Quantifying Online Advertising Fraud: Ad-Click Bots vs Humans [pdf]

For some reason, I guess because domain had the word &quot;Oxford&quot; and the file was PDF, I thought it was a pure academia publication, but apparently it&#x27;s from a company that&#x27;s selling bot fraud software <a href="http://oxford-biochron.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxford-biochron.com&#x2F;</a>

I know this is anecdotal but i don&#x27;t find their findings to be true in practice -- at least as far as facebook.<p>If facebook tells me I got 180 clicks, my javascript detects 100 page views, and 45 people fill out my form, then I know at least 25% of those clicks were real people, or bot sophisticated and motivated enough to actually continue through filling out a form on the destination page.<p>There is certainly click fraud on every platform -- clicks that only facebook&#x2F;linkedin&#x2F;google report, but never appear on server logs.<p>I&#x27;d be interested in knowing what your personal experience has been, I know there are many people on hacker news who&#x27;ve advertised something in the past.

A little bit of LaTeX can bring a lot of authenticity to what is basically a corporate blog post. How about some of the actual data used to make this claim?

<a href="http://oxford-biochron.com/who-we-are/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxford-biochron.com&#x2F;who-we-are&#x2F;</a> Conflict of interest much ? writes a paper saying they did research on this.....

The authors are selling a product to detect click bots. Take the results with a grain of salt..

With all those 5 bucks for 1000 page likes companies, there are a ton of people who are just paid to click like on things. Its not bots, its humans from places that are not the US. These humans, to avoid detection just click on random things to like in the US just to make it less obvious when they are paid to click like on things.

The problem with display advertising is that too much of the industry is focused on clicks. Anti-fraud companies can come up with ways to try to mitigate click fraud but it won&#x27;t do much of anything as they can, and will be, gamed by black hats - there&#x27;s too much money at stake.<p>I deal with it every day and the best method is to educate the client by explaining why a click is a poor indicator of performance. Work with the client to come up with measurable goals to track click-through&#x2F;view-through conversions on these goals and ultimately try to measure impact on ROI. It&#x27;s really not THAT difficult for most campaigns.<p>The most difficult part is that the client becomes aware of all those wasted dollars on previous campaigns that they thought were high performance because of a high CTR.

Looks like snake oil sellers push their marketing b###t with scientific sauce. Recent report from ComScore <a href="http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/Ad-Fraud-and-NonHuman-Traffic-How-Rampant-is-the-Problem" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comscore.com&#x2F;Insights&#x2F;Blog&#x2F;Ad-Fraud-and-NonHuman-...</a> have absolutely different numbers.

Most click-fraud is carried out by setting up plausible-looking websites, signing them up to ad networks, and then clicking on the adverts that are served up on those sites.<p>There&#x27;s nothing in this article about what kind of sites the adverts were being served on, which is a fairly glaring omission.

This document looks official, and replicates the format of a proper scientific paper. But it&#x27;s extremely short, offers almost zero details about their &quot;analysis&quot; and produces dramatic conclusions that further the business goals of the authors.<p>I personally would not trust this at all.

Could someone fill me in on the business model of these click farms? How do they profit from clicking other people&#x27;s ads?<p>I&#x27;m sure it will be perfectly obvious in hindsight.

I wonder what Google&#x27;s internal research shows. Are they themselves not committing fraud by failing to publicize this to their customers?

This is disturbing to say the least.

Don&#x27;t tell Facebook

uhh, the first point references wikipedia... I&#x27;m not sure if I trust the authors