archit3ch 6y ago
      If they advertise increased click-through rate and they increase it, what stops them from claiming they fulfilled their end of the bargain? It could even be click bots.
      - user5994461 6y ago
        Fraud is not a valid way to fulfill your end of a contract ;)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Getting tons of applicants doesn’t help you if they don’t have the skills or skill level you need.
mgav 6y ago
A pay-for-performance model (e.g. pay per sale) eliminates all the risk for advertisers. Does this exist anywhere, aside from affiliate deals? I'd be happy to pay 50% for each digital product sale, since those are 96% profit.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  You just described affiliate marketing. For example, sponsored content on YouTube => https://youtu.be/kUFWalEf31w?t=572 https://youtu.be/kUFWalEf31w?t=572
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yeah, but affiliate marketing is a pretty raw deal for the person doing it because they carry all risk. It's just a job working in sales for other companies but without benefits. There needs to be some adjustment for "your marketing/product is shit and will therefore be much harder to sell."
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  >I'd be happy to pay 50% for each digital product sale You will have to when the advertising network figures out the value of a sale.
- Macha 6y ago
  Adtech companies don't really want to be held responsible for the effectiveness of your advertisement or the conversion rate of your landing page. When such models exist (called CPA or cost-per-action usually), there's a significant premium attached for that risk. Most advertisers don't want to pay that premium.
- summerlight 6y ago
  https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7528254 https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7528254 Google has a such product but I think it is nowhere close to the majority of ad spending. A part of the reasons is that it needs campaigns' conversion volumes to be above a certain threshold (so their model has a reasonable amount of training data) while advertisers may exploit the system by not reporting legitimate conversions. So Google requires them to be eligible by some unknown criteria.
baobabKoodaa 6y ago
> Error establishing a database connection Based on the title I'm guessing this could have been delivered as a static web page delivered by a CDN. I've never understood why some people want to set up their own web servers to deliver static content.
- s_dev 6y ago
  >I've never understood why some people want to set up their own web servers to deliver static content. I've a Digital Ocean droplet running several static sites for €5 a month. Whats the problem?
  - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
    The problem is that this website is down and no-one can access its content. This problem would not exist if the author had simply released their static content on a CDN. Your 5€ DO droplet is not helping me access this content.
- Macha 6y ago
  Don't know if it's a personal site or not, it sounds like it is. But at least my case is that a VPS provider provides a hard stop to spend. Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill. That said, I've topped HN before and nginx happily handled that load on a 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM host with a static site. A lot of these personal site meltdowns are Wordpress with no caching plugins.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    > Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill. The last time an article on my site reached the top of HN, my AWS bill was a couple of dollars for the month, across S3, Cloudfront, Athena and SNS. I get the concern that you'll spend more than you intended with AWS, but it's honestly hard to blow a budget on a static site hosted in S3 and served by Cloudfront. Those two services have heavy guard rails on what you can accidentally commit to doing, unlike the myriad compute services.
ramon 6y ago
Facebook gives you better returns as well as Google Ads, Linkedin was not a good convertion rate at all and they don't really care about it so yes you're correct about the statement of "Money Pit" it's because we're used to Facebook and Google conversions that we expect the same from Linkedin and actually it's different platforms with different goals and objectives, not sure why you should expect the same "money's worth" on every platform out there each one has a different objetive and different users that's how it works they're different.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
I can't read the source article (site is down) but judging from the header I'm kinda glad LinkedIn is not selling many ads. The last years it's become an even more fake stream of glossy PR marketing crap filled with stock photos of smiling faces, and people commenting how much they adore the company line. I get enough of all that on the company's own sites, thank you. I get that people don't want to be critical in public, but you don't have to repost every piece of marketing BS that comes your way :) Especially when I know some of these people tell a completely different story in person. And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. There's constantly people bothering me with their 'services' which are totally not relevant to my role if they'd even bothered to glance at my profile. I wish I could report them somehow. The only reason I still have it is because it's almost impossible to get a job without it :) Because the business world loves it. But it's more fake than FaceBook now. Everyone is one successful talented employee who is completely in line with the corporate hive mind.
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  I don't really use LinkedIn that much, so this confuses me: > And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. Do you mean simply having an account? Or are there now fees for, e.g. avoiding recruiters? I thought that the business model of LinkedIn had only companies/recruiters pay to reach (free) users.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    No, having an account is free. But many features are behind a paywall now, like seeing who is visiting your profile. It used to be it was only not shown if you were browsing privately youself, but recently it changed and you can only see the first two. Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option. Especially lately I get a lot of spam from SAP related businesses even though I don't work with ERP systems nor have I ever done so. It's super annoying. If it was even remotely related to my work it would be much less so.
glutamate 6y ago
I don't know anything about LinkedIn ads, but I watched some of the video that this post is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM It sounds like they are moaning that their client side rendered React-based landing page had a lot of bounces which they don't believe because client side rendered react pages are known to be "very very fast" and "some of the very fastest available technology". (This is around the 15:30 mark) That's baloney, client side rendered JavaScript landing pages are much slower than server-side rendered.
- _jal 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure I'm a bot to a lot of these sites - JS is disabled by default, selectively enabled sometimes. When greeted by a blank page, I frequently "react" by just going elsewhere.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    App Annie actually banned me once when I logged with javascript disabled and privacy badger installed. I had to contact their customer support, and they just said to disable my extensions and don't do it again otherwise I'll be banned permanently. I don't use their service anymore.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  They also tacitly claimed that 1.3 seconds isn't enough time for their pages to render.
- _fat_santa 6y ago
  I was about to comment the same thing. They talked about how it's a progressive web app: good, built in react: good, client side rendered: no no no why! As a general rule, Web "apps" should be client rendered (think FB, Twitter, Gmail, etc), Web "sites" should be server rendered. I wish React made it more clear what the difference between the two is and why you should use one versus the other. I know frameworks like Next and Gatsby do it but I wish it was a more ingrained part of React.
- 6y ago
josefrichter 6y ago
LinkedIn is the weirdest product ever. Everybody is there, nobody is using it for anything. Except shady recruiters.
- 3np 6y ago
  I actually do have several friends and other people in my network (some quite accomplished professionally) who are very active on LinkedIn, and there's not much shady about them. But yes, it's weird.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Well, that and colleagues of mine from over in the the marketing and sales departments, who can't understand why it takes me an average of 2 months to get around to accepting their connection requests.
- treis 6y ago
  Lots of people use it. The feed aspect of it is useless. But in terms of a network it's great. I've found 2 out of my last 3 jobs there. Assume it's also great for organic marketing as well where you target associates of your current clients.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    So it's a digital rolodex. That's not terribly impressive for the weight of the name.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > it's a digital rolodex. That's not terribly impressive for the weight of the name. It's an automatically-updating and linked rolodex. Rolodexes tell you that you know X. They don't say who X knows.
- mcv 6y ago
  Not just shady ones. I notice a lot of legitimate recruiters find me on LinkedIn and it leads to real work for me. I personally avoid it like the plague, but I do keep my CV up to date there. (Actually it's out of date right now, but I'll update it when I start looking again.)
ajimix 6y ago
it's pretty easy to click on competitors ads with bots to run out competitors credit and then run your ads for the rest of the day for cheap prices. But the same happens with Google adwords. I guess they don't have any way to prevent it
chungalunga 6y ago
I’ve never used LinkedIn, do they have any real competitors or is this just a monopoly being a monopoly?
baybal2 6y ago
> LinkedIn Ads network is likely awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic Just like every single other adnet? The very fact of massive adfraud groups allegedly specialising on one or another net means that they must be making money somehow. By the definition, those guy must be one step ahead of the adnet, or they don't make money, and fizzle in a few months. My impression is that there are groups which have consistently defeated all, and every bot detection method the entirety of ad industry threw on them.
socrates1998 6y ago
LinkedIn is one of those things you have and probably only use when you need a job or are desperate for clients. No one is there to get decent information or to genuinely connect with people. It's the digital equivalent of the super fake networking seminars people go to. Everyone is a seller and on one is a buyer. Makes sense that their ad network is sketchy and buggy.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  I deleted my LinkedIn two weeks ago.
- gk1 6y ago
  I know plenty of technical founders who are quite active on LinkedIn. Without disclosing any names, I can assure you they are not looking for new jobs or desperate for anything. At one point I was convinced that everybody is leaving FB just because I and a few people I knew were leaving FB. Years later it's still a dominant social network. Beware of confirmation bias and the firehouse effect[0]. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-marty-o-connell-calls-this-the-firehouse-effect-he https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-mart...
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    I know several very active founders on LinkedIn as well, but it’s clear that they’re all using LI for the intended purpose: Building their personal brand and business network. They may not be actively looking for jobs or desperate for clients, but they are working the system to elevate their own status. It’s possible to find halfway decent content on LI, but it takes a lot of work to filter out the fluff. Even then, you have to be honest about why people are doing it in the first place: Networking and brand building. No busy founder is going to frequently take time away from their growing business to write LI content without expectation of personal or business gain. That’s not to say you can’t find diamonds in the rough, but you need to be realistic about the context to separate it from the brand building.
    - 6y ago
jwr 6y ago
B2B SaaS founder here. I had exactly the same experience. I built my own code for tracking signups, and discovered that the actual conversions were a big fat zero. That's when I stopped burning money on LinkedIn ads. Mind you, this experience wasn't much different for other ad networks. Quora was slightly better in that at least there seemed to be some interest shown by people landing (or perhaps this was the only ad site that sent actual people my way?).
rdslw 6y ago
I dont agree with bowdlerization happening on Hacker News, wrt legitimate titles. This is effectively censorship @dang (I'm addressing it to you because you speak most often here, and set the tone, not because you personally did it. ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation I do understand that having less clickbaity _content_ is noble goal (and reason we read HN), but let US do our job in giving upvotes to good topic or flaging bad ones, while having ORIGINAL titles author of the post intended, not the one the censor considers proper.
- dang 6y ago
  The problem is that a title on HN's front page doesn't just represent what the author believes. It also represents what "HN" believes, to some extent. Of course, HN doesn't exist as a person and doesn't believe anything at all, but that doesn't matter, because people receive those titles as if it does. So there are multiple ways that a title can be misleading and we have to balance them. Upvotes alone don't solve this. On the contrary: indignation routinely gets the most upvotes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not—people just upvote angry shit more than they upvote anything else. If we don't want the front page to be all-angry and mostly-false all day, then moderators have to intervene. Is that censorship? That's up to you—people use that word to mean whatever sort of intervention they don't like. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
GhostVII 6y ago
I know nothing about advertising, but does it really matter if you are getting bot traffic if you are still getting conversions from the ads? If you know that for every $10 you spend on LinkedIn ads, you get 1 person to sign up for your service, then it doesn't matter how many mistaken clicks or bots clicked on the ad since click through isn't the main metric you are using. Isn't that why websites have so much tracking? So they can attribute an ad to a conversion rather than just looking at the number of clicks?
michaelbuckbee 6y ago
I don't quite understand the economics of the ad fraud on the closed (on site) LinkedIn ads. How does a third party (not LinkedIn, and not the advertiser) make money from this?
- topkai22 6y ago
  I don't think they are intending to make money on the clicks itself, but having a bot click on ads would seem to make it appear more "real" and less likely to get discovered.
gk1 6y ago
Sooo, I've spent hundreds of thousands on LinkedIn Ads on behalf of clients. Here is my take: Ad platforms work in varying degrees for different products and companies. You should not dismiss an ad platform based on poor performance alone without understanding why it performed poorly. It's sort of like with airlines: If you boycott an airline for every minor offense, pretty soon you'll have no option but to take the train. In this case, it's disingenuous to paint an entire ad platform--that does hundreds of millions in revenue[1]--as "awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic" based on a campaign that ran for just 1.5 days and resulted in 11 clicks. (They say they saw similar results from larger campaigns, but they don't show them.) But Ok, let's say we take out the generalizations. I get that it's disconcerting for any company to find they were charged for traffic that bounced within a second. In that case you need to look for the root cause, and see if it can be resolved or worked around. In this case the root cause should be painfully obvious to experienced marketers like the authors: Most of the 11 clicks seems to be from mobile traffic (as seen in their Fullstory report), where it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. They do mention this possibility in both the video and the title, but they seem to underestimate the likelihood of this being the root cause, and talk too much about bots instead. I've seen this exact misclick behavior in Twitter and for that reason I stopped advertising there. Unlike Twitter, however, LinkedIn lets you work around this. They offer a "lead gen" campaign type, which requires two clicks (one on the ad, and one more on the "submit form" button) and sharing of contact information before the advertiser is charged. I've still seen funky results from this--such as users saying they don't recall submitting any form--but in much fewer cases than with simple image ads. Today, when I run LinkedIn campaigns, it is almost always with lead gen ads. The results are far better than this anecdotal post suggests. Some issues still come up, and I've found that attempting to troubleshoot them leads to a better outcome for the business than dismissing the entire ad platform. [0] https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/ [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/#3 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/#3
- datenhorst 6y ago
  > it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. This is especially true in a mobile browser. The website is incredibly slow and borderline unusable on a mobile phone.
dumbfounder 6y ago
The use of the term "study" is quite misleading. This is hardly a "study". I think the title should be "Someone has a bad experience marketing on LinkedIn, gets frustrated, and assumes LinkedIn is to blame".
soared 6y ago
A sample size of of 2,000 impressions is absolutely useless. Even the larger example is completely useless. I don’t even considering analyzing a campaign with less than 50k impressions, and I won’t look at a variable if it’s under 10k. Realistically I want a few hundred thousand impressions before trying to make big claims about fraud.
- gknight 6y ago
  I hear you, but often times in B2B advertising, your target audiences are going to be small. How would you suggest assessing the success/failure of your ad campaigns if it's an order of magnitude less than your 50k threshold?
  - rtx 6y ago
    Let's not start with the assumption that we can reach c-suite at large companies in 25 dollars per lead.
    - soared 6y ago
      Or that you can really reach them at all using social/digital ads (without missing your target on 99% of your other impressions).
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Yeah, it was a wake-up call for me that b2b tech companies are first and foremost sales companies. Once place I worked the actual product was developed and maintained by a team of about 20 people that included dev, ops, and product managers but sales was about 200 people. Just getting a meeting with a decision maker at a med-large company could take a whole team months. I don't envy their jobs.
  - soared 6y ago
    So if your audience is actually that small, you should do account based marketing (ABM) which looks entirely different. Rather than spend money on LinkedIn ads trying to target “decision makers at IT companies” you spend your time actively pursuing individual companies. I’ve never actually worked in a role like that, but have had clients move from abm to general b2b marketing.
JonoW 6y ago
I'm confused, why would a fraud bot click on ads that makes LinkedIn money? Normally ad-fraud is when a fraudulent publisher is set up, made to look legit, hosts ads, which a bot then clicks the hell out of. Where's the incentive here for a bad actor on LinkedIn?
soared 6y ago
It’s very clear this company doesn’t have an experienced media buyer running their campaign. This blog post is /exactly/ like a nontechnical person spinning up a bunch of aws stuff and complaining about billing fraud. Media buying is a niche skill, and you can’t just throw money at LinkedIn and expect it to work. (Especially for true for a /branding/ agency and not a media buying agency)
tempsy 6y ago
Amazing how much wealth in Silicon Valley has been built on top of profits from rampant ad fraud.
nbzso 6y ago
Why I deleted my LinkedIn account? Literally the baddest UX ever. Lots of self-serving, self-promoting, click-baiting people. There is a thing called web. In this thing you can have a blog, in this thing called blog you can actually reach your ideal audience. LinkedIn is a tool created from the start to serve a corporate idea, which in my view is useful if executed with a boundaries. Where are LinkedIn boundaries? They don't exist.
12xo 6y ago
The issue isnt the lack of clicks perse, its the fact that LI and others digital ad providers charge so much for something that is neither market driven nor validated by independent auditors. $45 per click? People need to know that LI just made that figure up based on cursory examination of competitive fees. They price their traffic based on guesses and and then add 10-30% every few days to see how much people will spend. If they spend more, its worth more... But its the furthest thing from market based pricing as there is literally no open market or visual competition for the traffic for 99% of all ads served on these platforms. Imagine owning a gas station on an island and charging as much as you want. $50 per gallon, $100 per gallon and then, not even delivering a full gallon! That's the same thing here. Without competition or regulation the prices are set by greed and greed alone.
audiometry 6y ago
I logged into LinkedIn yesterday and it took me to a special page where it excoriated me for using “automated tools” to make fake activity or something. It demanded I click an “acknowledgement that I will henceforth comply” or I was subject to account termination. Frankly I felt like refusing and telling LinkedIn to fuck off. I have no idea what it was accusing me about. I almost never use the site. I have a 25 year career in an industry where I am known and the industry knows me, so LinkedIn is zero value to me. I would never find a job there nor look for a candidate there. So whatever their systems are doing, they’re incompetent and generate false positives. Shamefully, however, I clicked “I will comply”. Bah bah bah bleets this Sheeple.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
All LI Marketing I've done has resulted in net zero leads. My own content create if free, apart from my time cost, and is much more fruitful.
jd115 6y ago
The biggest mystery for me is why so many people believe so strongly in Facebook Ads. I have never gotten ANYTHING other than bot traffic from FB, or anything above 0% conversion, after repeatedly (mis-)spending thousands on FB ads. I must really be going all backwards about it, or something. (P.S. this is for content that otherwise gets a very healthy conversion rate from organic traffic)
- rtx 6y ago
  Is it just content or product. I have seen great results for cheap consumer products.
- jazzyjackson 6y ago
  All I get are ads for cheap consumer products off alibaba, some even having the audacity to claim they are made in USA, when I could do a reverse image search from their shopify page to the alibaba post. I read all the happy comments wondering how many were bots. I comment about finding the product on alibaba and my comment is swiftly removed and the option to comment is no longer on the post. So much for freedom of speech, zuck.
- kimi 6y ago
  My experience with FB ads stopped when they were estimating our target of interest as being 50% male and 50% female, with a large interested population living in Libya.
picodguyo 6y ago
I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped countries. Then there was the behavior of the "users" when they visited the site. A large percentage of them went straight to the search box (which literally no humans do on the site) and typed in something topical but completely unrelated to the site's topic, e.g. "covid". Another large percentage just scrolled up and down randomly. It was interesting to see the size and relative sophistication of the fraud going on but not exactly $500 well spent.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Wow, I had the same issue. I'm an ad-noob in the fullest sense of the word, but I tried the Google "Smart Ad". It turned out the same way you mentioned. I looked at where my clicks were coming from, and they were all pretty much from Hindi oriented Youtube channels. I was baffled at how that happened as I targeted US/Canada as you did.
  - kzrdude 6y ago
    It seems like pay-per-click and similar models should just be discontinued, they don't work since they can be exploited. An independently verifiable metric needs to be used (if the price for the ad should be traffic or interaction based) - or something completely different. Fixed prices?
    - radicaldreamer 6y ago
      There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.
      - 6y ago
Androider 6y ago
So the same as every other ad network then? Only half joking. Our niche SaaS sees 90% of Google Ad spend going to India, Russia and South America unless we create a short-list of countries to specifically target. And Google is full of dark-patterns around your targeted countries, by default it selects "people in, or interested in, your targeted locations" unless you drill down and find an obscure setting to change this. Then you only need to deal with the domestic and/or more sophisticated ad fraudsters, which will still probably end up as the majority of the spend.
atum47 6y ago
I have never clicked on a Ad from linkedin purposely. The thing is, everytime I go to check my profile (which is on the left top part of the screen - I'm dextrous) I end up clicking on a Ad with the palm of my hand (smartphone).
ShorsHammer 6y ago
I may have a meagre business and live in a meagre world but would never hire a single person who subscribes to linkedin nor participates in their blatant games. It's the most ridiculous HR wetdream and yet some seem to have no problem playing along. Lay your own beds with that stuff. It's only a matter of time before you'll live in shame for what comes out and probably write woeful blogposts about how fooled you were and now so enlightened never again to repeat such clear mistakes. Having self-worth really isn't that hard. Selling yourself and all your friends for pennies is incredibly easy though, which is what is happening here. Please keep digging those graves. The internet never forgets, nor forgives. The internet is forever, make no mistake.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  The internet forgets all the time. There's a bunch of videos I can't find anymore and information on famous people and plebs alike goes missing.
koverda 6y ago
Sounds like this person is bad at advertising and marketing, and looking to blame anyone but themselves. My guess is the content of the ad was poorly paired with the landing page. For what it's worth, I ran a LinkedIn campaign, had a $10 CPC with about a 40% conversion rate from a click to lead. Also that sure is a lot of "conclusions" to make very little data.
lmeyerov 6y ago
This reminds me of our Google AdWords experience for our enterprise analytics product. We started with an experienced marketing consultant and later a Google-provided account manager joined. We were tuning our acct setup to get signups at an industry avg, yet some reason the leads rarely qualified. Checking in a month or two into their experiment, I realized half our budget was going to middle school students using google as a calculator for their algebra homework! That was a bit of an 'aha' for me for their position in the market.
jbj 6y ago
I am so surprised to be redirected to rate the linkedin app while using their mobile web interface, I usually give them 1 or 2 stars for wasting my time. Maybe I actually misclicked on one of those pop ups that takes me to their app. makes me wonder what I may have agreed to on various sites by pure misclicks.
sailfast 6y ago
My profile is on LinkedIn because I feel like I’ll miss opportunities if I’m not on there. I’d love to remove it and go somewhere that doesn’t do this. Are there any non-terrible, more purely motivated sites for an individual to post their background and what they’re looking for so folks can view them?
- fakedang 6y ago
  Personal websites?
  - sailfast 6y ago
    Certainly, but it doesn’t have the same effect of having you searchable in a general database for recruiters. I don’t need to share network updates but I do want to be able to look for jobs and have someone be able to offer interesting opportunities. Ideally these connections are all personal anyway and you get poached because somebody knows you, but it’s nice to stay tapped into that virtually as well.
mancerayder 6y ago
Some apps, and many webpages on Android have this dark pattern of miniscule transparent x's to close ads and popups, that somehow don't register very easily. I'm on a Pixel 3 and I've replaced the device for unrelated reasons, it's not my screen. And my fingers are normally-sized. What that means is that people get this popup video playing, get a little X, try to hit the X but hit the thing behind it, or click on something else taking you elsewhere, or starting the video if by miracle autoplay ISN'T overridden... And so forth. I could go on and talk about how I have to zoom in with two hands, crane my neck and open the little x so it's a bigger X, so I can close it... But I'd rather focus on the question - how is this sustainable? That hostility makes users hostile, and it makes your entire ad infrastructure feel like a dirty enterprise, not the "it runs the Internet" philosophy that I'm guess adtech says to itself. Here's the thing - if I'm the company trying to advertise, do I even want to pay for clicks that are unwanted?
fimoreth 6y ago
Those are very small sample sizes to make any assumptions from. 11 clicks for their test, and only 256 clicks for the larger referenced test. The larger test then makes a huge assumption in user behavior: "So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing" Uh, no. Just because the ad brought them to your site, doesn't mean the user wants to interact with your video. You got them there, you have to work to keep them.
holidayacct 6y ago
likely? It's completely filled with bot traffic. At some point someone needs to create verified accounts on LinkedIn.
lucasnortj 6y ago
What’s an “ad”? I haven’t seen one of those in years
jl2718 6y ago
This is a reminder to myself to someday explain how these ad-click botnets work, how they make money directly and indirectly by clicking on your ads, and why the big ad tech companies need them to survive. The open question is whether there will still be perceived value when these things are known. So far, I don’t see ad spending affected by these exposes.
Scotrix 6y ago
We experienced a similar issue with LinkedIn ads, we had a small campaign for two weeks to a page which was only designated for this specific LinkedIn campaign. Apparently we got a few clicks (around 30) but there was not one single request for that page in our webserver logs.
caetris1 6y ago
Here is a recent video from a meetup hosted by LinkedIn where an engineer explains exactly how LinkedIn advertising works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YLoyFXvIY&list=PLihIrF0tCXddhXkQdAdnmfs8FtYMfrbTl&index=3&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YLoyFXvIY&list=PLihIrF0tCX...
martokus 6y ago
I’ve experienced the same with Snapchat and their geofencing ads. I geofence a perimeter around a venue where we run an event and run a branded filter. We have a team of 5 in the venue during the hours the ads run. None of them was able to see the filter come up. Snapchat on the other end shows hundreds of impressions and tens of uses. Surely a fraud.
kristopolous 6y ago
I've long contended that linkedin is essentially like a seedy dating site where we're all the women and the recruiters are the men hounding us.
penal_pilot 6y ago
I can't think of anyone who uses LinkedIn for anything other than finding jobs.
rdslw 6y ago
Simple linkedin lifehack: 1. put utf8 emoji at start of your name with space following it and then your first and last name. whatever emoji do: smile, country flag, beer. you name it. 2. discard any connect request or inmail or message that starts with 'Hello <emoji>' - it is automated 3. profit :)
nadohs 6y ago
I am not convinced by their single ad, one day of data (11 clicks total) that they have proven anything.. This was a waste of time unfortunately...
maxk42 6y ago
> LinkedIn’s ad platform reported 11 clicks. RMG’s logs showed ten clicks. This is well within the IAB's 10% discrepancy. Also that sample size is bullshit. I could show you the sample size of my $7,000 campaign from a couple months ago that recorded a slightly larger discrepancy, but the fact of the matter remains that LinkedIn was the best performer of all ad networks I tested. Again: That's not to say there's no fuckery afoot but that is a hell of small sample size to refer to as a "study".
dreamcompiler 6y ago
"FullStory reported mouse movements that were nothing like what an actual human would do." That web sites can tell where I move my mouse is simply unacceptable. What can we do to block JS from reporting mouse movements? (Yes, I know I can turn JS off altogether, but most sites aren't fully functional without JS.)
scottydelta 6y ago
Even the job posting on LinkedIn seems very shady. This was the result of $32 daily budget LinkedIn suggested us for running our job ad: https://i.imgur.com/7fYv6jy.png https://i.imgur.com/7fYv6jy.png Out of two people who applied, one seems like a bot/empty profile.

488 points by sbachman 6y ago

I deleted my LinkedIn account because it attracted an endless number of bad business partners. I got sick and tired of all the "Joe Blow"(s) on LinkedIn who claim to be "Joe Blow Inc." (I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one person.) I've certainly found work on LinkedIn, but my experience is that for other kinds of sales and networking it is a terrible time sink. Based on the intense level of BS I can't imagine that advertising would have really worked there.

pixl97 6y ago
>I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one person. No, it is the limited liability. Don't want to lose your house because of a bad business deal.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Exactly - although most jurisdictions do require that a corporation have more than one person involved; in the UK you can have a corporation with one director but it must have a secretary as well.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I think that has changed - I believe single person companies are possible now: https://www.qualitycompanyformations.co.uk/blog/can-you-set-up-a-limited-company-with-one-person/ https://www.qualitycompanyformations.co.uk/blog/can-you-set-...
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    When I was contracting a lot of my peers got forced into having a limited company as their clients didn't want to be deemed their employer.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      When it comes to both taxes (in the UK you can be more tax efficient than trading as a sole trader) and limited liability, why wouldn't you want to have a limited company?
      - fakedang 6y ago
        Considering all the new developments in the UK, all at the expense of the employee, there's a real business opportunity for someone who can help workers incorporate themselves as contractors under their individual limited companies. Especially when companieshouse has as much oversight on the database as I know about isolated Renshaw flux oscillation signatures.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    In india, they added OPC (one person company) which is an extension of limited liability for individuals. I think it's becoming quite common across countries.
- fakedang 6y ago
  And then there's the Middle East, where one bad deal or going bankrupt means straight to jail.
moneywoes 6y ago
What works in your experience?

ffpip 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20200908115120/https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200908115120/https://www.samue...

Scandiravian 6y ago
Thank you and well played (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193) For future people getting here - the site went down. Most likely from the massive attention from this post.

marcinzm 6y ago

Hard to know how much is ad fraud and how much is people just not being interested in what is being advertised. Don't see why I should care about yet another webinar especially if I'm already a successful CEO and get five thousand webinar requests a day. Might click for more info but then after 10 seconds on the page (and seeing it's more BS) I'll probably bail. Same as this quote: >“You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing. No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail. edit: Also at only 11 clicks, the metrics are pure noise. Sure they each cost $45 but it's still only 11 clicks. Can't even blame the CPC estimation for being off at such a low number.

mumblemumble 6y ago
> No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail. Exactly. Even if I was thinking about requesting a demo when I clicked the ad, I then want to see a lot of information on the target site before proceeding. I'm not going to sign up for a demo unless I think there's a pretty good chance I'll want to buy. Most vendor websites don't provide nearly enough information for me to make that judgment. As someone who doesn't consider talking to sales people to be a recreational activity, that leaves me with little choice but to bail.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Same. I hate when I need to get on a call to just get pricing for something, or even worse, to just renew a yearly subscription. Plus this was analytics software which is a dime a dozen nowadays. So you need to make your value proposition known very well and very quickly. Even then you'll get a very low conversion rate unless you've done a very good branding campaign to get your name out there.
- smnscu 6y ago
  No, thanks. Unless the person giving me the demo is the CEO, their entire salary and taxes are being taken out of my price, and it's most likely not the kind of company I want to do business with.

LeonM 6y ago

I advertised on LI about a year ago. I had reasonable success (in terms of new leads/signups). Here is what I remember from the experience. I found that the interface for managing ads was terribly buggy and shouldn't even be considered production ready. One bug that I remember is that it wasn't possible to remove ads, and the button to suspend an add didn't work most of the time. In typical LI fashion the interface was full of dark patterns, it was really tricky to limit the expenses. In the blink of an eye you could be spending hundreds of USD per day. Analytics were somewhat available, but basically useless. For no reason the CPC could jump to dollars per click, and no way to discover why. Advertising, especially for a tech SaaS, is hard. The tools available are usually terrible to use, expensive and often shady. In my experience, doing advertisements is one of the worst parts of starting a new service.

the-dude 6y ago
Sounds like a feature, not a bug, to me.
mathattack 6y ago
Strange. I always thought the reason they weren’t improving the Consumer end user GUI was because they focused monetization on Enterprise. I guess it was crap all around. (Perhaps they under invest because they have such a defensible position as the one place for online resumes)
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Their Sales Navigator offering is utter crap, too. Borderline useless. I canceled after about a year because changes to the free version made it sufficient for my use. As a further warning, don't even consider utilizing the LinkedIn platform as a creator or community builder. For example, I manage some popular groups, and one day LinkedIn decided that I send too many messages by welcoming new members. Even though their documentation still stated that group managers could message their members without limit, my account kept getting suspended. What did their support tell me? (and I was still paying $100/month at the time) "If you keep sending messages, then you risk being permanently banned." Creating value on the platform, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users, has no weight at LinkedIn.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> “You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing. This guy is deluded. People click random things to get more info, and they might not have liked the more info they got so didn’t go ahead with the demo.

dgellow 6y ago
I stopped reading the content of marketing websites ages ago, I just click on whatever is big and orange or other flashy colors until I see something that looks like a list of features, or whatever I'm looking for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to be the only one to have this marketing blindness. I guess I'm a bot based on my behaviour?
- jabroni_salad 6y ago
  If the landing page has a bunch of soft stuff like 'expands synergy' on it I am just going to assume I was not the target audience. I'm not a CEO, I'm a practitioner. Put something crunchy in there. Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    > Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao Ad nauseam did exactly this until the extension was banned from chrome store: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
    - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
      It still does exactly this for me because it is not banned from the internet (yet).
    - ffpip 6y ago
      If anybody is considering using this for privacy reasons don't. If you want to piss off as dev or act like a bot, only then use it.

motohagiography 6y ago

I lost a couple of thousand dollars using their services (literally 5x my ad budget) because they "refill" your ad account based on the ceiling you intend to spend - without an email notification or other notification in your main profile. It cycled through my ~$300 ad budget and charged me that amount multiple times before I caught it on my bill. Never received the refund they said they'd send either. People say that half of all advertising dollars are wasted, you just don't know which half, but this company has perfected it to 5-10x what you mean to spend on advertising is wasted, and you don't know until they've taken it from you and then shown you the fine print. In short, avoid.

chinathrow 6y ago
Perfect for small claims court if you are US based.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Or a chargeback for that matter.
  - penagwin 6y ago
    I was going to say - it's a lot easier to not let them take your money (even retroactively) - then it is to get it back through small claims court.
  - Archit3ch 6y ago
    If they advertise increased click-through rate and they increase it, what stops them from claiming they fulfilled their end of the bargain? It could even be click bots.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      Fraud is not a valid way to fulfill your end of a contract ;)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chrisseaton 6y ago
Getting tons of applicants doesn’t help you if they don’t have the skills or skill level you need.

mgav 6y ago

A pay-for-performance model (e.g. pay per sale) eliminates all the risk for advertisers. Does this exist anywhere, aside from affiliate deals? I'd be happy to pay 50% for each digital product sale, since those are 96% profit.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago
You just described affiliate marketing. For example, sponsored content on YouTube => https://youtu.be/kUFWalEf31w?t=572 https://youtu.be/kUFWalEf31w?t=572
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yeah, but affiliate marketing is a pretty raw deal for the person doing it because they carry all risk. It's just a job working in sales for other companies but without benefits. There needs to be some adjustment for "your marketing/product is shit and will therefore be much harder to sell."
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
>I'd be happy to pay 50% for each digital product sale You will have to when the advertising network figures out the value of a sale.
Macha 6y ago
Adtech companies don't really want to be held responsible for the effectiveness of your advertisement or the conversion rate of your landing page. When such models exist (called CPA or cost-per-action usually), there's a significant premium attached for that risk. Most advertisers don't want to pay that premium.
summerlight 6y ago
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7528254 https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7528254 Google has a such product but I think it is nowhere close to the majority of ad spending. A part of the reasons is that it needs campaigns' conversion volumes to be above a certain threshold (so their model has a reasonable amount of training data) while advertisers may exploit the system by not reporting legitimate conversions. So Google requires them to be eligible by some unknown criteria.

baobabKoodaa 6y ago

> Error establishing a database connection Based on the title I'm guessing this could have been delivered as a static web page delivered by a CDN. I've never understood why some people want to set up their own web servers to deliver static content.

s_dev 6y ago
>I've never understood why some people want to set up their own web servers to deliver static content. I've a Digital Ocean droplet running several static sites for €5 a month. Whats the problem?
- baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  The problem is that this website is down and no-one can access its content. This problem would not exist if the author had simply released their static content on a CDN. Your 5€ DO droplet is not helping me access this content.
Macha 6y ago
Don't know if it's a personal site or not, it sounds like it is. But at least my case is that a VPS provider provides a hard stop to spend. Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill. That said, I've topped HN before and nginx happily handled that load on a 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM host with a static site. A lot of these personal site meltdowns are Wordpress with no caching plugins.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  > Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill. The last time an article on my site reached the top of HN, my AWS bill was a couple of dollars for the month, across S3, Cloudfront, Athena and SNS. I get the concern that you'll spend more than you intended with AWS, but it's honestly hard to blow a budget on a static site hosted in S3 and served by Cloudfront. Those two services have heavy guard rails on what you can accidentally commit to doing, unlike the myriad compute services.

ramon 6y ago

Facebook gives you better returns as well as Google Ads, Linkedin was not a good convertion rate at all and they don't really care about it so yes you're correct about the statement of "Money Pit" it's because we're used to Facebook and Google conversions that we expect the same from Linkedin and actually it's different platforms with different goals and objectives, not sure why you should expect the same "money's worth" on every platform out there each one has a different objetive and different users that's how it works they're different.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

I can't read the source article (site is down) but judging from the header I'm kinda glad LinkedIn is not selling many ads. The last years it's become an even more fake stream of glossy PR marketing crap filled with stock photos of smiling faces, and people commenting how much they adore the company line. I get enough of all that on the company's own sites, thank you. I get that people don't want to be critical in public, but you don't have to repost every piece of marketing BS that comes your way :) Especially when I know some of these people tell a completely different story in person. And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. There's constantly people bothering me with their 'services' which are totally not relevant to my role if they'd even bothered to glance at my profile. I wish I could report them somehow. The only reason I still have it is because it's almost impossible to get a job without it :) Because the business world loves it. But it's more fake than FaceBook now. Everyone is one successful talented employee who is completely in line with the corporate hive mind.

hyperdimension 6y ago
I don't really use LinkedIn that much, so this confuses me: > And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. Do you mean simply having an account? Or are there now fees for, e.g. avoiding recruiters? I thought that the business model of LinkedIn had only companies/recruiters pay to reach (free) users.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  No, having an account is free. But many features are behind a paywall now, like seeing who is visiting your profile. It used to be it was only not shown if you were browsing privately youself, but recently it changed and you can only see the first two. Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option. Especially lately I get a lot of spam from SAP related businesses even though I don't work with ERP systems nor have I ever done so. It's super annoying. If it was even remotely related to my work it would be much less so.

glutamate 6y ago

I don't know anything about LinkedIn ads, but I watched some of the video that this post is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM It sounds like they are moaning that their client side rendered React-based landing page had a lot of bounces which they don't believe because client side rendered react pages are known to be "very very fast" and "some of the very fastest available technology". (This is around the 15:30 mark) That's baloney, client side rendered JavaScript landing pages are much slower than server-side rendered.

_jal 6y ago
I'm pretty sure I'm a bot to a lot of these sites - JS is disabled by default, selectively enabled sometimes. When greeted by a blank page, I frequently "react" by just going elsewhere.
- bogwog 6y ago
  App Annie actually banned me once when I logged with javascript disabled and privacy badger installed. I had to contact their customer support, and they just said to disable my extensions and don't do it again otherwise I'll be banned permanently. I don't use their service anymore.
mumblemumble 6y ago
They also tacitly claimed that 1.3 seconds isn't enough time for their pages to render.
_fat_santa 6y ago
I was about to comment the same thing. They talked about how it's a progressive web app: good, built in react: good, client side rendered: no no no why! As a general rule, Web "apps" should be client rendered (think FB, Twitter, Gmail, etc), Web "sites" should be server rendered. I wish React made it more clear what the difference between the two is and why you should use one versus the other. I know frameworks like Next and Gatsby do it but I wish it was a more ingrained part of React.
6y ago

josefrichter 6y ago

LinkedIn is the weirdest product ever. Everybody is there, nobody is using it for anything. Except shady recruiters.

3np 6y ago
I actually do have several friends and other people in my network (some quite accomplished professionally) who are very active on LinkedIn, and there's not much shady about them. But yes, it's weird.
mumblemumble 6y ago
Well, that and colleagues of mine from over in the the marketing and sales departments, who can't understand why it takes me an average of 2 months to get around to accepting their connection requests.
treis 6y ago
Lots of people use it. The feed aspect of it is useless. But in terms of a network it's great. I've found 2 out of my last 3 jobs there. Assume it's also great for organic marketing as well where you target associates of your current clients.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  So it's a digital rolodex. That's not terribly impressive for the weight of the name.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > it's a digital rolodex. That's not terribly impressive for the weight of the name. It's an automatically-updating and linked rolodex. Rolodexes tell you that you know X. They don't say who X knows.
mcv 6y ago
Not just shady ones. I notice a lot of legitimate recruiters find me on LinkedIn and it leads to real work for me. I personally avoid it like the plague, but I do keep my CV up to date there. (Actually it's out of date right now, but I'll update it when I start looking again.)

ajimix 6y ago

it's pretty easy to click on competitors ads with bots to run out competitors credit and then run your ads for the rest of the day for cheap prices. But the same happens with Google adwords. I guess they don't have any way to prevent it

chungalunga 6y ago

I’ve never used LinkedIn, do they have any real competitors or is this just a monopoly being a monopoly?

baybal2 6y ago

> LinkedIn Ads network is likely awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic Just like every single other adnet? The very fact of massive adfraud groups allegedly specialising on one or another net means that they must be making money somehow. By the definition, those guy must be one step ahead of the adnet, or they don't make money, and fizzle in a few months. My impression is that there are groups which have consistently defeated all, and every bot detection method the entirety of ad industry threw on them.

socrates1998 6y ago

LinkedIn is one of those things you have and probably only use when you need a job or are desperate for clients. No one is there to get decent information or to genuinely connect with people. It's the digital equivalent of the super fake networking seminars people go to. Everyone is a seller and on one is a buyer. Makes sense that their ad network is sketchy and buggy.

kordlessagain 6y ago
I deleted my LinkedIn two weeks ago.
gk1 6y ago
I know plenty of technical founders who are quite active on LinkedIn. Without disclosing any names, I can assure you they are not looking for new jobs or desperate for anything. At one point I was convinced that everybody is leaving FB just because I and a few people I knew were leaving FB. Years later it's still a dominant social network. Beware of confirmation bias and the firehouse effect[0]. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-marty-o-connell-calls-this-the-firehouse-effect-he https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-mart...
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I know several very active founders on LinkedIn as well, but it’s clear that they’re all using LI for the intended purpose: Building their personal brand and business network. They may not be actively looking for jobs or desperate for clients, but they are working the system to elevate their own status. It’s possible to find halfway decent content on LI, but it takes a lot of work to filter out the fluff. Even then, you have to be honest about why people are doing it in the first place: Networking and brand building. No busy founder is going to frequently take time away from their growing business to write LI content without expectation of personal or business gain. That’s not to say you can’t find diamonds in the rough, but you need to be realistic about the context to separate it from the brand building.
  - 6y ago

jwr 6y ago

B2B SaaS founder here. I had exactly the same experience. I built my own code for tracking signups, and discovered that the actual conversions were a big fat zero. That's when I stopped burning money on LinkedIn ads. Mind you, this experience wasn't much different for other ad networks. Quora was slightly better in that at least there seemed to be some interest shown by people landing (or perhaps this was the only ad site that sent actual people my way?).

rdslw 6y ago

I dont agree with bowdlerization happening on Hacker News, wrt legitimate titles. This is effectively censorship @dang (I'm addressing it to you because you speak most often here, and set the tone, not because you personally did it. ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation I do understand that having less clickbaity _content_ is noble goal (and reason we read HN), but let US do our job in giving upvotes to good topic or flaging bad ones, while having ORIGINAL titles author of the post intended, not the one the censor considers proper.

dang 6y ago
The problem is that a title on HN's front page doesn't just represent what the author believes. It also represents what "HN" believes, to some extent. Of course, HN doesn't exist as a person and doesn't believe anything at all, but that doesn't matter, because people receive those titles as if it does. So there are multiple ways that a title can be misleading and we have to balance them. Upvotes alone don't solve this. On the contrary: indignation routinely gets the most upvotes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not—people just upvote angry shit more than they upvote anything else. If we don't want the front page to be all-angry and mostly-false all day, then moderators have to intervene. Is that censorship? That's up to you—people use that word to mean whatever sort of intervention they don't like. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

GhostVII 6y ago

I know nothing about advertising, but does it really matter if you are getting bot traffic if you are still getting conversions from the ads? If you know that for every $10 you spend on LinkedIn ads, you get 1 person to sign up for your service, then it doesn't matter how many mistaken clicks or bots clicked on the ad since click through isn't the main metric you are using. Isn't that why websites have so much tracking? So they can attribute an ad to a conversion rather than just looking at the number of clicks?

michaelbuckbee 6y ago

I don't quite understand the economics of the ad fraud on the closed (on site) LinkedIn ads. How does a third party (not LinkedIn, and not the advertiser) make money from this?

topkai22 6y ago
I don't think they are intending to make money on the clicks itself, but having a bot click on ads would seem to make it appear more "real" and less likely to get discovered.

gk1 6y ago

Sooo, I've spent hundreds of thousands on LinkedIn Ads on behalf of clients. Here is my take: Ad platforms work in varying degrees for different products and companies. You should not dismiss an ad platform based on poor performance alone without understanding why it performed poorly. It's sort of like with airlines: If you boycott an airline for every minor offense, pretty soon you'll have no option but to take the train. In this case, it's disingenuous to paint an entire ad platform--that does hundreds of millions in revenue[1]--as "awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic" based on a campaign that ran for just 1.5 days and resulted in 11 clicks. (They say they saw similar results from larger campaigns, but they don't show them.) But Ok, let's say we take out the generalizations. I get that it's disconcerting for any company to find they were charged for traffic that bounced within a second. In that case you need to look for the root cause, and see if it can be resolved or worked around. In this case the root cause should be painfully obvious to experienced marketers like the authors: Most of the 11 clicks seems to be from mobile traffic (as seen in their Fullstory report), where it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. They do mention this possibility in both the video and the title, but they seem to underestimate the likelihood of this being the root cause, and talk too much about bots instead. I've seen this exact misclick behavior in Twitter and for that reason I stopped advertising there. Unlike Twitter, however, LinkedIn lets you work around this. They offer a "lead gen" campaign type, which requires two clicks (one on the ad, and one more on the "submit form" button) and sharing of contact information before the advertiser is charged. I've still seen funky results from this--such as users saying they don't recall submitting any form--but in much fewer cases than with simple image ads. Today, when I run LinkedIn campaigns, it is almost always with lead gen ads. The results are far better than this anecdotal post suggests. Some issues still come up, and I've found that attempting to troubleshoot them leads to a better outcome for the business than dismissing the entire ad platform. [0] https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/ [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/#3 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/#3

datenhorst 6y ago
> it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. This is especially true in a mobile browser. The website is incredibly slow and borderline unusable on a mobile phone.

dumbfounder 6y ago

The use of the term "study" is quite misleading. This is hardly a "study". I think the title should be "Someone has a bad experience marketing on LinkedIn, gets frustrated, and assumes LinkedIn is to blame".

soared 6y ago

A sample size of of 2,000 impressions is absolutely useless. Even the larger example is completely useless. I don’t even considering analyzing a campaign with less than 50k impressions, and I won’t look at a variable if it’s under 10k. Realistically I want a few hundred thousand impressions before trying to make big claims about fraud.

gknight 6y ago
I hear you, but often times in B2B advertising, your target audiences are going to be small. How would you suggest assessing the success/failure of your ad campaigns if it's an order of magnitude less than your 50k threshold?
- rtx 6y ago
  Let's not start with the assumption that we can reach c-suite at large companies in 25 dollars per lead.
  - soared 6y ago
    Or that you can really reach them at all using social/digital ads (without missing your target on 99% of your other impressions).
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yeah, it was a wake-up call for me that b2b tech companies are first and foremost sales companies. Once place I worked the actual product was developed and maintained by a team of about 20 people that included dev, ops, and product managers but sales was about 200 people. Just getting a meeting with a decision maker at a med-large company could take a whole team months. I don't envy their jobs.
- soared 6y ago
  So if your audience is actually that small, you should do account based marketing (ABM) which looks entirely different. Rather than spend money on LinkedIn ads trying to target “decision makers at IT companies” you spend your time actively pursuing individual companies. I’ve never actually worked in a role like that, but have had clients move from abm to general b2b marketing.

JonoW 6y ago

I'm confused, why would a fraud bot click on ads that makes LinkedIn money? Normally ad-fraud is when a fraudulent publisher is set up, made to look legit, hosts ads, which a bot then clicks the hell out of. Where's the incentive here for a bad actor on LinkedIn?

soared 6y ago

It’s very clear this company doesn’t have an experienced media buyer running their campaign. This blog post is /exactly/ like a nontechnical person spinning up a bunch of aws stuff and complaining about billing fraud. Media buying is a niche skill, and you can’t just throw money at LinkedIn and expect it to work. (Especially for true for a /branding/ agency and not a media buying agency)

tempsy 6y ago

Amazing how much wealth in Silicon Valley has been built on top of profits from rampant ad fraud.

nbzso 6y ago

Why I deleted my LinkedIn account? Literally the baddest UX ever. Lots of self-serving, self-promoting, click-baiting people. There is a thing called web. In this thing you can have a blog, in this thing called blog you can actually reach your ideal audience. LinkedIn is a tool created from the start to serve a corporate idea, which in my view is useful if executed with a boundaries. Where are LinkedIn boundaries? They don't exist.

12xo 6y ago

The issue isnt the lack of clicks perse, its the fact that LI and others digital ad providers charge so much for something that is neither market driven nor validated by independent auditors. $45 per click? People need to know that LI just made that figure up based on cursory examination of competitive fees. They price their traffic based on guesses and and then add 10-30% every few days to see how much people will spend. If they spend more, its worth more... But its the furthest thing from market based pricing as there is literally no open market or visual competition for the traffic for 99% of all ads served on these platforms. Imagine owning a gas station on an island and charging as much as you want. $50 per gallon, $100 per gallon and then, not even delivering a full gallon! That's the same thing here. Without competition or regulation the prices are set by greed and greed alone.

audiometry 6y ago

I logged into LinkedIn yesterday and it took me to a special page where it excoriated me for using “automated tools” to make fake activity or something. It demanded I click an “acknowledgement that I will henceforth comply” or I was subject to account termination. Frankly I felt like refusing and telling LinkedIn to fuck off. I have no idea what it was accusing me about. I almost never use the site. I have a 25 year career in an industry where I am known and the industry knows me, so LinkedIn is zero value to me. I would never find a job there nor look for a candidate there. So whatever their systems are doing, they’re incompetent and generate false positives. Shamefully, however, I clicked “I will comply”. Bah bah bah bleets this Sheeple.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

All LI Marketing I've done has resulted in net zero leads. My own content create if free, apart from my time cost, and is much more fruitful.

jd115 6y ago

The biggest mystery for me is why so many people believe so strongly in Facebook Ads. I have never gotten ANYTHING other than bot traffic from FB, or anything above 0% conversion, after repeatedly (mis-)spending thousands on FB ads. I must really be going all backwards about it, or something. (P.S. this is for content that otherwise gets a very healthy conversion rate from organic traffic)

rtx 6y ago
Is it just content or product. I have seen great results for cheap consumer products.
jazzyjackson 6y ago
All I get are ads for cheap consumer products off alibaba, some even having the audacity to claim they are made in USA, when I could do a reverse image search from their shopify page to the alibaba post. I read all the happy comments wondering how many were bots. I comment about finding the product on alibaba and my comment is swiftly removed and the option to comment is no longer on the post. So much for freedom of speech, zuck.
kimi 6y ago
My experience with FB ads stopped when they were estimating our target of interest as being 50% male and 50% female, with a large interested population living in Libya.

picodguyo 6y ago

I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped countries. Then there was the behavior of the "users" when they visited the site. A large percentage of them went straight to the search box (which literally no humans do on the site) and typed in something topical but completely unrelated to the site's topic, e.g. "covid". Another large percentage just scrolled up and down randomly. It was interesting to see the size and relative sophistication of the fraud going on but not exactly $500 well spent.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Wow, I had the same issue. I'm an ad-noob in the fullest sense of the word, but I tried the Google "Smart Ad". It turned out the same way you mentioned. I looked at where my clicks were coming from, and they were all pretty much from Hindi oriented Youtube channels. I was baffled at how that happened as I targeted US/Canada as you did.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  It seems like pay-per-click and similar models should just be discontinued, they don't work since they can be exploited. An independently verifiable metric needs to be used (if the price for the ad should be traffic or interaction based) - or something completely different. Fixed prices?
  - radicaldreamer 6y ago
    There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.
    - 6y ago

Androider 6y ago

So the same as every other ad network then? Only half joking. Our niche SaaS sees 90% of Google Ad spend going to India, Russia and South America unless we create a short-list of countries to specifically target. And Google is full of dark-patterns around your targeted countries, by default it selects "people in, or interested in, your targeted locations" unless you drill down and find an obscure setting to change this. Then you only need to deal with the domestic and/or more sophisticated ad fraudsters, which will still probably end up as the majority of the spend.

atum47 6y ago

I have never clicked on a Ad from linkedin purposely. The thing is, everytime I go to check my profile (which is on the left top part of the screen - I'm dextrous) I end up clicking on a Ad with the palm of my hand (smartphone).

ShorsHammer 6y ago

I may have a meagre business and live in a meagre world but would never hire a single person who subscribes to linkedin nor participates in their blatant games. It's the most ridiculous HR wetdream and yet some seem to have no problem playing along. Lay your own beds with that stuff. It's only a matter of time before you'll live in shame for what comes out and probably write woeful blogposts about how fooled you were and now so enlightened never again to repeat such clear mistakes. Having self-worth really isn't that hard. Selling yourself and all your friends for pennies is incredibly easy though, which is what is happening here. Please keep digging those graves. The internet never forgets, nor forgives. The internet is forever, make no mistake.

friendlybus 6y ago
The internet forgets all the time. There's a bunch of videos I can't find anymore and information on famous people and plebs alike goes missing.

koverda 6y ago

Sounds like this person is bad at advertising and marketing, and looking to blame anyone but themselves. My guess is the content of the ad was poorly paired with the landing page. For what it's worth, I ran a LinkedIn campaign, had a $10 CPC with about a 40% conversion rate from a click to lead. Also that sure is a lot of "conclusions" to make very little data.

lmeyerov 6y ago

This reminds me of our Google AdWords experience for our enterprise analytics product. We started with an experienced marketing consultant and later a Google-provided account manager joined. We were tuning our acct setup to get signups at an industry avg, yet some reason the leads rarely qualified. Checking in a month or two into their experiment, I realized half our budget was going to middle school students using google as a calculator for their algebra homework! That was a bit of an 'aha' for me for their position in the market.

jbj 6y ago

I am so surprised to be redirected to rate the linkedin app while using their mobile web interface, I usually give them 1 or 2 stars for wasting my time. Maybe I actually misclicked on one of those pop ups that takes me to their app. makes me wonder what I may have agreed to on various sites by pure misclicks.

sailfast 6y ago

My profile is on LinkedIn because I feel like I’ll miss opportunities if I’m not on there. I’d love to remove it and go somewhere that doesn’t do this. Are there any non-terrible, more purely motivated sites for an individual to post their background and what they’re looking for so folks can view them?

fakedang 6y ago
Personal websites?
- sailfast 6y ago
  Certainly, but it doesn’t have the same effect of having you searchable in a general database for recruiters. I don’t need to share network updates but I do want to be able to look for jobs and have someone be able to offer interesting opportunities. Ideally these connections are all personal anyway and you get poached because somebody knows you, but it’s nice to stay tapped into that virtually as well.

mancerayder 6y ago

Some apps, and many webpages on Android have this dark pattern of miniscule transparent x's to close ads and popups, that somehow don't register very easily. I'm on a Pixel 3 and I've replaced the device for unrelated reasons, it's not my screen. And my fingers are normally-sized. What that means is that people get this popup video playing, get a little X, try to hit the X but hit the thing behind it, or click on something else taking you elsewhere, or starting the video if by miracle autoplay ISN'T overridden... And so forth. I could go on and talk about how I have to zoom in with two hands, crane my neck and open the little x so it's a bigger X, so I can close it... But I'd rather focus on the question - how is this sustainable? That hostility makes users hostile, and it makes your entire ad infrastructure feel like a dirty enterprise, not the "it runs the Internet" philosophy that I'm guess adtech says to itself. Here's the thing - if I'm the company trying to advertise, do I even want to pay for clicks that are unwanted?

fimoreth 6y ago

Those are very small sample sizes to make any assumptions from. 11 clicks for their test, and only 256 clicks for the larger referenced test. The larger test then makes a huge assumption in user behavior: "So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing" Uh, no. Just because the ad brought them to your site, doesn't mean the user wants to interact with your video. You got them there, you have to work to keep them.

holidayacct 6y ago

likely? It's completely filled with bot traffic. At some point someone needs to create verified accounts on LinkedIn.

lucasnortj 6y ago

What’s an “ad”? I haven’t seen one of those in years

jl2718 6y ago

This is a reminder to myself to someday explain how these ad-click botnets work, how they make money directly and indirectly by clicking on your ads, and why the big ad tech companies need them to survive. The open question is whether there will still be perceived value when these things are known. So far, I don’t see ad spending affected by these exposes.

Scotrix 6y ago

We experienced a similar issue with LinkedIn ads, we had a small campaign for two weeks to a page which was only designated for this specific LinkedIn campaign. Apparently we got a few clicks (around 30) but there was not one single request for that page in our webserver logs.

caetris1 6y ago

Here is a recent video from a meetup hosted by LinkedIn where an engineer explains exactly how LinkedIn advertising works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YLoyFXvIY&list=PLihIrF0tCXddhXkQdAdnmfs8FtYMfrbTl&index=3&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YLoyFXvIY&list=PLihIrF0tCX...

martokus 6y ago

I’ve experienced the same with Snapchat and their geofencing ads. I geofence a perimeter around a venue where we run an event and run a branded filter. We have a team of 5 in the venue during the hours the ads run. None of them was able to see the filter come up. Snapchat on the other end shows hundreds of impressions and tens of uses. Surely a fraud.

kristopolous 6y ago

I've long contended that linkedin is essentially like a seedy dating site where we're all the women and the recruiters are the men hounding us.

penal_pilot 6y ago

I can't think of anyone who uses LinkedIn for anything other than finding jobs.

rdslw 6y ago

Simple linkedin lifehack: 1. put utf8 emoji at start of your name with space following it and then your first and last name. whatever emoji do: smile, country flag, beer. you name it. 2. discard any connect request or inmail or message that starts with 'Hello <emoji>' - it is automated 3. profit :)

nadohs 6y ago

I am not convinced by their single ad, one day of data (11 clicks total) that they have proven anything.. This was a waste of time unfortunately...

maxk42 6y ago

> LinkedIn’s ad platform reported 11 clicks. RMG’s logs showed ten clicks. This is well within the IAB's 10% discrepancy. Also that sample size is bullshit. I could show you the sample size of my $7,000 campaign from a couple months ago that recorded a slightly larger discrepancy, but the fact of the matter remains that LinkedIn was the best performer of all ad networks I tested. Again: That's not to say there's no fuckery afoot but that is a hell of small sample size to refer to as a "study".

dreamcompiler 6y ago

"FullStory reported mouse movements that were nothing like what an actual human would do." That web sites can tell where I move my mouse is simply unacceptable. What can we do to block JS from reporting mouse movements? (Yes, I know I can turn JS off altogether, but most sites aren't fully functional without JS.)

scottydelta 6y ago

Even the job posting on LinkedIn seems very shady. This was the result of $32 daily budget LinkedIn suggested us for running our job ad: https://i.imgur.com/7fYv6jy.png https://i.imgur.com/7fYv6jy.png Out of two people who applied, one seems like a bot/empty profile.