3 ms·

If clicks can be botted, why can’t impressions? What this does kill is a small time publisher opening up their own website while waiting at the Apple Store and

• crazygringo 3y ago
  Is it just a question of scale? You can easily have 100x or 1000x more impressions than clicks. So detecting fraudulent clicks is much harder than fraudulent impressions, in terms of a proportion of fraud, just because there's so much less of a baseline genuine signal. E.g. 20 fraudulent clicks out of 40 total clicks per day, who can tell? But 20,000 fraudulent impressions out of 40,000 total, now you can do a lot more pattern recognition to filter them out.
  • Scoundreller 3y ago
    If those 20 fraud clicks didn’t come from a source similar to 2000-20000 pageviews, they should be able to pick out something happening. Like. You’re right: it’s easier for a small-time fraudster to do cpc fraud, but they should still be able detect suspicious page views, whether there’s a click involved or not. At cpc large scale fraud, there’s a lot of data either way.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      Not necessarily at all. The profile of people who click on an ad may be very different from those who just see it. The point is that small numbers just don't let you make confident conclusions period.
  • crowcroft 3y ago
    A good example is looking for 'unique devices' that are doing the action. It is fairly trivial to have 20 unique devices generating 20 clicks, quite a bit more challenging to have 20,000 unique devices generate 20,000 impressions.
    • Scoundreller 3y ago
      It’s a website: you can spoof a lot of details to show uniqueness. Proving you’re not headless is where it gets difficult.