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Comment by ventana | Hacker News Reader

That's great!

I was experimenting with Google Ads traffic to one of the websites I cared about, and even just looking at the existence of mouse move and scroll events, let alone the patterns, made me understand how many bots, or users who just (mis)clicked the ad and never did any action on my website, were counted as paid clicks in Google Ads. Analyzing for patterns like in this article would've made even more sense.

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'Clicks' like that have bolstered stock prices for decades now.

I alway wondered why so many people (not saying you're one of them) get mad at being charged for misclicks and bots.

It all averages out.

You bid $3 a click because your conversion ratio is x, and paying $3 is worth it. Even if 90% of the traffic is bots, it works out. If Google filtered out all the bots, the conversion ratio for you and your competitors would go up, and your competitors would be willing to pay $27 per click and you'd outbid at $30, being at the exact same result at the end of the month spent for the exact same results.

The problem is when your competitors get the idea to spam your campaign with fake traffic, which is a real thing that happens.

For me, $3 a click would've worked for some projects, but $30 would not work for sure. Knowing that it's $30 and not $3 before the start of some campaigns, I would've saved some money. I instead paid that money to Google for this lesson.

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