It's always been a surprise to me how much money is flowing from ads and how any business can be so reliant on it, since this makes it sound like it's fundamentally flawed. One would think the jig would eventually be up.
I guess my point is the alternatives to Google Maps aren't perfect but they have a lot more to offer than many people assume. When I drove across Canada, from Ottawa to Anchorage, OSM never let me down. It's a viable alternative.
Agreed. The real losers are the genuine content creators, as the adcash isn’t flowing to them. They can’t just average it out.
Of course there’s no way to contact and tell Google that Google gave me fraud traffic and got me banned from Google.
Honestly after the ad images/video, all the fraud detection javascript from the advertiser, the publisher, the advertiser's system of choice, the publisher's system of choice all doing "trust but verify" with each other is the largest contributor to how big ads are.
Best was when I kept seeing ads for a thing I was selling. I visited some big box sites about it to copy the specs on it.
I think if ads were smarter, you'd get ads for your vacuum's filter a few months after buying it and maybe replacement pieces just after warranty, but what do I know?
I wonder what would be reliable ways to spend money for advertising, then? I'm new to this, but I was thinking about spending some money for some online marketing until reading this.
I see some "captive" ads now, and I can imagine those are worth so much more - for example instagram play-between ads. No wonder the open web is dying.
> If the Google Ads system detects geographic areas that someone is interested in, we may show appropriate ads targeted to that area or surrounding areas (known as "location of interest").
> The default advanced location option in Google Ads will use both physical location and / or location of interest to determine where ads can appear. You can update your advanced location options at any time.
Looks like "interest" is still the default!
It's really interesting that somehow the fact that we recorded these less known user agent bots actually made the product more useful for you and you were able to detect fraud going on.
I sometimes buy fraudulent ad traffic and point it ad landing pages that should drive away humans, trying to fingerprint anything that sticks around. I'd be very interested in tracking bots that actually send you events.
It is the equivalent of installing an app that silently opens every attachment that is emailed to you.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#does-adnauseams-...
[1] https://quinnkeast.com/writing/the-possibility-gap-its-time-...
However, I don't see a way to allow that without also making the aforementioned unwanted connections also possible.
https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033640653-Ident...
This is a bit better than it used to be. At one point the documentation had a field for User Email Address, and only a footnote in some documentation suggested it be hashed. Still, for a company that chooses to use the feature, the session recording can be tied back to the user account and any data already associated with it.
Your parents would definitely wonder why you were receiving checks in the mail from Xpics.
Once I left the Visual Basic scripted web control running overnight by mistake...
Looking back, it was pretty shitty behaviour by me, but as a 14 year old boy, it just didn't even feel like a crime, even a victimsless one; it almost felt entrepreneurial.
Seems that getting rid of this sort of problem is one of the reasons one would use an ad network.
Not defending google but the latter is on by default, switching to the former can massively help here.
I can imagine that ad fraud prevention must be a hard task, probably requiring AI/ML nowadays. But I don't like that fact because it will probably force website owners to add more behavior tracking and analytics events on every web page. That will end up with more websockets, more memory and longer loading times and higher UI latencies and further worsenijg thr web browsing experience which is already pretty bad. :(
If you’re an advertiser and the display market becomes 90% fraud, you just end up paying 1/10th the rate for 10x the traffic.
Legit publishers get 1/10th the revenue though.
I've read very different from other commentators right here on HN who claim that Google ads work well for them and likewise I've heard plenty of anecdote from users of Facebook's and other ad platforms that they have delivered positive ROI for ad placement of their offers.
Any opinion?
With DR if your sales / leads are not generating a Return on Adspend (ROAS), you will change or stop advertising.
With branding, you might not even notice that Google is sending traffic from the wrong country. And you might be happy with the great looking vanity metrics.
My experience with Google (YouTube) Ads is that they work extremely well. I use them to generate leads for solar panel installers.
Note: I am not ruling out that I am just a noob.