> 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.
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.
Your calculations make as much sense as pouring out 90% of a can of beer, claiming you have just made vodka, and simultaneously trying to pay only for the 10% of beer that is left.
The entire premise of the article is quite accurate and most companies are spending money on third-parties to do what this guy has done to recoup fraudulent spends; so, none of this is new to the industry. Everyone knows it's happening and it's all part of the gig; it benefits everyone except those spending so little is truly done to correct it.
It is the ad network's problem because they are showing ads to all those bots which costs them. It is also the ad networks problem in that they are not effective - maybe for your $10k for 47 sales is good enough, but for most it isn't and so they lose customers who pay attention to value. It is also their problem in that by giving a false number of views they lose some face, but this is always a proxy that isn't of much value to anyone.
The more important thing that is your problem is verifying the ads are worth it. How do you know the ad resulted in 47 sales. A large number of adds should be buy this in the future not today, and thus clicks are the wrong measure.
You do understand that when I stop/reduce the fraudulent clicks that leaves extra ad budget available to be spent by clicks from real people who will actually buy things.
I have 0 incentive to not work to stop/reduce the fraudulent clicks. My ad spend stays the same but my sales go up.
The point here, for me, is that a microeconomic perspective on this whole question is more salient than a purely technical one.
Fake clicks give the illusion that ads are working and instead you have to optimize your funnel or whatever else.
The online ad market is extremely inefficient because it has no idea how much ad spend is even reaching people.
I am fine with spending $10,000 on ads (or whatever amount).
The issue is that when I know $5,000 of it was spent on clicks that had 0% chance to convert. For every fraudulent click I can block/prevent that is one more click that can be made by a real person who may actually make a purchase.
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?
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.
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.