Click fraud, botnets, draining budgets, how all online advertising is deceiving you, including context and RTB and how to put everyone in cancer
Perhaps with this article I will bury my office, and with it my dreams of working on CPS. Dreams of honest, transparent and understandable work without lies and deceit. Perhaps, but not a fact. Maybe it will become a definite manifesto in the industry in which I work.
The problem is that the more honest you are in this market, the poorer you are. Unfortunately, I am no exception and I have a choice. Either stand in line for cutting budgets, draining bot traffic and blaming failures on the advertiser, or try to change something. To live at the expense of deception and be constantly head over heels in the shit that the advertiser casts on you after the next "effective" placement - there is a dubious pleasure of working.
Recently, a startup, a friend, came to me, I relate to him well and asked where he should be advertised best of all and for not very expensive. To which my answer was: “My friend, I'm sorry, but after 3 years in advertising I can honestly answer that I don’t know. Try it in social networks, they don’t seem to cheat there, although I’m not sure about that either. ”
So what is the reason for my pessimism? It's time to call a spade a spade. The whole problem lies in the structure of profit production and distribution of responsibility in the market, and it is directly opposite to itself in its fundamentals.
The webmaster (the owner of the resource or the publisher, as it is fashionable to call them now) needs to pay for articles, for the promotion of the resource and bear other costs. For the vast majority, advertising is the only revenue.
An advertiser needs traffic efficiency and results, and what’s next will not bother anyone.
Both of these parties seem to be doing one thing and are interested in overall efficiency. However, at the moment it is a hallucination.
The webmaster and advertiser are not friends, but sworn enemies. And the faster you understand this, the more money you save.
Where did CPS come from (cost per sale)? Why are most advertisers now trying to switch to this format as much as possible? Why did KPI become the main and only method of evaluating advertising?
Everything is pretty commonplace - fraud. And there is nothing you can do about it. In no form other than CPS.
Imagine you are a webmaster. Enter in the search engine a request of the form “How to wind up an advertisement”, “botnet for clicking ads”, “click bot”, “script for promotion”.
Now let's face it - we are dealing with a huge fraudulent market and there is nothing you can do about it. Once a webmaster only needs to notice that attracting an audience is more expensive than advertising revenue and that’s where the honesty ends, and the bots start. And almost everyone is sick with this disease, there is no correlation between the size of the site. Both krupnyak and trifle are engaged in this.
What bribes RTB? Its scale. By connecting to a dozen suppliers, you can immediately gain access to 500 thousand sites, possibly a million in RuNet. You can immediately access 60-80 million users. The market is immediately in the palm of your hand. However, after working with RTB for about a year, I can safely say that, apart from the scale of RTB, I did not solve anything with fraud, moreover, it created even more problems.
When in Whisla we were tortured to fight advertising clicks, catching bots through Yandex Webvisor and RTB appeared, we breathed a sigh of relief. The model of buying impressions, rather than clicks, looked risky, but extremely promising. Indeed, the click fraud is behind. It makes no sense to wind up our advertising anymore. However, in reality, everything turned out quite the opposite.
Previously, we bought clicks and we were constantly clicked by almost all the thematic platforms on which we worked. Moreover, the list of these sites included both the top 30 and small ones. We could stop something by catching bots, by manually viewing visits, automatically checking the average CTR of the system and comparing it with a specific site. We banned, tracked, banned and tracked, but this is all running around behind our own tail. Webmasters continue to call and you can do nothing about it. I am not saying that 100% of the sites do this, but I will not be mistaken if I say that 95%. I’ll just say this when we transferred our network to the shows, even the coolest sites that we could never think of suddenly suddenly stopped delivering clicks by magic, but the shows flowed like water. And these are sites on which many of you come to read about politics.
Wonderful brave new world of RTB. Why click when pay-per-impression? But you will be surprised that in RTB there are much more click-throughs than before. But what's the point?
Webmasters quickly realized that if you win some impressions and there are no clicks, then DSP (advertising systems) will turn off non-clickable places and revenue will drop. They go to SSPs (networks connecting sites) and ask what’s the matter, why did the ads disappear? SSP has no choice but to tell the webmaster that the site’s click-through has dropped and is no longer being bought. What conclusion does the vybmaster make? Right! We get our old botnet, since these idiots need clicks! And all over again.
In order to track all this garbage, we introduced a video recording of all the transitions when installing our security code on the website to the advertiser. We can say that we duplicated Webvisor. Functionality is available only to admins. And as soon as we did all the sadness and sadness crawled out. Video is present at a maximum of 60% of transitions. Moreover, part of this video is the same bots that are visible to the naked eye. Thus, at best, we have 50% of live traffic. At that moment, you most likely thought about the horror going on in my system. However, go to your Yandex Metrica, to Webvisor and count the number of transitions without video. And how many of them are there without videos from Adwords? How much from Direct? Well, yes, Yandex somehow faded trying to explain it technically, like a cookie wasn’t stamped, but believe me, all this is bleating.
About three or four months, we came to this conclusion, until we lost a sufficiently large proportion of the clientele that we can understand. Nobody wants to see that an advertising system delivers 50% of live traffic. And there is nothing you can do about it. Neither retargeting, nor ingenious antifrauds, nor the display of ads in iframes can save. We even made some kind of captcha (a swipe slider like a screen block on mobile devices that appears when you click on a banner), so they learned to get around this too. One advertiser bombarded us very intensively with questions about why we have empty transitions. Gave access to his "Metric". When asked why there are much more empty transitions in your transitions from Adwords, the client could not answer anything and simply left.
All the pain and sadness is that everyone has such a situation. And no one is to blame for this, except for the source of traffic. When we saw in our reports on banned sites sites included in the top 10 runet, I realized that the situation with advertising is just awful. No matter how advertisers shout at us, this will not change anything. And no one will change this, except for the advertisers themselves.
In 2008, Click Forensics announced that there were more than 30% of fraudulent traffic in ad networks and that Google had been refusing and silent about the problem for three years now, completely ignoring reports. As a result, Google was silent, silent, and bought this company with giblets, renaming it Adometry.
It's no secret that botnets now rule the Internet. Who does not know - these are networks from infected computers that are used for various purposes ranging from DDOS attacks to advertising clicks.
According to various estimates, the owner of a botnet in a couple of thousand infected machines can earn up to $ 60k per month due to advertising clicks.
In detail about click bots and botnets I wrote in this article (link webplanet.ru/knowhow/advert/l_e_x_a/2008/10/23/clickbot.html ) specialist in similar matters, Lech Andreev. I highly recommend reading it. His conclusion is simple: everyone earns money by issuing the advertiser dry, namely: the owner of the botnet, the webmaster and the advertising system as a conductor of this disgrace. Moreover, the rotation of the advertising system does not matter. Everything will be repeated in another system.
That’s why when my team leader asked how we’ll deal today with paid motivated clicks from sites like Wmmail.ru, I told him that compared to botnets, at least real people call us, so as a problem compared to bots it’s possible say no problem at all.
Today, the Internet makes the biggest money by clicking on Internet ads. And you can’t do anything with this, except for one thing: stop buying clicks and moreover impressions! Cancer your ad systems. Rebel against your agencies! Stop practicing self-deception and finally see a simple truth - people earn a lot of money from your blindness and illiteracy!
Demand CPS Jobs!
However, note that CPS CPS'u discord. Never buy from CPA networks that buy from the same webmasters through offers, as a matter of fact being the same wrapping agent. Buy from networks that buy on impressions or clicks, and sell you on CPS.
Ask the advertising network for a report on how it buys traffic: for impressions, clicks or offers.
From now on, you should know that the webmaster (publisher) is an enemy for you. SSP and DSP are enemies for you. You are on the battlefield, where you are the victim and the main target.
I hope this is enough for you to get rid of the stupid illusion that thematic will save you? No, friends, the theme has not been working for a long time and almost everything is played. And the top 10 Runet will not save you either. And clever words like Retargeting, Programmatic, Publisher, Antifraud and others will not save you either.
The only way out of the prevailing darkness is for you to escape from the fire from any form of payment, except for CPS.
But not so simple. Type refused clicks and happiness came. Be prepared to open your CRM, deep integration and the fact that the advertising system will see your customers. Believe me, she doesn’t need them. Such a discovery is necessary first of all to you. So the advertising system will be able to see the result, as well as trust you that you are not hiding the real situation of sales. And stick your pixels away! Precisely deep integration in CRM! You have to understand one more thing - there are no miracles. Advertising is expensive and leads for 200r. Is a hallucination. Call them and understand what you are dealing with. Get ready for the fact that CPS advertising will be effective, but expensive.
The quality of an advertising system can be judged if it buys by impressions, offers CPS, requires deep integration, and also swears at your sales managers and its services are expensive. These 4 factors together are your salvation.
Perhaps with this article I will call a flurry of criticism and seething from colleagues in the shop like “We don’t understand what you are talking about, everything is fine with us” or “Learn to deal with cheating like us first, and then write trololo articles”, maybe even “If if you knew all the power and power of programmer and retargeting, you wouldn’t ache here ”, as well as other nasty things. The problem is that the root of the problem is not in technology, but as I wrote above in the mechanism of profit generation and distribution of responsibility. But that doesn't matter anymore. It’s finally time to do something about it and this is only in the hands of advertisers. Only in your hands!
Most recently, we started working on CPS and I’ll tell you frankly - we are incurring huge losses precisely because of bots and clashing. At the same time, advertisers are unhappy with only one thing - there are few sales, but no one shouts that the traffic is wound up. They don’t care. If we do not find a solution, we will leave the market. And any system that cannot find this solution should go. And that office, which will find a solution before everyone else, will take off a rocket with the power that Google once took off.
Place this market as a cancer and start bending it today, completely giving up clicks and impressions! Let the advertising system bears these risks, in the end it's her job. And when the advertising system begins to think with his head because of the loss of money on bots, then in the end he will start to eagerly think about the quality of traffic. At the same time, having become banned by all systems, maybe the owners of the resources will change their minds who knows. Perhaps public blacklists of cheat sites will revive again and will serve as a reminder of the past era of click fraud.
The problem is that the more honest you are in this market, the poorer you are. Unfortunately, I am no exception and I have a choice. Either stand in line for cutting budgets, draining bot traffic and blaming failures on the advertiser, or try to change something. To live at the expense of deception and be constantly head over heels in the shit that the advertiser casts on you after the next "effective" placement - there is a dubious pleasure of working.
Recently, a startup, a friend, came to me, I relate to him well and asked where he should be advertised best of all and for not very expensive. To which my answer was: “My friend, I'm sorry, but after 3 years in advertising I can honestly answer that I don’t know. Try it in social networks, they don’t seem to cheat there, although I’m not sure about that either. ”
So what is the reason for my pessimism? It's time to call a spade a spade. The whole problem lies in the structure of profit production and distribution of responsibility in the market, and it is directly opposite to itself in its fundamentals.
The webmaster (the owner of the resource or the publisher, as it is fashionable to call them now) needs to pay for articles, for the promotion of the resource and bear other costs. For the vast majority, advertising is the only revenue.
An advertiser needs traffic efficiency and results, and what’s next will not bother anyone.
Both of these parties seem to be doing one thing and are interested in overall efficiency. However, at the moment it is a hallucination.
The webmaster and advertiser are not friends, but sworn enemies. And the faster you understand this, the more money you save.
Where did CPS come from (cost per sale)? Why are most advertisers now trying to switch to this format as much as possible? Why did KPI become the main and only method of evaluating advertising?
Everything is pretty commonplace - fraud. And there is nothing you can do about it. In no form other than CPS.
Imagine you are a webmaster. Enter in the search engine a request of the form “How to wind up an advertisement”, “botnet for clicking ads”, “click bot”, “script for promotion”.
Now let's face it - we are dealing with a huge fraudulent market and there is nothing you can do about it. Once a webmaster only needs to notice that attracting an audience is more expensive than advertising revenue and that’s where the honesty ends, and the bots start. And almost everyone is sick with this disease, there is no correlation between the size of the site. Both krupnyak and trifle are engaged in this.
What bribes RTB? Its scale. By connecting to a dozen suppliers, you can immediately gain access to 500 thousand sites, possibly a million in RuNet. You can immediately access 60-80 million users. The market is immediately in the palm of your hand. However, after working with RTB for about a year, I can safely say that, apart from the scale of RTB, I did not solve anything with fraud, moreover, it created even more problems.
When in Whisla we were tortured to fight advertising clicks, catching bots through Yandex Webvisor and RTB appeared, we breathed a sigh of relief. The model of buying impressions, rather than clicks, looked risky, but extremely promising. Indeed, the click fraud is behind. It makes no sense to wind up our advertising anymore. However, in reality, everything turned out quite the opposite.
Previously, we bought clicks and we were constantly clicked by almost all the thematic platforms on which we worked. Moreover, the list of these sites included both the top 30 and small ones. We could stop something by catching bots, by manually viewing visits, automatically checking the average CTR of the system and comparing it with a specific site. We banned, tracked, banned and tracked, but this is all running around behind our own tail. Webmasters continue to call and you can do nothing about it. I am not saying that 100% of the sites do this, but I will not be mistaken if I say that 95%. I’ll just say this when we transferred our network to the shows, even the coolest sites that we could never think of suddenly suddenly stopped delivering clicks by magic, but the shows flowed like water. And these are sites on which many of you come to read about politics.
Wonderful brave new world of RTB. Why click when pay-per-impression? But you will be surprised that in RTB there are much more click-throughs than before. But what's the point?
Webmasters quickly realized that if you win some impressions and there are no clicks, then DSP (advertising systems) will turn off non-clickable places and revenue will drop. They go to SSPs (networks connecting sites) and ask what’s the matter, why did the ads disappear? SSP has no choice but to tell the webmaster that the site’s click-through has dropped and is no longer being bought. What conclusion does the vybmaster make? Right! We get our old botnet, since these idiots need clicks! And all over again.
In order to track all this garbage, we introduced a video recording of all the transitions when installing our security code on the website to the advertiser. We can say that we duplicated Webvisor. Functionality is available only to admins. And as soon as we did all the sadness and sadness crawled out. Video is present at a maximum of 60% of transitions. Moreover, part of this video is the same bots that are visible to the naked eye. Thus, at best, we have 50% of live traffic. At that moment, you most likely thought about the horror going on in my system. However, go to your Yandex Metrica, to Webvisor and count the number of transitions without video. And how many of them are there without videos from Adwords? How much from Direct? Well, yes, Yandex somehow faded trying to explain it technically, like a cookie wasn’t stamped, but believe me, all this is bleating.
About three or four months, we came to this conclusion, until we lost a sufficiently large proportion of the clientele that we can understand. Nobody wants to see that an advertising system delivers 50% of live traffic. And there is nothing you can do about it. Neither retargeting, nor ingenious antifrauds, nor the display of ads in iframes can save. We even made some kind of captcha (a swipe slider like a screen block on mobile devices that appears when you click on a banner), so they learned to get around this too. One advertiser bombarded us very intensively with questions about why we have empty transitions. Gave access to his "Metric". When asked why there are much more empty transitions in your transitions from Adwords, the client could not answer anything and simply left.
All the pain and sadness is that everyone has such a situation. And no one is to blame for this, except for the source of traffic. When we saw in our reports on banned sites sites included in the top 10 runet, I realized that the situation with advertising is just awful. No matter how advertisers shout at us, this will not change anything. And no one will change this, except for the advertisers themselves.
In 2008, Click Forensics announced that there were more than 30% of fraudulent traffic in ad networks and that Google had been refusing and silent about the problem for three years now, completely ignoring reports. As a result, Google was silent, silent, and bought this company with giblets, renaming it Adometry.
It's no secret that botnets now rule the Internet. Who does not know - these are networks from infected computers that are used for various purposes ranging from DDOS attacks to advertising clicks.
According to various estimates, the owner of a botnet in a couple of thousand infected machines can earn up to $ 60k per month due to advertising clicks.
In detail about click bots and botnets I wrote in this article (link webplanet.ru/knowhow/advert/l_e_x_a/2008/10/23/clickbot.html ) specialist in similar matters, Lech Andreev. I highly recommend reading it. His conclusion is simple: everyone earns money by issuing the advertiser dry, namely: the owner of the botnet, the webmaster and the advertising system as a conductor of this disgrace. Moreover, the rotation of the advertising system does not matter. Everything will be repeated in another system.
That’s why when my team leader asked how we’ll deal today with paid motivated clicks from sites like Wmmail.ru, I told him that compared to botnets, at least real people call us, so as a problem compared to bots it’s possible say no problem at all.
Today, the Internet makes the biggest money by clicking on Internet ads. And you can’t do anything with this, except for one thing: stop buying clicks and moreover impressions! Cancer your ad systems. Rebel against your agencies! Stop practicing self-deception and finally see a simple truth - people earn a lot of money from your blindness and illiteracy!
Demand CPS Jobs!
However, note that CPS CPS'u discord. Never buy from CPA networks that buy from the same webmasters through offers, as a matter of fact being the same wrapping agent. Buy from networks that buy on impressions or clicks, and sell you on CPS.
Ask the advertising network for a report on how it buys traffic: for impressions, clicks or offers.
From now on, you should know that the webmaster (publisher) is an enemy for you. SSP and DSP are enemies for you. You are on the battlefield, where you are the victim and the main target.
I hope this is enough for you to get rid of the stupid illusion that thematic will save you? No, friends, the theme has not been working for a long time and almost everything is played. And the top 10 Runet will not save you either. And clever words like Retargeting, Programmatic, Publisher, Antifraud and others will not save you either.
The only way out of the prevailing darkness is for you to escape from the fire from any form of payment, except for CPS.
But not so simple. Type refused clicks and happiness came. Be prepared to open your CRM, deep integration and the fact that the advertising system will see your customers. Believe me, she doesn’t need them. Such a discovery is necessary first of all to you. So the advertising system will be able to see the result, as well as trust you that you are not hiding the real situation of sales. And stick your pixels away! Precisely deep integration in CRM! You have to understand one more thing - there are no miracles. Advertising is expensive and leads for 200r. Is a hallucination. Call them and understand what you are dealing with. Get ready for the fact that CPS advertising will be effective, but expensive.
The quality of an advertising system can be judged if it buys by impressions, offers CPS, requires deep integration, and also swears at your sales managers and its services are expensive. These 4 factors together are your salvation.
Perhaps with this article I will call a flurry of criticism and seething from colleagues in the shop like “We don’t understand what you are talking about, everything is fine with us” or “Learn to deal with cheating like us first, and then write trololo articles”, maybe even “If if you knew all the power and power of programmer and retargeting, you wouldn’t ache here ”, as well as other nasty things. The problem is that the root of the problem is not in technology, but as I wrote above in the mechanism of profit generation and distribution of responsibility. But that doesn't matter anymore. It’s finally time to do something about it and this is only in the hands of advertisers. Only in your hands!
Most recently, we started working on CPS and I’ll tell you frankly - we are incurring huge losses precisely because of bots and clashing. At the same time, advertisers are unhappy with only one thing - there are few sales, but no one shouts that the traffic is wound up. They don’t care. If we do not find a solution, we will leave the market. And any system that cannot find this solution should go. And that office, which will find a solution before everyone else, will take off a rocket with the power that Google once took off.
Place this market as a cancer and start bending it today, completely giving up clicks and impressions! Let the advertising system bears these risks, in the end it's her job. And when the advertising system begins to think with his head because of the loss of money on bots, then in the end he will start to eagerly think about the quality of traffic. At the same time, having become banned by all systems, maybe the owners of the resources will change their minds who knows. Perhaps public blacklists of cheat sites will revive again and will serve as a reminder of the past era of click fraud.