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Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?

by jiggy2011 14y ago

pathdependent 14y ago
Yes. This used to happen a lot on ad networks, although I personally don't know how pervasive it is now. The game is as jiggy said. Force competing ad buyers to pay for what appears to be non-productive traffic by forcing ad clicks. Since the real views are dominated by false views, the conversion rate on whatever is being sold appears to be horrible. The competitor goes elsewhere, and the scammer maintains access to artificially cheap ad inventory, since there are fewer bidders.
- dclowd9901 14y ago
  How does Google prevent this? Is it simply inherently not-problematic, due to their spread of advertising?
  - veyron 14y ago
    Overall it's hard to say whether google wins or loses overall by this. In absence of a real competitor in the search ad space, people generally will swallow google's fee hikes ...
  - pathdependent 14y ago
    It's a cat and mouse game. Google gets good at it; scammers get more sophisticated; google catches up again; ad infinitum. Also, in addition to the scam mentioned above -- in Google's case, targeting AdWords -- they have to deal with scammers hitting their own AdSense properties. It's a well known problem. Considering AdWords is Google's primary source of revenue, they work hard at it. For a tiny bit more directly from Google, see: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6114 http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
freshhawk 14y ago
As pathdependant said, this is a very common shady tactic in the ad business. You drive up your competitors costs with bots in order to drive them away from your keywords or make them think their conversions on those keywords are awful and then abandon them. By far the most likely explanation in my opinion. Even if it's not the correct one, some of the traffic is almost certainly these kinds of bots.

Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?

pathdependent 14y ago

Yes. This used to happen a lot on ad networks, although I personally don't know how pervasive it is now. The game is as jiggy said. Force competing ad buyers to pay for what appears to be non-productive traffic by forcing ad clicks. Since the real views are dominated by false views, the conversion rate on whatever is being sold appears to be horrible. The competitor goes elsewhere, and the scammer maintains access to artificially cheap ad inventory, since there are fewer bidders.

dclowd9901 14y ago
How does Google prevent this? Is it simply inherently not-problematic, due to their spread of advertising?
- veyron 14y ago
  Overall it's hard to say whether google wins or loses overall by this. In absence of a real competitor in the search ad space, people generally will swallow google's fee hikes ...
- pathdependent 14y ago
  It's a cat and mouse game. Google gets good at it; scammers get more sophisticated; google catches up again; ad infinitum. Also, in addition to the scam mentioned above -- in Google's case, targeting AdWords -- they have to deal with scammers hitting their own AdSense properties. It's a well known problem. Considering AdWords is Google's primary source of revenue, they work hard at it. For a tiny bit more directly from Google, see: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6114 http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

freshhawk 14y ago

As pathdependant said, this is a very common shady tactic in the ad business. You drive up your competitors costs with bots in order to drive them away from your keywords or make them think their conversions on those keywords are awful and then abandon them. By far the most likely explanation in my opinion. Even if it's not the correct one, some of the traffic is almost certainly these kinds of bots.