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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
by 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 agoWow, 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 agoIt 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 agoThere'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.
- Macha 6y agoSometimes it's just priced in. If partner A has a 10% fraud rate and partner B has a 5% rate but partner A is 10% cheaper than partner B, while you'll probably complain to partner A it's still the sensible choice.
- dhimes 6y agoIt's hard to get the numbers, though. I mean, I guess we could ask....
- Macha 6y agoWell, at my last employer we had our own systems analyzing traffic, we had integrations with third parties (DoubleVerify being the biggest) to detect fraud, our clients often had their own third party integrations to detect fraud and would complain if we hadn't found it but they did at too high a rate, etc. Honestly after the ad images/video, all the fraud detection javascript from the advertiser, the publisher, the advertiser's system of choice, the publisher's system of choice all doing "trust but verify" with each other is the largest contributor to how big ads are.
- bluGill 6y agoEvery been to a big break and motor store and they asked for your zip code? That is because they have someone in the back office to wants to see if the ads - dead tree paper - they spent to your zip code worked. It isn't hard to work the numbers from there, but it is tedious and requires some statistics.
- Scoundreller 6y agoHeh, I always find it funny when I buy a non-recurring thing, but keep seeing ads for it. Best was when I kept seeing ads for a thing I was selling. I visited some big box sites about it to copy the specs on it.
- nickff 6y agoAll the metrics for advertisement sales have been gamed for as long as I know of (at least 20 years); this goes for paper, online, television, and radio. Smart advertisers know what's going on, and they take the 'gaming' into account.
- kzrdude 6y agoI've been waiting so long for it to be a bubble that pops, web ads just can't be worth that much when they are so bad. I see some "captive" ads now, and I can imagine those are worth so much more - for example instagram play-between ads. No wonder the open web is dying.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoConversion tracking is the much loathed "spying/stalking" of ads.
- gomoboo 6y agoWhat would the goal of the “users” (bots?) have been in this case? Is there any monetary gain for them? Would a competitor do this to waste your ad spend?
- konschubert 6y agoI guess google pays a share of the money to owners of youtube channels/websites where the ads are displayed?
- gomoboo 6y agoI hadn’t thought of that angle. Seems that getting rid of this sort of problem is one of the reasons one would use an ad network.
- picodguyo 6y agoPresumably the ad clicks are making money for the apps/sites that are displaying the ads.
- treis 6y agoI have a memory of doing that 20 years ago as a pre-teen to make my friend like 50 cents.
- zaroth 6y agoMany of the adult-oriented ads paid upwards of $0.50/click. Your parents would definitely wonder why you were receiving checks in the mail from Xpics. Once I left the Visual Basic scripted web control running overnight by mistake...
- GordonS 6y agoI used to do the same thing, but I don't think any of them were adult sites. It was all done through some kind of ads broker, and the cheques came directly from them. Looking back, it was pretty shitty behaviour by me, but as a 14 year old boy, it just didn't even feel like a crime, even a victimsless one; it almost felt entrepreneurial.
- huac 6y agothe default setting on Google location targeting is/was "user in [geo] OR user 'interested' in [geo]." which is insane! but could explain the location weirdness
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI know this isn't tech support, but is there somewhere I can read about changing this? And you are damn right, it's extremely astonishing seeing as how "target geo" != "interested in" at least on it's face.
- huac 6y agoFrom their FAQ: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2453995?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2453995?hl=en > If the Google Ads system detects geographic areas that someone is interested in, we may show appropriate ads targeted to that area or surrounding areas (known as "location of interest"). > The default advanced location option in Google Ads will use both physical location and / or location of interest to determine where ads can appear. You can update your advanced location options at any time. Looks like "interest" is still the default!
- tehwebguy 6y agoWow I figured Google quietly changed this in shame when it was publicized years back. How are they still running this scam?
- rtx 6y agoDisplay network has been like that for atleast 10 years that I have been using it.
- a123b456c 6y agoWhy continue to use it?
- Scoundreller 6y agoThe fraud really just steals from legit publishers. If you’re an advertiser and the display market becomes 90% fraud, you just end up paying 1/10th the rate for 10x the traffic. Legit publishers get 1/10th the revenue though.
- wgx 6y agoCan I ask then, why continue to use it for 10 years?
- rtx 6y agoYou can sell crappy products with above 90 percent margin. Though now we primarily use FB.
- willyg123 6y agoI ran into the same thing. Until now I thought I was just a noob and couldn't figure out a way to exclude each country by painstakingly excluding each country manually. These exclusions did work for me though. Note: I am not ruling out that I am just a noob.
- vasco 6y agoI work at Hotjar and love it that you're getting value out of the product! We do try to not record bots that advertise known user agents, like Google, Bing and other common ones. Reasoning being that recording non-humans will usually not tell you much about how your UX is optimized for humans. It's really interesting that somehow the fact that we recorded these less known user agent bots actually made the product more useful for you and you were able to detect fraud going on.
- picodguyo 6y agoI promise I'm not a shill, but yes I do indeed love HotJar and find it essential for getting new sites off the ground. I've uncovered countless UX improvements by watching HotJar recordings. And thanks for your generous free tier!
- AlexandrB 6y agoI wonder what your users would think of the fact that their every click was being recorded. I suspect the reason most people are not worried about this kind of stuff is that they're not aware how creepy it actually is.
- picodguyo 6y agoI can respect that some people find it creepy, and I personally use AdBlock, which blocks HotJar as others mentioned. That said, I find a tool that records anonymous sessions detached from any sort of PII or even IP address much less offensive than something like Google Analytics, social login, or literally any advertising pixel.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhat matters is consent.
- beervirus 6y agoSounds creepy af. It's stuff like this that makes me keep javascript disabled whenever possible.
- pluc 6y agoI mean in most cases Google controls both the Ad Network and the analytics people use to monitor those ads. It's easy to imagine some artificial inflation happening.
- canadianwriter 6y agoIn the location settings - did you choose "are in location" or "are in location or are searching for location" Not defending google but the latter is on by default, switching to the former can massively help here.
- thrownaway954 6y agoyou sure you setup your campaign correctly? from what it sounds like, you didn't limit your campaign to search. also it would be VERY interesting to see how you not only setup your ad group but also what keywords you used for each group. typically when we see people complain about ad fraud we see alot of basic mistakes that they made when setting up their campaign. i hate to say it, but 99% of the people out that claim they know how to setup and manage a google ads campaign are amateurs at best and don't know the basic foundations of the way google ads works.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoYou're right, we are amateurs. But the fact that I "target" US/Canada, and my ads are being shown to Hindi-folk is a case of bad ui and bad design.
- picodguyo 6y agoAs mentioned, this was Google's Smart (display) Ads not their traditional search ads. I've had good success with the latter but decided to try the former on their suggestion.
- Mr_2020 6y agoI ran ads with Google again recently after a long hiatus. Literally 0 conversions (free signup) but ads on FB/Reddit/Others performed fine. Just 100% worthless traffic. Google has gone very wrong.
- funman7 6y agoWho would be paying the person or bot in this scenario. Surely LinkedIn wouldn’t be directly paying for that I wonder what is funding all this.
- shadowprofile77 6y agoSo would this then mean that Google's Adwords program for advertising your business based on keywords and target countries or regions is broken and unusable for business owners? (at least not profitably usable). I've read very different from other commentators right here on HN who claim that Google ads work well for them and likewise I've heard plenty of anecdote from users of Facebook's and other ad platforms that they have delivered positive ROI for ad placement of their offers. Any opinion?
- 35mm 6y agoI think it depends if you’re doing Direct Response Ads, or branding. With DR if your sales / leads are not generating a Return on Adspend (ROAS), you will change or stop advertising. With branding, you might not even notice that Google is sending traffic from the wrong country. And you might be happy with the great looking vanity metrics. My experience with Google (YouTube) Ads is that they work extremely well. I use them to generate leads for solar panel installers.
- neop1x 6y agoThere is also a more broad article about ad fraud I found interesting https://clearcode.cc/blog/rtb-online-advertising-fraud/ https://clearcode.cc/blog/rtb-online-advertising-fraud/ I can imagine that ad fraud prevention must be a hard task, probably requiring AI/ML nowadays. But I don't like that fact because it will probably force website owners to add more behavior tracking and analytics events on every web page. That will end up with more websockets, more memory and longer loading times and higher UI latencies and further worsenijg thr web browsing experience which is already pretty bad. :(