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And then there are the "wet bots" - Amazon Turks and overseas humans (lowly) paid to use a regular browser and PC and manually click on stuff for whatever purpo

by rotten 14y ago

And then there are the "wet bots" - Amazon Turks and overseas humans (lowly) paid to use a regular browser and PC and manually click on stuff for whatever purpose (rig internet voting, drive fake advertising charges, steal data, skew hit counters - whatever).

alttab 14y ago
Is an impression from a mechanical turk not a true impression? Its a real person, after all. If the premise of marketing and advertising work due to mere exposure, then intent of the view shouldn't be measured. What you are getting at however is very important to ad-driven internet business models. You make the empathetical deduction that if you are there for one purpose, you are impervious to advertising. Now, if you are still with me after that statement, then there are larger impications of online advertising than are actually being measured. For instance, if the intent of the view mattered, would it be worth more? I think Google has answered that question rather clearly. Measuring "why someone is visiting a URL" (and thus generating an ad-view) is a larger technical problem than could be accomplished with some fancy algorithms. That is, unless the service knew all of your browsing history... In any case, you raise a good point about the intent of the page-view and how that should be "credited" as advertising. To do this however is to challenge existing 'fundamental' theories.
- nhashem 14y ago
  The problem with mechanical turk impressions/clicks is typically the country of origin, since they usually involve paying people in third-world countries a fraction of a cent which is still worth some nominal amount to them. Say you are an advertiser who runs an ecommerce site that only ships within the US. You don't want to pay for impressions/clicks from people in India because you can't actually sell to them, even if they are "real" people and not a script. Also, there is "brand marketing" and "performance marketing." I'm not sure they have classic definitions, but generally brand marketing is based on "mindshare" and tough to quantify. This is basically any TV commercial -- Budweiser doesn't expect you to jump off your couch the second you see a Bud Light commercial, but maybe a week later when you're in the supermarket, you spot that new brand of beer and recall the commercial with Jay-Z rapping and grinding with some models, and think, "eh, maybe I'll try Bud Light Platinum, I will purchase this and consume it later because I like the idea of rapping with models," even at a subconscious level. Performance marketing is all about ROI. You spend $100 marketing dollars, and you want to make at least $X back. Typically $X = 100 in this example, although in some cases you may want to adjust profit margins or even run at negative profit (for example, if you want to maximize revenue even at an unprofitable rate). Almost any advertiser on the internet has a performance marketing mentality, mainly because it's much easier to actually measure performance. This is why advertisers like the OP are frustrated with Facebook, because paying for bot traffic makes it extremely hard to hit their performance marketing goals. You are right though, in that this is a huge gray area. To give two extremes, let's say you run an ecommerce site but you'd also like to monetize with ads. So you reach a deal with a shopping comparison site to display their products on your pages in your footer. If you buy AdWords to your site, and those visitors from AdWords scroll down and click on the shopping comparison ads, they are probably fine with paying you for that traffic, although you are probably paying something like $2/click. If you make a page with JUST the shopping comparison ads, and buy traffic from someone who basically infects computers with trojans and overwrites their Google search results to be your site (say at $0.01 per click), then you'll get clicks on the shopping comparison ads and make lots of money, except the shopping comparison site will realize these clicks don't lead to any actual sales for their merchants (since this is extremely poor quality traffic since all the users that end up there have basically no intent) and will kick you off. Somewhere in between adveritsing for "first page Google AdWords" traffic and "trojan/botnet" traffic is basically every other form of internet advertising, and how gray that area is, is typically completely defined by your business partners.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  It's at best a gamed impression. Advertising and marketing are generally very intentionally tailored. You're not trying to reach any human, you're trying to reach a human in your target demographic. Skewing results (and wasting resources) by paying people who are entirely outside your marketing effort to click through links (or take other similar resource-costing / data-skewing actions) is not the desired result.
pherk 14y ago
All that is really no excuse for not developing a foolproof system. And if you know that you don't have a great system to catch fraud, then you should simply leave some money on the table. See, the essence here is not to come up with a great algorithm. This is not a programming contest. But to create a system where everyone (publisher, advertiser, ad-network and customer) wins. In this very early stage, the success of Facebook's Ad network should be measured only by one metric - ROI of Advertisers. And that number has to be consistently better than Google's.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  > And that number has to be consistently better than Google's. Why's that? This isn't a zero sum game. You don't advertise only on Google or only on Facebook; as much as your budget allows, you advertise on every channel you can achieve a positive ROI on. For any advertiser looking for a direct response, like a signup or purchase, I doubt anything Facebook can do would make the ROI better than advertising on search. No amount of demographic and interest targeting will make advertising to people as effective as advertising to intent. You can pay Google to send you people while they're in the process of looking for your product; Facebook doesn't do that.
  - tlow 14y ago
    Who is the "you" that your post above mentions?
    - dangrossman 14y ago
      The advertiser.
- johnvclifford 14y ago
  ROI to the advertiser is a key metric. Smart marketers compare the LTV or Life time value of customers that come from specific campaigns. ROI metric does not have to be better than Google for an ad campaign on Facebook or Microsoft Adcenter to be profitable. I have worked with clients to use web analytics and cohort analysis to optimize both quality (higher conversion, better LTV ) and quantity of leads. Sometimes Microsoft Adcenter traffic converts better but does have sufficient quantity compared to Google Adwords. Also different ad platforms have different levels or competition as well as different levels of fraud detection and click quality. I am surprised that Facebook does not detect and suspend obviously spammy user accounts whether that account is bot driven or outsourced to humans overseas.Google and Facebook have financial incentives to not filter out all low quality ad traffic because many advertisers don't have expertise or time to closely examine traffic sources as the company mentioned in this news story. A combination of tech expertise and marketing savvy are needed to reduce this problem. More analytic tools are available for Google Adwords than are available for Facebook ads.
gojomo 14y ago
Thank you for introducing me to the term "wet bots"!

by rotten 14y ago

alttab 14y ago

Is an impression from a mechanical turk not a true impression? Its a real person, after all. If the premise of marketing and advertising work due to mere exposure, then intent of the view shouldn't be measured. What you are getting at however is very important to ad-driven internet business models. You make the empathetical deduction that if you are there for one purpose, you are impervious to advertising. Now, if you are still with me after that statement, then there are larger impications of online advertising than are actually being measured. For instance, if the intent of the view mattered, would it be worth more? I think Google has answered that question rather clearly. Measuring "why someone is visiting a URL" (and thus generating an ad-view) is a larger technical problem than could be accomplished with some fancy algorithms. That is, unless the service knew all of your browsing history... In any case, you raise a good point about the intent of the page-view and how that should be "credited" as advertising. To do this however is to challenge existing 'fundamental' theories.

nhashem 14y ago
The problem with mechanical turk impressions/clicks is typically the country of origin, since they usually involve paying people in third-world countries a fraction of a cent which is still worth some nominal amount to them. Say you are an advertiser who runs an ecommerce site that only ships within the US. You don't want to pay for impressions/clicks from people in India because you can't actually sell to them, even if they are "real" people and not a script. Also, there is "brand marketing" and "performance marketing." I'm not sure they have classic definitions, but generally brand marketing is based on "mindshare" and tough to quantify. This is basically any TV commercial -- Budweiser doesn't expect you to jump off your couch the second you see a Bud Light commercial, but maybe a week later when you're in the supermarket, you spot that new brand of beer and recall the commercial with Jay-Z rapping and grinding with some models, and think, "eh, maybe I'll try Bud Light Platinum, I will purchase this and consume it later because I like the idea of rapping with models," even at a subconscious level. Performance marketing is all about ROI. You spend $100 marketing dollars, and you want to make at least $X back. Typically $X = 100 in this example, although in some cases you may want to adjust profit margins or even run at negative profit (for example, if you want to maximize revenue even at an unprofitable rate). Almost any advertiser on the internet has a performance marketing mentality, mainly because it's much easier to actually measure performance. This is why advertisers like the OP are frustrated with Facebook, because paying for bot traffic makes it extremely hard to hit their performance marketing goals. You are right though, in that this is a huge gray area. To give two extremes, let's say you run an ecommerce site but you'd also like to monetize with ads. So you reach a deal with a shopping comparison site to display their products on your pages in your footer. If you buy AdWords to your site, and those visitors from AdWords scroll down and click on the shopping comparison ads, they are probably fine with paying you for that traffic, although you are probably paying something like $2/click. If you make a page with JUST the shopping comparison ads, and buy traffic from someone who basically infects computers with trojans and overwrites their Google search results to be your site (say at $0.01 per click), then you'll get clicks on the shopping comparison ads and make lots of money, except the shopping comparison site will realize these clicks don't lead to any actual sales for their merchants (since this is extremely poor quality traffic since all the users that end up there have basically no intent) and will kick you off. Somewhere in between adveritsing for "first page Google AdWords" traffic and "trojan/botnet" traffic is basically every other form of internet advertising, and how gray that area is, is typically completely defined by your business partners.
dredmorbius 14y ago
It's at best a gamed impression. Advertising and marketing are generally very intentionally tailored. You're not trying to reach any human, you're trying to reach a human in your target demographic. Skewing results (and wasting resources) by paying people who are entirely outside your marketing effort to click through links (or take other similar resource-costing / data-skewing actions) is not the desired result.

pherk 14y ago

All that is really no excuse for not developing a foolproof system. And if you know that you don't have a great system to catch fraud, then you should simply leave some money on the table. See, the essence here is not to come up with a great algorithm. This is not a programming contest. But to create a system where everyone (publisher, advertiser, ad-network and customer) wins. In this very early stage, the success of Facebook's Ad network should be measured only by one metric - ROI of Advertisers. And that number has to be consistently better than Google's.

dangrossman 14y ago
> And that number has to be consistently better than Google's. Why's that? This isn't a zero sum game. You don't advertise only on Google or only on Facebook; as much as your budget allows, you advertise on every channel you can achieve a positive ROI on. For any advertiser looking for a direct response, like a signup or purchase, I doubt anything Facebook can do would make the ROI better than advertising on search. No amount of demographic and interest targeting will make advertising to people as effective as advertising to intent. You can pay Google to send you people while they're in the process of looking for your product; Facebook doesn't do that.
- tlow 14y ago
  Who is the "you" that your post above mentions?
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    The advertiser.
johnvclifford 14y ago
ROI to the advertiser is a key metric. Smart marketers compare the LTV or Life time value of customers that come from specific campaigns. ROI metric does not have to be better than Google for an ad campaign on Facebook or Microsoft Adcenter to be profitable. I have worked with clients to use web analytics and cohort analysis to optimize both quality (higher conversion, better LTV ) and quantity of leads. Sometimes Microsoft Adcenter traffic converts better but does have sufficient quantity compared to Google Adwords. Also different ad platforms have different levels or competition as well as different levels of fraud detection and click quality. I am surprised that Facebook does not detect and suspend obviously spammy user accounts whether that account is bot driven or outsourced to humans overseas.Google and Facebook have financial incentives to not filter out all low quality ad traffic because many advertisers don't have expertise or time to closely examine traffic sources as the company mentioned in this news story. A combination of tech expertise and marketing savvy are needed to reduce this problem. More analytic tools are available for Google Adwords than are available for Facebook ads.

gojomo 14y ago

Thank you for introducing me to the term "wet bots"!