How old is this article? Is it a reprint from years ago? Because he talks about suddenly pivoting his data by “conversion rate” and having an AHA moment about how we measure success.
Except… conversion rate is a bone-standard, absolutely ubiquitous way to measure traffic quality in ecommerce. No one places ads without knowing how many of them lead to conversions. Defining your conversion event is often part of setting up an ad in the first place.
He then goes on to describe his hand-rolled script that analyses mouse movements to differentiate humans from bots.
Except… that’s exactly what the “I am human” checkbox from CloudFlare and Google have been doing for years.
CloudFlare have said that about 30% of Internet traffic is bots. This is well known. It could easily be 70% for some sites.
I would say that there’s nothing to see here, but it’s probably a little worse than that: just adding some really shaky analysis and anecdotal data to an already widely-covered topic. Are we actually going to trust an internet marketer’s hand-rolled mouse movements analysis over CloudFlare?
I’m not.
The article only alludes to answering the question “Who is engineering this?”
It’s the ad platforms. They’re doing it. They’re selling ads, then they’re also using bots to pump up the impression numbers, so that they get paid more.
This is fraud.
Marketing doesn’t work nearly as well as marketers would like you to believe, so much so that they have to fake their effectiveness.
Nobody pays for ad impressions anymore. Haven’t for… gosh like a decade.
There’s a lot of stupidity in adverting, but eventually people stop coming back to dump more millions into a bunch of bot page refreshes that don’t lead to sales.
Yep.
If I’m paying you to market my product, and I’m not selling any product, I’d don’t give a shit how many views I’m catching, you are not selling my product, so I’m trying another marketer.
This one is extremely difficult to fix as well. Ad companies bribe politicians with reduced price advertising for political campaigns to prevent laws being passed to regulate them.
Sounds like another bubble ripe for bursting.
I used to work in marketing as a dev and this shit never made sense to me. I didn’t investigate like TFA but I am 0% surprised by the finding. Incentives are all misaligned.
muh KPIs!!
It’s systemic, and whether or not it’s perpetrated directly by big tech, they are the primary beneficiaries i.e. increased ad sales.
This is a problem that requires regulation, which means it will not be addressed meaningfully, as that won’t happen anytime soon.
really interesting article. thanks a lot for sharing
