Online Add Fraud

[Thailandnotes]

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/

Add schemes rotting the internet..

[don]

Re: Online Add Fraud

The art is making the fake traffic look real, often by sprucing up websites with just enough content to make them appear authentic. Programmatic ad-buying systems don’t necessarily differentiate between real users and bots, or between websites with fresh, original work, and Potemkin sites camouflaged with stock photos and cut-and-paste articles.

Where have I heard this before . . . .

[seobook]

Re: Online Add Fraud

There are about a dozen headwinds in the online ad market

• the above mentioned fraud
• movement of ad spend away from direct ad buys to programmatic advertising
  • not only does this lower CPMs (in part due to the above fraud being mixed in to other inventory to justify lower spending, but in many cases nearly half the ad spend is going into management rather than reaching the publishers (more fraud & more automation = greater need for management))
  • Google also has something called custom affinity audiences, which allows advertisers to target ads to competing sites or collections of niche sites without advertising on those sites & even if those sites do not carry Google ads (plenty of user data from Chrome and Android). Facebook also allows advertisers to advertise to people who "like Coke" or similar & they recently revised their privacy policies to allow themselves to use the like and share buttons on third party sites for ad targeting, even if the person viewing the page does not click on like or such.
  
  
• walling off of data
  • if you go back about 5 years almost all search visits came with keyword data. this in turn allowed publishers to know where they were ranking that they didn't anticipate & close the loop in terms of being able to use the data to improve user experience. now most search traffic (from Google, Yahoo! & Bing) just shows the source of the traffic but no keyword data.
  • in the past one could also use the search query data as a parameter in the ads. now the trigger ad term is passed but the actual keywords are not passed on Google's ad URLs & you have to get them via API.
  
  
• mixing in crap
  • enhanced campaigns tried to push advertisers into eating lower quality mobile traffic with their desktop campaigns, but luckily there were work arounds
  • Google progressively extended ad matching types. broad became really broad. and then more recently exact matching keyword targeting became exact(ish) keyword targeting
  
  
• the rise of ad blockers
  • once installed they are unlikely to get uninstalled
  • smaller companies don't have the scale to rely on native advertising & as more companies do native ads it will: lower the prices of the formats as supply increases and novelty wears off, cause consumers to become more skeptical of anything which looks like it could be a native ad / advertorial, and make ad blockers more likely to block it
  
  
• the increasing shift to mobile
  • lower CPM per ad unit
  • fewer ad impressions on each page
  • Google suggesting ad heavy layouts are a poor user experience, even as in some cases the first screen or two full of mobile search results are nothing but ads (shifting click mix from organic to ads)
  • Google claiming app install interstitial ads are a poor user experience (if companies want to get out of the ecosystem risk by trying to have users install their app) but at the same time Google pitches their own "beautiful" interstitial ads for mobile apps & interstital page ads for websites. (apparently the interstitial ad format is only offensive & a low quality user experience if it promotes the same site the user is on )
  • in spite of there being millions of apps, most users typically only use 2 or 3 apps & something like half of app usage time in some key markets is just the Facebook app. some other highly profitable app use cases (maps, search, etc.) are pre-loaded & set by contractual default.
    • within social apps, there is an increasing shift toward lowering organic reach of content creators & increasing the percent of the stream which is ad-driven.
    • Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles & a soon-to-launch Google competitor will keep users within these services rather than even allowing them to touch the publisher's site.
      • over time this makes it harder for publishers to target ads, personalize their services, improve user experience, promote subscriptions & signing up to subsequent content off the platforms, etc.
      • once the platforms become dominant enough they will drastically change the revenue sharing terms. currently FB is allowing publishers to keep 100% on their self-sold ads & 70% on FB sold ads, but look at YouTube's terms ... they only give the content creators 55%, far less than the 72% default revenue sharing percentage on regular AdSense ads.
  
  
• the brand bias in Google's relevancy algorithms has made serving smaller businesses profitably on a sustainable basis much harder & in many cases/markets almost impossible for SEOs.
  • as the ecosystem has become less stable it is harder to keep clients happy if traffic jumps up and down. even if net traffic grows, wild oscillations still cause stress, layoffs, inventory management issues, increased costs due to friction from communications issues, etc.
  • to appreciate the extreme risks here, consider how Panda or Penguin algorithms can cause a 70%+ decline in search traffic, and are sometimes not updated for a year or more. so no matter what you do to fix the issue, your 70% decline is locked in AT LEAST until the algorithm runs again. how do you both invest in rapidly improving your site while also having your revenues drastically cut?
    • some of these types of algorithms do have false positives. and those false positives can become self-reinforcing.
    • MetaFilter was torched & saw an overnight 40% traffic decline. the pain went on for well over a year before their founder wrote about it publicly.
    • after he wrote about it, the issue was fixed on Google's end a few months later, but the stress of the process had tore him up so bad he still quit in spite of the recovery. he couldn't handle the stress, and that is a rare case where Google offered prompt support & even Google confirmed the issue was a false positive.
    
    
  • as a counter to the above risk, consider how earlier this year Thumbtack egregiously violated Google's guidelines at mass scale with link building schemes. They recovered from the manual penalty in a week. Unsurprisingly, Thumbtack is a Google investment (or shall we call it an alphabet alpha bet?). Some other past Google investments have been rather aggressive on some aspects. RetailMeNot gave bloggers free t-shirts for embedding a widget full of over a dozen keyword rich links in their blog sidebars. Auction.com was pushing guest blog posts which they recycled on many sites literally at the same time Google announced their crack down on guest blogging.
  
  
• Google Gmail priority inbox moving emails from companies like Groupon out of the inbox
• search engines scraping content from publishers & displaying it in their knowledge graphs or featured answers
  • even if these offer the user a slightly quicker answer, if the publisher doesn't get the pageviews then their ability to fund the formatting and verification of such data is hurt & their ability to use profits from evergreen content to fund deeper journalistic efforts is vastly eroded.
  • some of these results are also including action items for previewing books, or downloading songs, or renting movies or such
  
  
• vertical search offerings like hotel search in general purpose search results
• increasing size of ad units in search results
  • Google has a lot of automated ad extensions for things like site links, locations, ratings, reviews, callouts, click to call, etc.
  • on commercial terms Bing sometimes has 4 ads above the organic search results. in some cases each of the 4 ads can have 6 clickable sublinks on them. that would make the first organic result the 29th clickable link on the page.
  • Yahoo! sometimes puts 5 ads above the organic search results. they make the entire background area near the ads clickable, have the right rail ads scroll down the page to pull attention over to them, etc. they've also played with other aspects of the layout like only bolding keywords in ads while not bolding keywords in organic listings, making the top ad a purple color which is both similar to the color of their logo & a common / default color for links to a page you have already visited.
  • AOL, Ask & most other web portals tend to be even more extreme with the ad placement in the search results. perhaps the single counter-trend example is DuckDuckGo.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Online Add Fraud

In my mind “searching” has deteriorated in every category I can think of…
Finding quick DIY info, sourcing stuff locally or long distance, discovering in-depth articles on topics of interest, cross-referencing hotel and airline info….results for all of these are less and less satisfying.

Just as an example, I was looking for specs the other day on what size drill bit to use for a certain size tap. Not long ago, that search would be like BINGO! Now I have to wade through garbage.

Searching for obscure information brings up dozens of “yellow pages” sites that promise to link to that best industrial bread mixer near you but in the end produce no results.

The only upside I see is the growth of local forums. Here in Chiang Mai queries on cacti, fire bricks, cultivating artichokes, scissor sharpening, don’t get you instant results, but do often result in slightly delayed BINGO.

[don]

Re: Online Add Fraud

Finding quick DIY info, sourcing stuff locally or long distance, discovering in-depth articles on topics of interest, cross-referencing hotel and airline info….results for all of these are less and less satisfying.

Just as an example, I was looking for specs the other day on what size drill bit to use for a certain size tap. Not long ago, that search would be like BINGO! Now I have to wade through garbage.

Searching for obscure information brings up dozens of “yellow pages” sites that promise to link to that best industrial bread mixer near you but in the end produce no results.

In the end the internet may prove worse than free television, whose content promise was also sacrificed on the alter of commodities.

The only upside I see is the growth of local forums.

+1 That's generally the best source for hashing out computer glitches, from fellow sufferers and what they've discovered. The rest are usually worthless, with predators lying in wait to sign you up for more BS you seriously don't want.