When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions.
Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields.
The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers. Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up.
Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case.
Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.
I made an ad fraud startup which ran into the exact same problem. With video ads, advertisers will pay 10x more to be in a “user initiated” video player (the user clicked or there was a reasonable expectation there’d be a video on that page - YouTube, camera icon on preceding link, etc).
But more often then not, those ads are running in an autoplay context (sticky video players in the bottom corner, large players in the footer, etc).
I built a mechanism which could tell the difference (viewport, fixed positioning, fingerprint elements on the page, provide a screenshot of the offended page with your ad on it, and various other signals).
We ran tests with advertisers, agencies, demand side platforms (dsps), server side platforms (ssps). We’d compare their existing fraud numbers (very low) with our reports (80% fraud).
Within each company, we’d have a champion saying “this is going to change everything. Quality supply, better performance metrics, etc etc”. Then we’d get introduced to a team whose compensation was driven by “percentage of spend” - every deal died at this stage.
My opinion: if your company is using online advertising tied to conversions (someone buying something, or potentially signing up for something) then you’ll be fine as long as it’s economical. But if your ads are for brand awareness, be extremely careful running on any website which isn’t in the top 10 sites on the internet.
A funny anecdote that's not fraud but puts a bit more ambiguity into the alleged targeted ad eyeballs even from the big players. There's a good amount of "ambient" content on YouTube these days. Some not targeted at adults or even humans.
I have been playing YouTube videos on my TV of birds & wildlife, for my house cats to enjoy. There is one guy who makes 8 hour long videos. There is one content creator basically targeting this market of "birds for your cats to watch".
I have noticed that the YouTube app on my Samsung TV will play for an unbelievable number of hours without any "are you still watching" prompt. Easily 6 hours!!
I've been playing them videos almost daily for weeks and only got this prompt this weekend finally.
So some companies probably think they are paying for targeted ads to some category like "people interested in cats / wildlife", YouTube collects a cut and pays the content creator a cut. All this for feline-only eyeballs.
I do the same thing, but in my case it's guinea pig eyeballs. But I'm a Premium subscriber so I don't get ads anyway.
Kids videos on YouTube[0] is another vector of techincally-not-fraudulent-but-very-low-value ad inventory. The stats on those videos also tend to be highly suspicious - i.e. basically no comments but millions of views and likes. Normally you'd call this bots, but then you realize that small children are literally incapable of commenting on all those Pregnant Elsa & Spiderman videos they are subjecting themselves to.
[0] Not to be confused with YouTube Kids, a subbrand/app intended for small children to satisfy US COPPA
I have played serval hours of an ambient ocean sounds vid on YouTube and the only advertising was at the beginning. That was years ago, but I suspect they intentionally avoid inserting advertising in the middle of such videos.
Ironically, it seems like the best indicator an actual human is there to view your ad would be if they skipped them after 5 seconds or watched the whole thing.
Could be because some people actually watch these videos and click skip occasionally. The sea sounds was a static image so I doubt people just stared at the empty screen for very long.
That’s not fair to the kitty. Why can’t they skip ads too? Let’s get the European nut bags to draft up some ridiculous legislation like GDPR that forces advertisers to put another pop up warning potential ata they can’t skip these ads
Hmm, that raises the question whether marketing can be made cost effective. One would need to get the cat excited about a product that it can somehow instruct its human caretaker about...
See I run a DSP and I'm not sure what incentive we would have to be against this? My primary goal is to keep advertisers spending, and the better their results the longer they hang around. I have a vested interest in eliminating fraud if followed to that conclusion. Then again we focus on performance campaigns not brand awareness so we're a bit a different. Most of our inventory too comes from large sandboxed audio apps so while not perfect on the fraud front there is less potential for it from less players.
Then again I am a startup and I have seen how some people at very large adtech companies operate. Less sophisticated clients (many of them with huge budgets) can't properly evaluate what they are buying and thus default to cheapest CPMs possible. It's unfortunate and a symptom of the incredibly opaque ads stack and inventory.
But yeah - I'm totally out of my depth here, and while the Wikipedia articles makes some sense if anyone here wanted to throw out (or suggest) a quick primer on this industry I know that _I_ would learn a lot :)
The acronym was defined in the comment to which they were replying (thus two levels above your own reply); it would have been redundant to again define it yet again.
The acronym was defined in the post to which they were replying (two levels above your reply), so it would have been a bit redundant for them to define it yet again.
Amidst all this fraud there must be a huge opportunity for a startup with a different model that actually delivers verifiable results (eg. higher fee for a cut of affiliated sales would better align incentives and perhaps encourage a reduction of unwanted spam to end users).
But it isn't even a problem that experts don't know how to solve it. We know how to solve this issue. The problem is that at basically every large company someone's bonus is tied to keeping the current status quo. There are all these measures and statistics around ad revenue and spending, but the problem is that a lot of it is naïve and outdated, but nonetheless John's quarterly bonus is tied to a program that is defunct and wasteful, and often these are business people, they are not going to blatantly work against their own interests.
It is like with Google. They have a huge issue with the company spinning up new projects and then abandoning them at the drop of a pin, and it is crystal clear why this happens (people take on impactful[i.e. visible] projects for their promotion packet, but the incentives are for heading a project, not for maintaining it). It isn't a matter of figuring out a solution, the problem is that the problem will persist as long as important stakeholders are financially incentivized to resist change.
By top 10, do you mean google / Facebook ads? I have some friends whose online store got a lot do traffic from Facebook but I don’t know much personally
> I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot
Ad fraud is an adversarial game, and you can't 'solve' it with simple things like this. You'll temporarily cause a lot of pain for the bot operators (yay!) but then they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets (hacked consumer devices). Which is already what they do when trying to defraud advertisers on networks that take fraud seriously (which it sounds like your company didn't).
> they'll adjust and start sending the traffic from botnets
I'm not saying using a botnet is "hard", per se, but the difference in difficulty compared to using a hosting provider is significant. If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well.
I ran a volunteer bot net that generated legitimate looking traffic to websites. Its incredibly easy for anyone with a large network of gray and black hats to pull it off.
My botnet was specifically for the optimization of bounce rates, we kept away from any ads of any sort, and only navigated around the internal website through clicking relative links or absolute links with the same domain.
If you wanted lower bounce rates, you had to also run this on your PC, and kick over $50/mo. It was my favorite service I ever wrote even if it did help rank websites that naturally shouldn't have been ranked higher.
Maybe this deserves a blog post, but I'm lazy. So here is the back story from 10,000 feet.
I worked for a company that basically gave me 80% time. 20% of my time was supporting the products we already launched, the other 80% was experimenting and coming up with new products.
I was blogging kind of regularly back then (once every week or so), on a subdomain without any actual backlinks other than from a few "no-index" and "no-follow" links on social media. So technically my website should not have been in the top page for any search term and I shouldn't have had ANY traffic, but it usually was #1 or #2 for various WordPress and jQuery related searches (I had a couple of jQuery plugins and wrote some php hacks that eventually took down millions of websites), and I got 10k monthly visitors on average.
So I started looking into WHY I was the top result of those queries, and it was because when someone landed on my site with that query, the bounce rate was only 10-30% compared to most other sources being 85-90% bounce. The exact technical meaning of a bounce is lost on me now, but it had to do with how long you stayed on the site without leaving or if you click on other internal links for the site.
So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.
I first tried this with Selenium (or an equivalent back then), and Google blocked it almost immediately. So then I hacked together a headless version of chromium, with some standard but randomly generated user agent, and eventually expanded it to IE and Firefox as well.
And the marvelous thing is it WORKED! And surprisingly well. BUT you had to get your site in the top 100 results, and be running google AdSense before it would work. It also proved what we had long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without (probably because of telemetry data they could gather).
The concept worked, we launched the product, and got a few dozen subscribers over the next month, BUT the demand just never materialized, and after 6 months we started seeing diminishing returns as google started captcha-ing our requests, and eventually it was no longer useful and we shuttered it.
Without a large enough network of consumer PCs on consumer internet, it was doomed to fail. The network needed to be around 1000 users before it would work. We even tried giving away free limited accounts (20 visits/day for free if you ran the script, and it stacked, so if you had 3 different PCs on 3 different ISPs - home/work/mom & dads house/etc - you would get 60 visits/day).
Ultimately, I think there wasn't enough education around it, and nothing we did marketing wise really helped.
> long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without
Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.
It is definitely hard to compare one site ranking vs another and definitively conclude that AdSense made one rank higher than just Analytics, but in every case AdSense+Analytics sites correlated with a better ranking/.
All of the cases were sites that were doing SEO (on- and off-site). There were lots of differences between them, so never an apples to apples, but Analytics + AdSense > AdSense only > Analytics only.
It was very compelling results. Never did a GA ONLY site improve better than an AS only or an AS + GA.
Because we didn't forcefully take over anyone's computer. You voluntarily signed up and installed the bot. And it was free if you installed the script to use the botnet to crawl your own websites.
> So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.
Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5 minutes on that domain and navigated around it?
If you're hoping to participate in the SEO game, you have to utilize google's javascript analytics code. Their code collects and reports on a variety of user activity. It's safe to assume (based on google published articles [1]) that the data collected is used to influence the site's rankings.
You don't need to install Google Analytics to rank on Google.
The article you cited mentions CRUX data[1], which comes from the Google Chrome browser, not Google Analytics. That data is reported to website users in the form of the Core Web Vitals report, which is a different product than Google's ranking algorithm. Although similar data is probably used as a ranking factor, you can't conclude that from this support documentation.
> If bot operators are being forced to use botnets, I'd say the solution is working very well.
If ad-fraud goes from "We accidentally ran these 'indexing-bots' against some websites, causing some counters to be off. Sorry about that!" to "We deployed our code to run on stolen or hacked machines through botnets paid for in crypto on the dark web", you've moved from legally gray to clearly illegal.
I'm not objecting to making the move (definitely do it) but about selling it as a "solution" when it's really beginning a perpetual fight.
People often don't recognize that they are in an adversarial situation, where taking a step that looks like it solves the problem does much less than you expect because other people will later counter your work.
Only in adversarial games, and most of engineering isn't adversarial. Enabling compression on your website or designing your UI to make things clear to users give real improvements that don't degrade with time. Other sorts of improvements like optimizing your JS delivery or your server specs decay with time, because people make incidental changes elsewhere, but this is a slow process. Adversarial situations are very different because there's a motivated person on the other end trying to counter what you're doing, and gains are especially short-lived.
I like to divide solutions into four approximate categories based on what sort of scenario they're applying to:
1. Collaborative situations: your solution works better and better, because people notice and work with you. Ex: designing an icon or coining a word for a new concept; over time more and more people recognize it, use it, etc.
2. Indifferent situations: your solution continues working about the same, because it's not about interaction with others who adapt. Ex: enabling compression on HTML serving, inventing joist hangars, new cancer surgery technique. Most inventions and engineering is in this category.
3. Decay situations: your solution slowly stops working as well, because the world moves on. Ex: payroll software needs to be updated as payroll regulations change.
4. Adversarial situations: your solution quickly stops working well, because others are directly trying to counter your work. Ex: investing strategies, antibiotics, ad fraud, ad fraud detection.
When you're evaluating a solution based on how it seems like it would work in the current world, thinking about how collaborative-vs-adversarial the situation is helps you predict what the full rollout of your solution would look like.
It's nice that you have a framework but you still haven't addressed my (I think fairly simple) question about how any of it applies here.
I realise this probably comes of a little snarky but I've tried following your comments in good faith and it just seems like a very abstract hammer looking for a nail without really reading/listening to the quite literal/simple/not-very-abstract discussion being had here.
We started with EdwardDiego calling blocking cloud IPs "a simple solution to ad fraud" and me replying that because ad fraud is an adversarial situation this wouldn't be nearly as much of a solution as they seemed to think.
Then, in our subthread it seemed to me like you were saying that it being adversarial doesn't matter, and wins are always ephemeral ("every solution is a component in the perpetual fight"). I responded by explaining how this varies by situation, with some where wins compound (cooperative) but that the adversarial nature of ad fraud shortens the lifetime of wins dramatically compared to other domains.
-cuts their profits in half or more because they have to pay for the proxies(or if they own them they can't sell them since they need them)
-it prevents most low skilled people from doing it
-it prevents them from doing on it on an infinite scale, AWS have more than a 100 millions IPs, it's rare to see a grey market proxy provider with more than a few millions clean IPs, and it usually cost like 40 cents per IP, where it can be FREE on AWS
You add basic protection against headless browsers, behavioral analysis etc...And now 99% of the people who can fool you are already making 6 figures in legitimate jobs and won't risk 10 years of jail to earn just a bit more money.
When you’re competitive it can be enough to be just a bit harder to crack than the competition. The bots may just choose another advertising platform as the target.
Each layer of difficulty reduces the number of adversaries you have to deal with. Check your spam folders to see how many are incredibly basic and easily caught with the simplest tools.
Moreover, fraudsters are generally lazy. If fraud that works against somebody else doesn't work for you, the fraudster won't go after you until they've saturated all the “somebody elses”, which may be a long time. I used to work in fraud detection in adtech, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit.
Whether the solution is working well isn't about whether you have caused work for fraudsters (though I'm all for that) but about whether you are actually preventing fake traffic.
Difficulty will always have a direct impact on scale: if you've significantly increased the difficulty for fraudsters that's going to have a knock-on effect on the amount of fraudulent traffic you receive.
There's no such thing as zero; a successful measure is one that achieves significant reduction.
Definitely! I was taking issue with your counting "forced to use botnets" as a success, but it sounds like you're actually saying it's just a decent proxy for success, because it is hard enough that you expect this to massively cut down on fraud?
(I think of botnets as not actually that hard a step for fraudsters, and fraudsters as being very determined, but it depends a lot on how much money people can make with fraud against your particular situation)
This is like burglars. You don't need to scare all the burglars, you just need to make your house slightly more inconvenient to rob than your neighbor's door.
Of course not! The my parent's company is completely in the wrong, and running an online advertising business with a "pretend they're not there" approach to bots is a terrible idea. I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.
> I'm just saying it's nowhere near as easy as my parent seems to expect.
Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device.
And of course, as you are in this industry, you know that Apple devices are the highest quality, valuable, converting clicks in the ecosystem.
Then again, PAT would diminish inventory, prices would rise, and people would get better, but nonetheless similar, ROI that they get today.
It is intellectually dishonest to make predictions about ROI. Nobody really knows. Bot farms, fraud, those are all red herrings. Most advertising has shitty creatives.
> Apple could eliminate most ad fraud that pretends to be its platforms, by generating tokens from its secure enclave for advertisers, and providing a REST API to validate the token is from a live device.
What stops someone from buying an Apple device and generating a zillion tokens?
Rate limiting access to the enclave? Somewhat related, I fear this is where we are going to end up with secure attestation, limiting web access to approved devices.
But what if you (the party who bans the cloud provider IP ranges) don't have a majority share of the market, and your bigger competitors don't block these ranges?
Then it would be easier to bot owners to just move onto your competitors, and you would have higher efficiency than them.
That's fair, it wouldn't have prevented all fraud, but it would've excised a decent segment of obvious fraud, and tbh, we weren't Google, so the transition from t2.micros to bot nets may have proven economically unviable for the cut-rate scammers.
All "well, actually" aside, my point was, and remains... ...we could've taken some action against obvious fraud, but we didn't, because the business team didn't want their numbers to go down.
Currently working in ad tech. Your solution wouldn’t work today because so many current and upcoming privacy solutions being rolled out across platforms are run through a VPN or VPN-like service, and many with IP rotation. Many of the bots are using these services so that their IP appears as coming from a legitimate privacy service like Cloudflare.
The privacy service providers don’t have good incentives to attempt to identify which users are bots because it would undermine their privacy claims. Tough situation.
We do think we have a solution to this but it’s unlikely to last in a privacy arms race. There’s really only one logical place this ends with the ad model surviving, and it’s not pretty.
People using a privacy service are also highly likely to be using an ad blocker, I don't think trying to identify which ones are bots is even worthwhile.
Ads that are pre-rendered by the first-party origin, embedded in the page, cannot be blocked by ad blockers, unless the ad blocker keeps a giant blacklist of rendered advertising content. I don’t know about you but I’ve been starting to see more of this kind of content. Ad blockers are a separate issue from bot traffic.
But more importantly, while your assumption is probably true today, it won’t be soon. On-by-default network privacy enhancement is coming, and already here in places. You can easily have these services in place by accident, today, without knowing the first thing about them or why you might want them.
Origin-served ads cannot be blocked by host-based adblockers, but can be blocked by hueristics-based adblockers.
I'd implemented a variant of this as banner ads began increasing in prevalence in the late 1990s / early aughts, using CSS to filter out standard banner sizes and path elements. Tools such as uBlock Origin incorporate far more sophisticated variants of this. It's also possible to block (or selectively permit) specific page elements with a CSS editor (e.g., Stylus), with web proxies (including SSL/TLS terminating proxies), or other means.
My experience is that if a site tries excessively hard to cram ads down my throat, I'll kill it and look elsewhere.
For a long time the argument was that this was a limited technically-sophisticated niche response, and that "the average person" didn't care and wouldn't bother. The increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tools and default incorporation (e.g., in the iOS platform) suggests that the barrier is knowledge and skill rather than of caring, and that people who can block ads in general will.
This itself should be a cautionary note to both advertisers and advertising platforms, as the trend will be to drive the audience bar further down sophistication and means capabilties, meaning what ad content is shown aims at less remunerative segments, and tends toward ever-increasingly noxious methods. That story ends poorly, as do most Gresham's Law dynamics.
OP mentioned blocking cloud providers but didn’t explicitly mention CDNs, and at least with AWS their IP list allows you to filter out CloudFront. I don’t know of a list of second tier relay operators for iCloud Private Relay but I do know that Fastly[1] and Cloudflare[2] were going to be participating, and presumably other CDNs with their larger number of POPs compared to most VPS providers would be logical choices to run it. So blocking only VPS IP ranges might not necessarily affect iCloud Private Relay.
1: https://www.fastly.com/blog/icloud-private-relay-and-a-priva...
2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/icloud-private-relay/
12 year adtech veteran here. Ad fraud is a business problem, not a tech problem.
All the major solutions are well known but not implemented because of the massive effect it would have on business for everyone down the chain for advertisers.
The entire industry meets every year. They can figure this out and fix most big problems in a few hours, but incentives are not aligned for that to happen.
Advertising is corrupt, but much of business (and public perception) is corrupt in a much similar way. What you are seeing is a lack of integrity shared by business leaders who don't ask for rigor when their minions report higher rates of "engagement". There's too much of an incentive for the people in charge to be satisfied with someone telling them that something is "up", and too much incentive for those coming up with the numbers to not perform due diligence. I've seen this multiple times firsthand.
Our number of subscribers is through the roof! Mr. Corneroffice will be thrilled! Wait as sec... 90% of them are people we gave away free trials to. Ahh... fuck it. Mr. Corneroffice isn't gonna know or care, and neither will the investors. We're BigCo! Everything we say is considered official by most people anyway. After all, Mr. Corneroffice told us "fail fast, fail early" and "fake it 'til you make it". If he secretly knew I was including the free subscribers, he'd be proud! But he can't know because then I might not get that sweet, sweet bonus. Besides, it's not a lie, right?
Mr. Corneroffice has an incentive to catch BS like that, which is that aside from subscriber numbers, he's probably accountable for retention numbers, or even revenue numbers. If he accepts the fake numbers this month, his retention numbers are going to nosedive next month and he's going to look for a neck to choke. If he's content to fake all his numbers, his boss will have a similar counter-incentive, and so on all the way to the top until you reach investors, who are strongly incentivized to detect bullshit, if only to unload the stock onto some other sucker.
Perhaps the argument goes better if you say competition without rules leads to mafia, ie., people stop competing and form gangs -- since this is more efficient for them. These gangs then monopolise trade, and use violence to stop people competing with them.
If they disagree, you can always point to the state itself as an example. But likewise, without a winning mafia to set the rules, others arise quickly. No group wants to compete, the want to have already won.
They don't "fear" it any more than you or I "fear" going into work every morning, but competing honestly in the market is how they benefit society, and monopoly rents are the carrot that they're chasing. It's up to us to get our money's worth out of them.
No, because a capitalist (in the friedman, etc. sense) distinguishes between free markets and ancap-competition. A free market is a construct of a state with a functioning legal system, requiring as it does, property rights (, limited liability, etc.).
Capitalism is not ancap libertarianism. Indeed, it seems quite clear that ancap is an iterative contradiction, as "rule-free competition" cannot produce free markets.
There is no market that does not adjust itself with new circumstances. Crypto prices fell and GPUs are now affordable without any government intervention. Amazing isnt it ?
No one claims markets don't adjust. The claim is that unregulated markets often don't adjust for the benefit of the society at large. It weren't as amazing when the GPU prices soared due to mining, was it?
That's not quite right. The affordability increased slightly with the falling prices. But the merge basically opened the floodgates. It was a change in technology rather than a "market change" (as in business incentives balancing over time) that caused it.
1. Even with the bots, the price made sense for advertisers for so long because of how cheap ads were.
2. Its starting to not make as much sense and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc.
TLDR: Markets work but just not real time and not very perfectly. The issue with rules (esp excessive rules) is the corruption of the rule maker. To enforce these rules, the rule maker tends to have the ultimate capability for coercion.
And If you think "voting" prevents this corruption then you are r*ar*ed. Let alone the corruption of the masses which btw has resulted in the greatest acts of violence in history (USSR, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, 20th century Japan, French Revolution..)
> and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc.
What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views):
I think the point is, the problem isn't a problem if it is priced into the product. It's cheap as hell to show ads on a cost per delivery model because the value is low, in part because of bots, in part because people don't click on ads much and in part because it's not clear how useful they are for building brand awareness. If there are more bots than previously suspected, sites will need to charge less to account for that. That's how the market functions, not a sign that it is not functioning.
>When I worked in adtech, I proposed a simple solution to ad fraud on our platform - assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads, don't count their impressions.
Wait, is that not automatic on every single Ad network out there? WTF?
What, you just expect Google to show you a giant red box saying "Whoops, we detected that you were trying to do an ad fraud! Better luck next time!". Google will happily show you whatever ads you request, but they won't count them as monetizable impressions and they won't charge advertisers for them. The goal is to make it impossible to tell as a bot operator whether your fraud was successful. So why give bot operators more info about how to evade your detections?
It is wonderful that after cable TV, where a few thousand of individuals' viewing habits determined who watched what, we now have an absolute stellar system where everything can be measured, yet, nobody wants to see the real numbers. :D
> The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers
Furthermore they were not spending their own money to buy those ads. Shareholders money is (almost) for free. In my experience companies run by the founders with little or no investors are always more careful about the money they spend.
What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code.
> "What kind of rational system would ever incentivize spending rather than results (aka sales?). Sounds like the marketing equivalent of being paid by the line of code."
OP works for an advertising company. They get paid by clients to run advertising campaigns. Employees of the advertising company get bonuses for closing high-profile deals with clients. The employees are incentivized to continue bringing in more revenue streams and continue closing more high-profile deals.
The deals couldn't have been made in the first place without some form of trust between the parties. As long as the clients are seeing results (aka return-on-investment, ROI), the trust is maintained, and the deals are renewed. Different clients have different budgets, and have different ways of measuring their ROI (sales are one parameter, but there can be more). No one would be buying those advertising services if they wouldn't be seeing ROI.
It is generally acknowledged that "advertising works". In reality though, there are lots of factors at play.
Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping. That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss.
There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as expected waste.
Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot, which have dubious correlations with reality but they look nice on dashboards.
I used to own a digital agency. I had a client who was the 80 year old CEO of a 120 year old military contractor. He sat through a meeting where his 27 year old marketing manager and I walked through advertising metrics for digital ads. At the end he said,
“This is all very interesting, and will be helpful for Kelly (the marketing manager). I’m going to decide if we renew next year with this: increase in sales divided by ad spend. I’m looking for a number greater than 3.”
This is the dichotomy. The company’s purchasing the ads want to spend based on conversions - the ad companies want to charge based on impression or clicks (if forced).
They did. We got them 5.2, but it was very hard, and it was also very good for our team to have to deal with a hard metric target. We got a lot better at ad buys.
In adtech you have to spend all the budget a client gives you. They get very pissy if you don't and it's not unheard of for clients to penalise you several multiples of the unspent budget.
> Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.
I had friends in college who did door to door sales for a major cable company. At the beginning of every week they had to stop by the office to pick up a stack of flyers and at the end of every week they had to mark off the houses they visited on a map. They got paid per flyer distributed and every flyer was distributed directly into the trash can.
They got paid, no one got harassed by door to door sales people, and the cable company got their marked off maps. Everyone was happy.
When I worked at a company that got like almost 100% of their revenue from ads, we got a very serious warning from an ad agency to stop serving our ads to bots. They gave us like 7 days to fix our traffic or we'd get removed, effectively killing our company. Scary time to be an engineer that morning! That was like 6-7 years ago, though! It's kinda crazy that things have changed this much.
I’ve worked for a company that used an Azure hosted internet gateway/firewall that all their sites connected through using an MPLS VPN. So there are definitely some non-not users with traffic coming from there. But yeah, happy enough to not see ads when piping traffic through those ranges!
So how about starting by not actually blocking the bots, but publishing two numbers, the original calc including bots, and the adjusted with bots removed. Try to estimate said number for competitors as well. Then after some years try to move to using mainly the second set of numbers.
"assume any UA coming from an IP range owned by a cloud provider was a bot and don't show them ads"
As someone who is trying to get into google ads for their startup, what's the best way to do this ? Is there a nice Google Ads 101 other than Google's own tutorials ?
> it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers
So much about how terrible things are in general can be tied back to this one simple concept.
that almost sounds whistleblower status. If they are a public company, and they are knowingly using bad data to look more financially successful, there may be something there.
Worst case, people using a VPN hosted on EC2 might not see an ad, but I was certain they'd cope. Best case, higher quality traffic increases yields.
The business team vetoed that, it would adversely impact their numbers in the current quarter, and well, a significant proportion of their total comp was bonuses tied to those numbers. Also, the shareholders seemed to be of the mindset that has infected cryptocurrency speculators where no matter what, the spice must flow, wait, I mean, the number go up.
Then there were all the "bonuses" and "incentives" negotiated with big advertisers or publishers. We just referred to them as kickbacks, because they totally are, but labeling something in code as kickbackPercentage was verboten. Just in case.
Advertising has always been corrupt. Bots just corrupt it a little further.