Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets
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Eventually the common thread between all these sites was identified -- they had retargeting tags from sites like AdRoll: http://www.thesempost.com/adroll-retargeting-bot-attack-behi...
For months now, huge botnets have been producing huge amounts of fake web traffic, picking up retargeting cookies in order to later be served ads and have whoever's behind the network paid for those views. That surge has never ended. It's only grown (including becoming less easy to spot), yet nobody seems to be talking about it anymore, including the retargeting companies.
I'd love to know who's behind it and how they control so many computers.
Thankfully, as far as I know we don't do any retargeting campaigns right now (but I think we did in the past, and we were targeted by those IE7 bots in July as well), but it's still awful PITA to deal with it in analytics data.
So, I'm seconding your comment completely.
Retargeting was definitely ripe for abuse. This underscores the importance of getting MUCH smarter and pickier with your audience lists and how you actually define them and value their contribution to a given conversion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
(Or Alvin Lucier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room)
That's one of the best SF books ever.
It all comes down to risk tolerance for both parties involved. On one end of the spectrum, CPM models put ALL of the risk onto the advertiser, and CPA is at the other, putting ALL of the risk onto the publisher. CPC falls in the middle.
Depending on who has more leverage in the negotiation, what is possible for one advertiser may not be possible for another. But given the low-quality traffic I've seen on some publishers, and specific instances where I know publishers were arbitraging $.01 CPC clicks into their inventory counts, I'm not at ALL surprised they are clinging to CPM as long as they can. Their very existence depends on it.
High-quality publishers have little problem going with CPA in cases where they can control more of the funnel (which is often the weak link), and they can command a much higher spread as a result.
The big money is in brands. P&G goes on a 6-month blitz making sure every man knows about the fusion razor, and the person that cleans the house knows what a swiffer is. They use an ad blitz to secure shelf space and consumer interest, then print money hand over fist for the next decade.
As a CPA buyer, I personally welcome rampant ad fraud because it keeps the people with real money like P&G from bidding up ad prices. Ad fraud screws brands and publishers. It helps CPA advertisers, because it keeps the brand money out of the system.
It also means we have time to really look at each ad to make sure it's a fit for the audience or if there are ways to make it better.
But these aren't that much of a problem in practice, really. See how affiliate marketing works: it's CPA for all intents and purpose masquerading under a different name. The biggest difference might be that the vendor will contact you, rather than make some kind of bid, if he thinks you've the right kind of traffic.
If your audience is interested in a particular product, you quickly discover it through common sense and trial and error, as you can normally see the click-through rates.
Also, a big ticket item with a low conversion rate sometimes earns better than a smaller one with a high conversion rate. As such, maxing out your ROI is really a matter of seeing what contributes to your bottomline.
further, it's not clear what an action would be for a brand campaign
finally, you can demonstrate, eg by geo-fencing, that display ads work, even if many or most of them don't lead to attributable conversions
That said, I'd be careful painting all agencies under the same brush. There are plenty of CPA/performance-based agencies out there now, plenty that are flat fee-based, and every shade of gray inbetween.
Ultimately, ad agencies are incentivized to retain their clients, and if they have performance-based clients, just spending their money with nothing to show will not keep them in business very long. Likewise, people assume most brand advertisers at big companies are stupid. First off, you can't be a "big brand advertiser" without a "big brand" which means "a ton of cash." This also means they have fairly savvy and advanced statistical methodologies and research groups in place to help measure overall lift. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is their lifeblood. Sure some of them have idiots working there, but at a certain point you have to look at the data at a higher level because you simply can't track everything you do in an accurate manner. Doesn't mean there isn't a way to observe lift and attribute it.
This assumes that ad networks with useful returns offer such an option.
I have no idea what Facebook have been playing at over the last month or so, but I do know that the new system seemed to charge us about 4-5x as much per real visitor to our site as the old one, despite having what appears to be the closest equivalent set up for click-based charging in the two systems. Of course, even that is only Facebook's idea of clicks, which includes non-conversion clicks such as people liking your ad itself or your page, not just the conversions you actually care about.
We pulled all Facebook advertising within a couple of days as a direct result of this and asked them what was going on. They claimed nothing had changed, and I'm told they suggested the dramatic difference was just down to "increased competition". Our theory is that a lot of other small/niche advertisers were also confused by the new model, but many didn't realise what was going on and continued running their own campaigns at the vastly higher cost per click, at least initially.
I was recently in a class where we performed a case study on Google. The professor asked if anyone had ever clicked on an ad. One kid out of 60 had clicked on ad for cheap protein supplements, but hadn't bought any. Everyone else scoffed, pointed out their use of AdBlock, and cited their gullible parents as the only people they knew who might ever possibly accidentally click on an ad. Furthermore, the strong majority of our class viewed targeted ads on Facebook and Gmail as extremely creepy and unconvincing.
There are two ad models that work in my opinion:
1. Native advertising: Ads disguised as useful content. This works for changing people's perceptions, especially if its done through official or generally impartial channels, such as news outlets. People think they're getting honest information about BP's charitable acts and Coke's health benefits, but they're really being lied to. This doesn't generate any direct sales, but it can really influence consumer sentiment on different brands which can have a massive impact on sales indirectly. This method is extremely sneaky and unethical, and that's probably why it works.
2. Snapchat's new model: Opt-in, high quality ads. I liken these ads to movie trailers. They are well-crafted and curated, and you only have to watch them if you want to. This way, people who click on them are already intrigued and have committed to watching the ad, making for a more engaged and curious user base. This method is still being developed but I can see it become big in the next couple of years.
If your entire class was running AdBlock, then your sample is far from representative of the general population.
There are two ad models that work in my opinion
The thing is, opinions don't matter in this game, facts do. Do you really think major brands like Coca Cola or McDonalds or Ford spend such astronomical sums of money on advertising without being pretty good at knowing what returns they get?
You might think that no-one really buys a car because of the product placement where the successful business owner drives that model in their favourite TV show, but you'd be wrong.
That would be an unusual viewpoint. People love identifying with their heroes -- I don't think anyone considers that a secret.
Related: http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2014/10/26/h...
Of course. My point is simply that there are more tried and testing advertising models that work than just the two that exist in roymurdock's opinion.
Indeed, Adblock Plus is only installed by ~7% of Firefox users:
I don't entirely dismiss your point though. I think the large scale buying of billions of impressions is certainly broken. Big advertising agencies have taken to just throwing tons of ops people at the problem.
I think the real shift, and the pioneering ways forward are going to be a combination of social ads that are highly segmented, and then what I call "digital experiential" This: http://sortieenmer.com/ is a good example of what I mean.
Basically, buying banner ads really efficiently aren't enough anymore. We need to be creative again and be better about segmenting our audiences to make ads relevant again.
Ads that force you to watch a video for X seconds, but in those X seconds they don't even show a logo or something, are money wasted indeed, again, IMHO.
Another example, ads that follow me. Oh god how I hate these. I visit a website, usually for a product that I already own, and the freaking ad from that company follows me wherever I go. This is money wasted.
Another example, I use Waze almost everyday to figure out the best route for my comute. My 4" screen phone sits there right on top of the radio. Whenever I stop the car, an ad pops up. But they make this ad so tiny that if I need to know what brand or product it is for, I have to pick my phone and look closer. This is money wasted.
The online advertising system is pretty broken... can I fix it?
Wasted on you, probably not on the majority.
If that item is a car, probably not.
If that item is a type of beer, or a model of razor blades, or a certain liquid to put in your washing machine, sure.
But yes, the ad system is completely broken. It's a complete security nightmare - they track you, in plain text, without telling you, they sell data about you without your consent, they are a great way to deliver exploits to millions of people (and their security policies are a complete joke). There are click-farms everywhere, pricing is not transparent, there are less-than-honest practices against advertisers all over the place, inventory gets sent to networks where they don't belong, then there are the intrusive ads, the dark pattern ads...
It would be nice to have an online ads industry that is safe and secure and honest to fund Internet content, but so much about (mass) advertising is so inherently anti-customer that I don't think that will ever happen. I hope we'll figure out ways to directly pay for content instead.
Most of the Valley does not care, and seems to be invested in maintaining and expanding the scale of the fraud. The market will eventually punish this when conditions change to be less frothy. It will be 2000 redux, for similar reasons as to why SV lost so much credibility the last time around (pervasive traffic fraud).
>Another example, ads that follow me. Oh god how I hate these. I visit a website, usually for a product that I already own, and the freaking ad from that company follows me wherever I go. This is money wasted.
Well, they do work for some people. They just have to be managed in a way that doesn't create this annoyance. You cap the frequency or make it so that the offer is actually attractive and useful to the user. Or you limit what it triggers on to only go off when the user does something that signals their intent to become a customer (like adding certain items to their cart and then abandoning without buying).
Many things that people hate about online advertising as a whole is more caused by people mismanaging the ads than is caused by platform problems.
You (the advertiser) have to capture my interest in the first 10-20 frames of video, and pitch me in 5 seconds. Anything else is a waste of your money.
Your move.
Plus, at least thus far the retargeted ads have all been... friendly? Not obnoxious?
The (almost feature-complete) version running at the site above was able to automatically identify and successfully block a number of bots found scraping (or, attempting to scrape) the site since 2012. Though it wasn't an easy task, it has been quite successful at blocking most of them since their second (often first) request.
In fact since the beginning, and largely upto now, most bots and botnets can still be easily spotted. Some by their user-agent, some falling into bot traps ("honeypots") which are invisible to regular users, some failing to load images (something that a regular user wouldn't do), some crawling the site at an unreasonable pace... most usually don't provide an http referer, some even appear to have a number of cookies set for your domain.
It's not always easy to spot them though - some botnets can only be undone by blocking their full IP subnet, or permanently banning their (sub)domains, like .cn, .ua or .br (if you don't have legitimate traffic from those domains).
Unfortunately, I haven't had enough spare time to complete my project (which tests all of the above conditions to spot bots, but is not ready for a release), but I could if there is some market - or I could sell the project if somebody is interested.
It is (probably) impossible to make a 99%+ effective bot blocker without having a very large number of false positives.
I've been working on this (and abusive user blocking) for a long time now and I'm roughly where you are, I have a product, it could be launched but I'm very wary of launching a half baked product that would eventually end up being disabled. I've had the help of a friendly corporate entity that gave me millions of datapoints to play with allowing me to look into their kitchen both on the support end and on the incoming traffic end as well as verified abusers.
This identified various fraud such as ad click fraud, affiliate scams, repeated harassment by the same users under different names, spam of all kinds and so on. It's been working there for more than 4 months on a fairly high level of confidence. And yet, I'm still wary of rolling it out on a larger scale.
The real winner in this is Amazon. Amazon doesn't pay anybody when someone clicks on a product listing. They have to buy. Same for eBay. So there's no point in 'bots clicking on those sites.
Online ad rates have been dropping for some time now. Most of the ads run by Google Adsense (the ones on third party sites) are there because Google pushes advertisers hard to use that feature. Most of the conversions from Google Ads come from the ones on search results, which are displayed when the user is looking for something. Those are useful. Most other forms of advertising are interruptions for users interested in something else.
The classic tactic ad-based companies try as ad prices drop is increasing the ad density. That's called "pulling a Myspace". It didn't work for Myspace, which tanked. Twitter seems to be headed that way - usage up, profits not too good.
The way this is going, online advertising is going to have the conversion (to a sale) rate of spam - one in thousands.
The entirety of innovation has been sizes & styles and tracking and not on presentation and usability that's complementary with content.
It's not a 'you made your bed' situation, but not wholly removed from it, either.
No, I can't say I do. If such crime is so rampant, one would think it was ripe for law enforcement to do more about it. I wonder if reporting it to the police every time one visits a relative and removes crap from their computer would start a disruption.
They basically asked me if I was reporting large-scale financial theft, human traficking or child porn. If it wasn't one of those, they didn't have the manpower or will to pursue it.
Just like when you advertise in a classical news paper, you only know how many copies are typically sold, not how many humans actually look at your ad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action
It's been about for a long time.
Case in point...
- You work with 3 CPA networks
- Each has their own tracking tag that their terms require payment be based off of
- A conversion comes in and each network registered an impression (or heck, even a click) before the visitor in question signed up.
Who gets the credit?
Well, if you don't have an agreement that states billing is done off of numbers from YOUR ad server, where you can dedupe and set an attribution model that makes sense for your particular business, the answer is that all of them will.
So you are paying 3x when realistically odds are that not all of them should get full credit. Hell, that doesn't even factor in other channels like organic, social, etc. that all likely played a role as well.
The advertisers will not have to put in more efforts to measure conversions and accordingly bid for the traffic.
What do you do to help inform what the settings should be? Unless an advertiser has a solution like VisualIQ, Convertro, Adometry, etc. (and they've all been bought up so who knows what will happen to them), or GA Premium, they likely don't have a dynamic attribution solution in place to help inform them as to what those values should be and how they are shifting over time (because in reality those weights are anything but static).
I really wish DSPs did more in the way of thought leadership on how to properly value view-throughs and other ways of measuring contribution as view-throughs are the majority of what they drive, and that metric is coming under increasing scrutiny (as it should).
Interestingly if these same bots were capable of making real purchases and were run by ad companies this behavior may be sustainable because some people are making money. Almost like wall street.
Let's say I spend $100K advertising on FB to get people a my FB page or group. In order to now be able to reach them I have to constantly pay FB through boosts and further ads.
Why? Because they've installed a mechanism through which they limit the reach of every single post you make on your page. And, if a percentage of your likes are fake or non-responsive for various reasons (they liked the picture on your ad, couldn't care less about your content) it is very likely your posts will be to a great degree wasted on a useless audience.
In addition to this they have NOT installed a mechanism through which I can engage with my entire audience. I understand that people don't want their timeline spammed. At the same time, they liked the page. If they liked Tesla it is likely they want to hear from Tesla. Facebook provides no mechanism through which you can do this (message your entire audience) unless you pay them for every single point of contact on every single message/post.
This, to me, is fundamentally wrong. They don't own my customers. I do. A fan page or group owner should not have to pay FB over and over again to reach his or her audience. It's a scam.
In sharp contrast to this, if I spend the same $100K advertising on Google and get my customers/likes/fans to register on my site I can then build a real relationship with them over time. If they don't like what I am saying they can opt out of the emails they receive. If they do, they keep receiving them. And I don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars every time I need to communicate with them.
A more concrete example is a product we tested on FB. It was aimed at medical professionals. With custom audiences you'd think you can reach a good number of your prospects. That isn't necessarily true. The heuristics they use can deliver anyone who, for example, likes pages with medical information. I am being simplistic. I think you get the point. Still, a good argument could be made that one could do worst outside FB. In terms of targeting a narrow audience this might mostly be true depending on the approach taken.
Reaching medical professionals on FB is expensive. Likes can easily cost you more than a dollar when all is said and done. And, generally speaking, there isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between ad spend and actions or page likes. So, you spend $100K to reach medical professionals and you might get 1,000 to 5,000 legitimate likes. In other words, you could actually spend a very real $20 to $100 per prospect. And then you have to spend money again every single time you need to reach them. We all know that a marketing message must be received multiple times before action is produced. You could very easily spend another $10 per prospect before you get a conversion. That's why I say this is a huge scam. If I spent $20 to $100 per effective member to a page or group, from that point forward they should be my members, prospects or customers, not Facebook's. And extorting money out of me in order to reach all of them with every post is just plain wrong.
The same scenario plays out far better if you avoid FB, use Google and other channels to reach your desired audience and bring people to your own environment for engagement. We've tested this with various audiences and also had plenty of prior experience before advertising on FB. We can consistently produce better results out of direct engagement with an email list as small as 200 people than by spending almost any amount of money on FB.
This is why I don't understand when I see TV ads where companies are subverting their brands to FB by telling people to go to their FB page rather than their own landing pages. They spend millions of dollars creating and airing these ads and then they have to go back and shovel more money at FB to reach the very people they spent so much money to target. That's just insane. More people doesn't mean better results.
In the end I think it is about a basic business formula: Is there a more cost-effective and higher-converting approach to reaching customers and building relationships with them than using FB ads? At the moment my answer to that question is: Yes. Absolutely. I could be wrong but my experiences so far tell me otherwise.