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Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that sh

Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to figure out if it was a successful campaign or not. When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that matters is impact on the bottom line.

nemomarx 1y ago
If you could pay for web ads in the same way you could pay for a billboard (flat rate per period of time) yeah that would help. if you pay per impression or view or click you have some other issues
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I love when I see websites that do this. They are just rare enough, but I appreciate them for existing.
processing 1y ago
yes, the co is likely spending big money on retargeting to bring back a potential customer to sell what the bot clicked on to generate retargeting. it's fraud and costing the company money.
boplicity 1y ago
It makes optimizing your ads significantly harder. Imagine trying to understand traffic flow on a freeway when 99.9% of cars are just projected illusions. Not fun. Effective advertising depends on iterative testing, which is very hard if the signal to noise ratio is way off.
paulcole 1y ago
> Does it really matter if it's all fraud Uh, yes. If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent clicks.
- dangus 1y ago
  The point is, if $10k brings in 47 sales and that’s not enough then you stop buying those ads. It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. You take your marketing spend elsewhere. You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom. How much of ESPN’s viewership happens at bars where nobody is watching? At some point it’s not reasonable to expect ad networks to be able to stop sophisticated bots or exclude them from your billed impressions. They should definitely try to minimize it if they want to maintain the value of their impressions but I think there is a good argument that OP just isn’t the right customer for this type of advertisement. If you’re trying to sell a t-shirt you don’t hire a salesperson to cold call people, maybe OP shouldn’t be using web ads in the first place. If fraud was cut down by half would their situation really be that much better?
  - ccortes 1y ago
    > It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. It does, because it changes the strategy. If you think the ads are working and have 10k potential customers then you start thinking about how to increase your conversion rate thinking you could get a chunk of those 10k, you might think distribution is solved. But if it turns out only 2.5k are real humans then your conversion rate might not even be an issue and it’s just the marketing strategy that needs tweaking. The whole point is that they are giving you fraudulent traffic which you use as real data to figure out the next steps. If you don’t know it’s fraudulent or how much of the clicks are fraudulent then you are taking decisions under the wrong assumptions. > You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom That’s not even a good analogy, we are taking clicks, not impressions.
  - paulcole 1y ago
    > You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom Yes, you literally can stop fraudulent clicks. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it's not possible? This is nothing like the Super Bowl analogy.
- 1y ago
dangus 1y ago
I was about to say something similar to this. You aren’t paying for conversion rate, you are paying for a link being put on a website when a query is made. You can’t control whether a bot follows that link. You can’t control how sophisticated that bot is. You can’t expect an advertiser to filter out every type of illegitimate traffic (although it sounds like they probably have the capability to filter out more but don’t have any incentive to do so). I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to not bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad services. It’s basically like paying for a cold lead, you’re attracting one of the least interested types of customers. The recommendation I’ve always seen is that it’s better to build legitimate interest in your product by producing content. Or perhaps move to an advertising platform where there’s more of a guarantee of reaching human users. But still, I’ve heard that trying to spend customer acquisition dollars on one-time purchases is a losing battle. If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without buying ads you can go without AdWords, too.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  >I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to not bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad services. It’s basically like paying for a cold lead, you’re attracting one of the least interested types of customers. Google Ads used to be very effective. You are catching the punter as they are actually looking for a solution to their problem. However Google have inflated bids and increased the complexity to the point where very few people can make a decent return now. >The recommendation I’ve always seen is that it’s better to build legitimate interest in your product by producing content. That is becoming rapidly less true as AIs steal all the traffic. >If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without buying ads you can go without AdWords, too. We can't all be Teslas.
whistle650 1y ago
This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a competitive market. If they don’t deliver the ROI because of bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an e-commerce site is profitable (enough) after the ad spend, period. If they are not, why do they spend what they spend on the ads?
- pixl97 1y ago
  Google is a competitive ad market?
  - toast0 1y ago
    There are certainly competition concerns about Google's advertising programs. But within their advertising market, you compete for placement with other advertisers. If everyone is getting lots of fraud traffic, presumably they adjust their bids for it, if you're getting outbid consistently, it's reasonable to expect that the other advertisers are either getting a better ROI or they have a lower ROI target than you do. About a million years ago, I was on a team that had a significant ad program, and it was primarily data driven, we'd come up with keywords to advertise on, measure the results and adjust our bids. With a little bit of manual work to filter out inappropriate keywords or to allow a lower ROI on "important" keywords. Of course, our revenue was largely also from advertising, so it was a bit circular.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    At google I would expect no. However I don't understand why other "portals" are not running their own ads (some are of course - but I think more should). If you are a portal your value is the eyeballs you sell to advertisers, so why are you out soucing this critical part of your business value? This needs to be a core competency you keep in house.
zurfer 1y ago
Yes it matters because Google ad spend is just one way to market and it's harder to attribute sales if there is a lot of fraud making it more inefficient.
fukka42 1y ago
Of course. It means you're being scammed by your advertising partner (Google).
ceedan 1y ago
yes, it matters.
bad_haircut72 1y ago
When you talk to Google sales they want to know how much you make per customer, so theyre able to figure out exactly how much they could charge to take 80% of the margin. The cream on top is taken by Google in the form of fake bot clicks.
- bluGill 1y ago
  IF you have things right - which Google has incentive to see to it that you don't - this makes no difference. Because the real measure isn't how much you make per customer, (including those who come by other means) - it people who didn't click on the ad even though seeing it was a part of their decision to buy (they saw the ad on their phone and told their wife who bought it). If you are doing proper add effectiveness measurement you get this data (it is messy data). Remember what matters is how the ad affects the bottom line. Everything else is just a proxy - you need to check to see if your proxies are good enough.
jklinger410 1y ago
Because the digital ads environment has promised more data. That is slowly falling apart, but it has been expected for a decade or so now.
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  Sounds like the bots might eventually restore privacy by accident by making the additional data all dross, leaving only sales correlative modeling.
  - jklinger410 1y ago
    Yes, that is more or less what is happening now, but also driven by AI. All marketing is moving back "up the funnel."
stronglikedan 1y ago
> they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs they also don't get charged retroactively for each dashcam and dog that looks at the billboard
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
marcosdumay 1y ago
You may be able to cancel out the numbers if the rate of fraud to real clicks is stable. But it's incredibly unlikely that the amount of fraud is stable, any attention from a small player can generate enough volume to eclipse all of the background. Thus no, you can't just account for it on your calculation. When a company puts up a billboard, it doesn't get taken down because a flock of birds passed by before anyone could look at it.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
It depends on whether the ad engagement / views were real people or bots - if you're a competitor, then using bots to use up your competitor's ad budget is a strategy. If you display ads on your website, then sure, it doesn't matter if a bot or real person viewed/clicked on your ad if you get paid regardless - to the point where there's a big industry of putting ads on sites then having bots engage with the site and its ads. Billboards are a bit different because that's paid per week / month, but internet ads are paid per impression or click.
- rockskon 1y ago
  If it's on your website then they'd be taking up bandwidth you gotta pay for.
lurk2 1y ago
> When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. Billboards sell for flat rates, online advertising is sold on the basis of impressions.
- criddell 1y ago
  Billboard rates are based on impressions too. A billboard along a busy road is more expensive than one out in the sticks.
  - lurk2 1y ago
    The pricing of a billboard is based on projected impressions but is decoupled from the billboard’s actual impressions. You pay the flat rate based on projected impressions. It doesn’t subsequently matter if an army of robots passes through and views the billboard 10,000 times, because the original projected audience should still see the billboard. You’re getting what you paid for. It’s also possible the projections are erroneous, fraudulent, or that the actual impressions just don’t follow the projected impressions for some other reason. This is the advantage of advertising online—if you pay for 10,000 views, the ad runs until you get them. Contrast the billboard with an online ad: If you pay for 10,000 impressions, and 9,000 of those impressions end up being automated traffic, then you’ve effectively lost 90% of your advertising budget. Like you mentioned, ad buyers can and do account for this, so it’s not clear that it’s as big of a problem as this thread is making it out to be. The theory I see thrown around is that Meta and Alphabet are tacitly allowing this bot traffic to continue (or even that they are responsible for it themselves) because it allows them to sell another round of ads, but if this is what is going on it isn’t clear why firms would keep buying ads that aren’t converting.

nemomarx 1y ago

If you could pay for web ads in the same way you could pay for a billboard (flat rate per period of time) yeah that would help. if you pay per impression or view or click you have some other issues

giancarlostoro 1y ago
I love when I see websites that do this. They are just rare enough, but I appreciate them for existing.

processing 1y ago

yes, the co is likely spending big money on retargeting to bring back a potential customer to sell what the bot clicked on to generate retargeting. it's fraud and costing the company money.

boplicity 1y ago

It makes optimizing your ads significantly harder. Imagine trying to understand traffic flow on a freeway when 99.9% of cars are just projected illusions. Not fun. Effective advertising depends on iterative testing, which is very hard if the signal to noise ratio is way off.

paulcole 1y ago

> Does it really matter if it's all fraud Uh, yes. If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent clicks.

dangus 1y ago
The point is, if $10k brings in 47 sales and that’s not enough then you stop buying those ads. It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. You take your marketing spend elsewhere. You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom. How much of ESPN’s viewership happens at bars where nobody is watching? At some point it’s not reasonable to expect ad networks to be able to stop sophisticated bots or exclude them from your billed impressions. They should definitely try to minimize it if they want to maintain the value of their impressions but I think there is a good argument that OP just isn’t the right customer for this type of advertisement. If you’re trying to sell a t-shirt you don’t hire a salesperson to cold call people, maybe OP shouldn’t be using web ads in the first place. If fraud was cut down by half would their situation really be that much better?
- ccortes 1y ago
  > It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. It does, because it changes the strategy. If you think the ads are working and have 10k potential customers then you start thinking about how to increase your conversion rate thinking you could get a chunk of those 10k, you might think distribution is solved. But if it turns out only 2.5k are real humans then your conversion rate might not even be an issue and it’s just the marketing strategy that needs tweaking. The whole point is that they are giving you fraudulent traffic which you use as real data to figure out the next steps. If you don’t know it’s fraudulent or how much of the clicks are fraudulent then you are taking decisions under the wrong assumptions. > You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom That’s not even a good analogy, we are taking clicks, not impressions.
- paulcole 1y ago
  > You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom Yes, you literally can stop fraudulent clicks. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it's not possible? This is nothing like the Super Bowl analogy.
1y ago

dangus 1y ago

I was about to say something similar to this. You aren’t paying for conversion rate, you are paying for a link being put on a website when a query is made. You can’t control whether a bot follows that link. You can’t control how sophisticated that bot is. You can’t expect an advertiser to filter out every type of illegitimate traffic (although it sounds like they probably have the capability to filter out more but don’t have any incentive to do so). I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to not bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad services. It’s basically like paying for a cold lead, you’re attracting one of the least interested types of customers. The recommendation I’ve always seen is that it’s better to build legitimate interest in your product by producing content. Or perhaps move to an advertising platform where there’s more of a guarantee of reaching human users. But still, I’ve heard that trying to spend customer acquisition dollars on one-time purchases is a losing battle. If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without buying ads you can go without AdWords, too.

hermitcrab 1y ago
>I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to not bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad services. It’s basically like paying for a cold lead, you’re attracting one of the least interested types of customers. Google Ads used to be very effective. You are catching the punter as they are actually looking for a solution to their problem. However Google have inflated bids and increased the complexity to the point where very few people can make a decent return now. >The recommendation I’ve always seen is that it’s better to build legitimate interest in your product by producing content. That is becoming rapidly less true as AIs steal all the traffic. >If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without buying ads you can go without AdWords, too. We can't all be Teslas.

whistle650 1y ago

This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a competitive market. If they don’t deliver the ROI because of bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an e-commerce site is profitable (enough) after the ad spend, period. If they are not, why do they spend what they spend on the ads?

pixl97 1y ago
Google is a competitive ad market?
- toast0 1y ago
  There are certainly competition concerns about Google's advertising programs. But within their advertising market, you compete for placement with other advertisers. If everyone is getting lots of fraud traffic, presumably they adjust their bids for it, if you're getting outbid consistently, it's reasonable to expect that the other advertisers are either getting a better ROI or they have a lower ROI target than you do. About a million years ago, I was on a team that had a significant ad program, and it was primarily data driven, we'd come up with keywords to advertise on, measure the results and adjust our bids. With a little bit of manual work to filter out inappropriate keywords or to allow a lower ROI on "important" keywords. Of course, our revenue was largely also from advertising, so it was a bit circular.
- bluGill 1y ago
  At google I would expect no. However I don't understand why other "portals" are not running their own ads (some are of course - but I think more should). If you are a portal your value is the eyeballs you sell to advertisers, so why are you out soucing this critical part of your business value? This needs to be a core competency you keep in house.

zurfer 1y ago

Yes it matters because Google ad spend is just one way to market and it's harder to attribute sales if there is a lot of fraud making it more inefficient.

fukka42 1y ago

Of course. It means you're being scammed by your advertising partner (Google).

ceedan 1y ago

yes, it matters.

bad_haircut72 1y ago

When you talk to Google sales they want to know how much you make per customer, so theyre able to figure out exactly how much they could charge to take 80% of the margin. The cream on top is taken by Google in the form of fake bot clicks.

bluGill 1y ago
IF you have things right - which Google has incentive to see to it that you don't - this makes no difference. Because the real measure isn't how much you make per customer, (including those who come by other means) - it people who didn't click on the ad even though seeing it was a part of their decision to buy (they saw the ad on their phone and told their wife who bought it). If you are doing proper add effectiveness measurement you get this data (it is messy data). Remember what matters is how the ad affects the bottom line. Everything else is just a proxy - you need to check to see if your proxies are good enough.

jklinger410 1y ago

Because the digital ads environment has promised more data. That is slowly falling apart, but it has been expected for a decade or so now.

Nasrudith 1y ago
Sounds like the bots might eventually restore privacy by accident by making the additional data all dross, leaving only sales correlative modeling.
- jklinger410 1y ago
  Yes, that is more or less what is happening now, but also driven by AI. All marketing is moving back "up the funnel."

stronglikedan 1y ago

> they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs they also don't get charged retroactively for each dashcam and dog that looks at the billboard

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

marcosdumay 1y ago

You may be able to cancel out the numbers if the rate of fraud to real clicks is stable. But it's incredibly unlikely that the amount of fraud is stable, any attention from a small player can generate enough volume to eclipse all of the background. Thus no, you can't just account for it on your calculation. When a company puts up a billboard, it doesn't get taken down because a flock of birds passed by before anyone could look at it.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

It depends on whether the ad engagement / views were real people or bots - if you're a competitor, then using bots to use up your competitor's ad budget is a strategy. If you display ads on your website, then sure, it doesn't matter if a bot or real person viewed/clicked on your ad if you get paid regardless - to the point where there's a big industry of putting ads on sites then having bots engage with the site and its ads. Billboards are a bit different because that's paid per week / month, but internet ads are paid per impression or click.

rockskon 1y ago
If it's on your website then they'd be taking up bandwidth you gotta pay for.

lurk2 1y ago

> When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. Billboards sell for flat rates, online advertising is sold on the basis of impressions.

criddell 1y ago
Billboard rates are based on impressions too. A billboard along a busy road is more expensive than one out in the sticks.
- lurk2 1y ago
  The pricing of a billboard is based on projected impressions but is decoupled from the billboard’s actual impressions. You pay the flat rate based on projected impressions. It doesn’t subsequently matter if an army of robots passes through and views the billboard 10,000 times, because the original projected audience should still see the billboard. You’re getting what you paid for. It’s also possible the projections are erroneous, fraudulent, or that the actual impressions just don’t follow the projected impressions for some other reason. This is the advantage of advertising online—if you pay for 10,000 views, the ad runs until you get them. Contrast the billboard with an online ad: If you pay for 10,000 impressions, and 9,000 of those impressions end up being automated traffic, then you’ve effectively lost 90% of your advertising budget. Like you mentioned, ad buyers can and do account for this, so it’s not clear that it’s as big of a problem as this thread is making it out to be. The theory I see thrown around is that Meta and Alphabet are tacitly allowing this bot traffic to continue (or even that they are responsible for it themselves) because it allows them to sell another round of ads, but if this is what is going on it isn’t clear why firms would keep buying ads that aren’t converting.