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I work in performance marketing, and I think the way to think about this is not “there’s fraud! We can’t trust anything!” Rather, it’s how much is fraudulent.

I work in performance marketing, and I think the way to think about this is not “there’s fraud! We can’t trust anything!” Rather, it’s how much is fraudulent. For example, if I spend $1m and $10k was fraud clicks, I might be ok with that. Sure not ideal, but if I still got great results with $990k, the overall campaign still did good. How do you know how much is fraudulent? Just look at your internal data. If Facebook says it delivered 100 clicks, but you only see 10 show up that is something to investigate. But if you see 90ish, move on with your life. Part of being in tech is not worrying about edge cases too much. (Unless you are in security or reliability or something where that’s crucial). Otherwise you’d never get anything done.

dathinab 6y ago
> How do you know how much is fraudulent? Just look at your internal data. If Facebook says it delivered 100 clicks, but you only see 10 show up that is something to investigate. But if you see 90ish, move on with your life. That isn't good enough IMHO you will (should) see a high amount of clicks, it's just that most/all of them might be from bots...
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Sure, this is why you shouldn't use these as metrics you care about. Look at sales/signups/etc.
iamacyborg 6y ago
> If Facebook says it delivered 100 clicks, but you only see 10 show up that is something to investigate. But if you see 90ish, move on with your life. Cool, so just give Facebook a 10% bonus for providing a fraudulent service?
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I can tell that you don't manage ad campaigns. Marketers are cool if they don't find out it's more than half bots. Notice how I worded the above sentence.
Nasrudith 6y ago
Really the fraud itself can be ignored if you just focus upon the apparent rate of return. If you have Option A with a high rate of fraud but the highest returns and Option B with no fraud but worse returns Option A is the rational choice. Granted the complication is that it is hard to get the actual rate of return reliably.

dathinab 6y ago

> How do you know how much is fraudulent? Just look at your internal data. If Facebook says it delivered 100 clicks, but you only see 10 show up that is something to investigate. But if you see 90ish, move on with your life. That isn't good enough IMHO you will (should) see a high amount of clicks, it's just that most/all of them might be from bots...

edmundsauto 6y ago
Sure, this is why you shouldn't use these as metrics you care about. Look at sales/signups/etc.

iamacyborg 6y ago

> If Facebook says it delivered 100 clicks, but you only see 10 show up that is something to investigate. But if you see 90ish, move on with your life. Cool, so just give Facebook a 10% bonus for providing a fraudulent service?

redis_mlc 6y ago
I can tell that you don't manage ad campaigns. Marketers are cool if they don't find out it's more than half bots. Notice how I worded the above sentence.

Nasrudith 6y ago

Really the fraud itself can be ignored if you just focus upon the apparent rate of return. If you have Option A with a high rate of fraud but the highest returns and Option B with no fraud but worse returns Option A is the rational choice. Granted the complication is that it is hard to get the actual rate of return reliably.