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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

It's not that large a number. All of advertising is a $500-$800 billion business depending on where you get the numbers, so that represents 2.5% lost to fraud.

That is believable to me. Larger than fraud in a lot of markets, but not particularly large, and everyone knows the market is full of bots, bad stats, and scams.

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A recent estimate of the digital ad market puts it at $105 billion[1]. Divide $16 billion by that and you get 15%.

[1] http://avc.com/2017/12/the-digital-advertising-duopoly/

As someone who has run a lot of decent sized FB campaigns, the norm would be for me to receive about 60-70% of the clicks I paid for. Not saying that was all fraud, maybe some people clicked and changed their mind... but I suspect the real "fraud" number is much, much higher than 2.5%. My guess is around 25%.

Clicks aren't sessions so you can't compare them and claim most of the missing sessions are fraud.

I was matching my advertising reports with server logs, GA, and piwik. I wasn't trying to naively compare two different metrics.

Well still, even in a perfect set up something like 20% of your display clicks still won't be counted as sessions. Lots of misclicks, exits before analytics loads, etc.

Edit: Oh did you mean advertising reports for sessions?

I tried all kinds of things. The most interesting thing (to me) was the clicks_paid_for / clicks_landed changed, depending on different targeting mechanisms I used.

I may have forgotten to acknowledge that I never really cared I didn't get all the clicks -- I was doing a CPA campaign, so I just baked in the non-visits.

Depending on targeting and platform, there was almost always a 20-70% discrepancy between the clicks I paid for (reported by the ad platform), and the visits that landed on my site (reported by GA, server logs, piwik, and analytics.js).

Also interesting - AdWords was always within 5%.

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