Click fraud, botnets, draining budgets, how you are deceived by all online advertising, including context and RTB, and how to put everyone on the go
Perhaps with this article I will bury my office, and with it my dreams about working on CPS. Dreams of honest, transparent and understandable work without lies and deception. 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 not an exception and there is a choice in front of me. Either become a public line for cutting budgets, merging bots traffic and dumping failures on the advertiser, or try to change something. To live at the expense of deception and to be constantly completely in shit, which the advertiser throws at you, after the next “effective” placement - there is a dubious pleasure from work.
Recently, a start-up came to me, a friend, to whom I have a good attitude and asked where he is best advertised for and not very expensive. To which my answer was: “Man, forgive me, but after 3 years in advertising, I can honestly answer that I don’t know. Try social programs, they don’t seem to wind up 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 the extraction of profits and the 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 they are now fashionable to call them) must pay for the articles, for the promotion of the resource and incur other costs. For the absolute majority, advertising is the only income.
The advertiser needs traffic efficiency and results, and no one cares what happens next.
Both of these parties seem to be doing the same 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 sooner you understand this, the more money you will save.
Where did CPS come from (cost per sale “pay per sale”)? Why now most advertisers are trying to go as far as possible to this format? Why was KPI the main and only method for evaluating advertising?
Everything is pretty banal - fraud. And you can't do anything about it. In no way other than CPS.
Imagine that you are a webmaster. Type in the search query like "How to cheat ads", "botnet to click advertisements", "click bot", "script to cheat ads."
And now let's face it - we are dealing with a huge fraudulent market and there is nothing you can do about it. Once it is enough for a webmaster to notice that attracting an audience is more expensive than advertising revenue, and this is where honesty ends and bots start. And almost everyone is sick with this disease, there is no dependence between the size of the site. This is done and krupnyak and trifle.
What is captivating RTB? Its scale. By connecting to the top ten vendors, you can immediately access 500,000 sites, possibly a million in runet. You can immediately access 60-80 million users. The market is immediately on the palm. However, having worked 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 I created even more problems.
When in Whisla we were tormented by the fight against ad-hoc advertising, the capture of bots through Yandex WebVizor and the RTB appeared, we breathed a sigh of relief. The model of buying impressions, not clicks, looked at least risky, but extremely promising. After all, really click fraud behind. There is no point more to cheat our ads. However, in fact, everything turned out quite the opposite.
Previously, we bought clicks and we were constantly clicked off by almost all the thematic platforms on which we worked. And in the list of these sites were both the top 30 and small. 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 were banned, tracked, banned and tracked, but this is all the legwork behind our own tail. Webmasters continue to click and you can’t do anything about it. I’m not saying that 100% of the sites do this, but I’m not mistaken if I say that 95%. I’ll just say this when we transferred our network to shows, even the coolest sites that we could never think of suddenly stopped delivering clicks by magic, but on the other hand, the shows were flooded. And these are sites on which many of you come to read about politics.
Wonderful brave new world of RTB. Why click when paying for shows? But you will be surprised that in RTB there are even more clicks than before. But what's the point?
Webmasters quickly cut through that if you screwed up one impression and there are no clicks, then DSP (advertising systems) will disable non-clickable places and revenues will fall. They go to the SSP (network, uniting sites) and ask what the matter is, why did the advertising go away? SSP has no choice but to tell the webmaster that the click-through rate of the site has fallen and is no longer being bought. What conclusion does vybmaster? Right! We get our old botnet, since these assholes need clicks! And all over again.
In order to keep track of all this garbage, we have in our network introduced a video of all transitions when installing our security code on the site to the advertiser. We can say that we have duplicated "Webvisor". Functionality is available only to admins. And as soon as we did, all the sadness and sadness came out. Video is present at a maximum of 60% of transitions. And some of this video is the same bots, which can be seen with the naked eye. Thus, at best, we have 50% of live traffic. At this point, you probably thought about the horror that is going on in my system. However, go to your Yandex Metric, in "Webvisor" and count the number of conversions without video. And how many of them without videos with Adwords? How many direct? Well, yes, Yandex somehow faded trying to explain it technically, like a cookie wasn’t put down, but believe me, all this bleating. For some reason, from among living people do not ask to click on your advertisements for the test and do something on the site - everything is set and recorded beautifully.
Three or four months, we came to this conclusion, until we lost a large enough share of customers, which can be understood. No one wants to see that the advertising system delivers 50% of live traffic. And you can't do anything about it. Neither the retargeting, nor the ingenious anti-frauds, nor the display of advertising in the iframes saves. We even made some kind of captcha (swipe slider like a block of the screen on mobile devices, which appears when you click on the banner), so they learned to bypass this. One advertiser very intensively bombarded us with questions, why we have empty transitions. Gave access to your "Metric". When asked why you have much more empty transitions in AdWords transitions, the client could not answer and just left.
All pain and sadness lies in the fact that everyone has such a situation. And no one is to blame, except for the source of traffic. When we in our reports on banned sites saw the sites included in the top 10 runet, I realized that the situation with advertising is simply awful. No matter how advertisers shout at us, it will not change anything. And no one will change this, except for the advertisers themselves.
In 2008, the company Click Forensics announced that the advertising networks of fraudulent traffic is more than 30% and that Google has rejected and silenced the problem for three years, completely ignoring the reports. As a result, Google paused, paused, and bought this company with giblets, renaming it into Adometry.
It's no secret that botnets now rule the Internet. Who does not know - these are networks from infected computers, which are used for various purposes ranging from DDOS attacks to ad-clicking.
According to various estimates, the owner of a botnet with a couple of thousand infected machines can earn up to $ 60k per month due to advertisements.
In some detail about the click bots and botnets painted in this article (link webplanet.ru/knowhow/advert/l_e_x_a/2008/10/23/clickbot.html ) specialist in similar cases Lech Andreev. I highly recommend reading. His conclusion is simple: they earn everything by putting out the advertiser dry, namely: the owner of the botnet, the webmaster and the advertising system as a conductor of this outrage. Moreover, the rotation of the advertising system does not matter. Everything will be repeated in another system.
That is why, when my tmilid asked how we would now deal with paid motivated clicks from sites like “Wmmail.ru”, I told him that compared to botnets, at least real people click on us, so as a problem compared to bots, say no problem at all.
Today, on the Internet, the biggest money is earned on the internet advertising. And you can’t do anything with this, except for one thing: stop buying clicks and especially shows! Put cancer on your advertising system. Raise a rebellion against your agencies! Stop doing self-deception and finally see the simple truth - on your blindness, as well as illiteracy, people earn big money!
Demand work on CPS!
However, please note that CPS CPS is different. Never buy from CPA networks that buy from the same webmasters through offers, in essence being the same cheat agent. Buy from networks that buy by impressions or clicks, and sell you on CPS.
Demand from the network advertising report as he buys traffic: for impressions, clicks or offers.
From now on, you should know that the webmaster (publisher) is your enemy. SSP and DSP are your enemies. 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 subject has not been working for a long time, and almost everything is played. And the top 10 Runet will not save you either. And buzz words like "Retargeting", "Programmatic", "Publisher", "antifraud" and others will not save you either.
The only way out of the pitch darkness that has been formed is for you to flee from any form of payment, except CPS, as if from fire.
But not so simple. Type abandoned clicks and happiness came. Be prepared for the opening of your CRM, deep integration and the fact that the advertising system will see your customers. Believe they don't need it. This 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 with sales. And stick your pixels away! It is deep integration in CRM! You have to understand one more thing - there are no miracles. Advertising is expensive and leads for 200 rubles. - This is a hallucination. Call them and understand what you are dealing with. Get ready for CPS advertising to be effective, but expensive.
The quality of the advertising system can be judged if it buys by show, offers CPS, requires deep integration, and also swears at your sales managers and its services are expensive. These 4 factors in the aggregate are your salvation.
Perhaps with this article I’ll call a flurry of criticism and boiling from colleagues in the shop of the form “We don’t understand what you are talking about, everything is all right” or “Learn to deal with the wrap first like us and then write little articles from Trololo” you knew all the power and power of programmatics and retargeting, you wouldn’t scream here, ”as well as other nasty things. The problem is that the root of the problem is not technology, but, as I already wrote above, in the mechanism for extracting profits and sharing responsibility. But it does not matter. It's time to finally 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 will tell you directly - we are suffering enormous losses precisely because of bots and clicking. At the same time, advertisers are dissatisfied with only one - few sales, but no one shouts that the traffic is turned on. They don't care. If we don’t find a solution, we’ll leave the market. And any system that cannot find this solution should go away. And that office, which will find the solution before anyone else, will fly up with a rocket with the power that Google once took off.
Put this market with cancer and start bending it today, giving up all clicks and impressions! Let these risks be borne by the advertising system, in the end it is her work. And when the advertising system starts to think with its head due to the loss of money on bots, it will eventually begin to think greedily about the quality of traffic. At the same time, once banned by all systems, resource owners can come to their senses, who knows. Perhaps the public blacklists of cheating sites will be revived 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 not an exception and there is a choice in front of me. Either become a public line for cutting budgets, merging bots traffic and dumping failures on the advertiser, or try to change something. To live at the expense of deception and to be constantly completely in shit, which the advertiser throws at you, after the next “effective” placement - there is a dubious pleasure from work.
Recently, a start-up came to me, a friend, to whom I have a good attitude and asked where he is best advertised for and not very expensive. To which my answer was: “Man, forgive me, but after 3 years in advertising, I can honestly answer that I don’t know. Try social programs, they don’t seem to wind up 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 the extraction of profits and the 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 they are now fashionable to call them) must pay for the articles, for the promotion of the resource and incur other costs. For the absolute majority, advertising is the only income.
The advertiser needs traffic efficiency and results, and no one cares what happens next.
Both of these parties seem to be doing the same 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 sooner you understand this, the more money you will save.
Where did CPS come from (cost per sale “pay per sale”)? Why now most advertisers are trying to go as far as possible to this format? Why was KPI the main and only method for evaluating advertising?
Everything is pretty banal - fraud. And you can't do anything about it. In no way other than CPS.
Imagine that you are a webmaster. Type in the search query like "How to cheat ads", "botnet to click advertisements", "click bot", "script to cheat ads."
And now let's face it - we are dealing with a huge fraudulent market and there is nothing you can do about it. Once it is enough for a webmaster to notice that attracting an audience is more expensive than advertising revenue, and this is where honesty ends and bots start. And almost everyone is sick with this disease, there is no dependence between the size of the site. This is done and krupnyak and trifle.
What is captivating RTB? Its scale. By connecting to the top ten vendors, you can immediately access 500,000 sites, possibly a million in runet. You can immediately access 60-80 million users. The market is immediately on the palm. However, having worked 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 I created even more problems.
When in Whisla we were tormented by the fight against ad-hoc advertising, the capture of bots through Yandex WebVizor and the RTB appeared, we breathed a sigh of relief. The model of buying impressions, not clicks, looked at least risky, but extremely promising. After all, really click fraud behind. There is no point more to cheat our ads. However, in fact, everything turned out quite the opposite.
Previously, we bought clicks and we were constantly clicked off by almost all the thematic platforms on which we worked. And in the list of these sites were both the top 30 and small. 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 were banned, tracked, banned and tracked, but this is all the legwork behind our own tail. Webmasters continue to click and you can’t do anything about it. I’m not saying that 100% of the sites do this, but I’m not mistaken if I say that 95%. I’ll just say this when we transferred our network to shows, even the coolest sites that we could never think of suddenly stopped delivering clicks by magic, but on the other hand, the shows were flooded. And these are sites on which many of you come to read about politics.
Wonderful brave new world of RTB. Why click when paying for shows? But you will be surprised that in RTB there are even more clicks than before. But what's the point?
Webmasters quickly cut through that if you screwed up one impression and there are no clicks, then DSP (advertising systems) will disable non-clickable places and revenues will fall. They go to the SSP (network, uniting sites) and ask what the matter is, why did the advertising go away? SSP has no choice but to tell the webmaster that the click-through rate of the site has fallen and is no longer being bought. What conclusion does vybmaster? Right! We get our old botnet, since these assholes need clicks! And all over again.
In order to keep track of all this garbage, we have in our network introduced a video of all transitions when installing our security code on the site to the advertiser. We can say that we have duplicated "Webvisor". Functionality is available only to admins. And as soon as we did, all the sadness and sadness came out. Video is present at a maximum of 60% of transitions. And some of this video is the same bots, which can be seen with the naked eye. Thus, at best, we have 50% of live traffic. At this point, you probably thought about the horror that is going on in my system. However, go to your Yandex Metric, in "Webvisor" and count the number of conversions without video. And how many of them without videos with Adwords? How many direct? Well, yes, Yandex somehow faded trying to explain it technically, like a cookie wasn’t put down, but believe me, all this bleating. For some reason, from among living people do not ask to click on your advertisements for the test and do something on the site - everything is set and recorded beautifully.
Three or four months, we came to this conclusion, until we lost a large enough share of customers, which can be understood. No one wants to see that the advertising system delivers 50% of live traffic. And you can't do anything about it. Neither the retargeting, nor the ingenious anti-frauds, nor the display of advertising in the iframes saves. We even made some kind of captcha (swipe slider like a block of the screen on mobile devices, which appears when you click on the banner), so they learned to bypass this. One advertiser very intensively bombarded us with questions, why we have empty transitions. Gave access to your "Metric". When asked why you have much more empty transitions in AdWords transitions, the client could not answer and just left.
All pain and sadness lies in the fact that everyone has such a situation. And no one is to blame, except for the source of traffic. When we in our reports on banned sites saw the sites included in the top 10 runet, I realized that the situation with advertising is simply awful. No matter how advertisers shout at us, it will not change anything. And no one will change this, except for the advertisers themselves.
In 2008, the company Click Forensics announced that the advertising networks of fraudulent traffic is more than 30% and that Google has rejected and silenced the problem for three years, completely ignoring the reports. As a result, Google paused, paused, and bought this company with giblets, renaming it into Adometry.
It's no secret that botnets now rule the Internet. Who does not know - these are networks from infected computers, which are used for various purposes ranging from DDOS attacks to ad-clicking.
According to various estimates, the owner of a botnet with a couple of thousand infected machines can earn up to $ 60k per month due to advertisements.
In some detail about the click bots and botnets painted in this article (link webplanet.ru/knowhow/advert/l_e_x_a/2008/10/23/clickbot.html ) specialist in similar cases Lech Andreev. I highly recommend reading. His conclusion is simple: they earn everything by putting out the advertiser dry, namely: the owner of the botnet, the webmaster and the advertising system as a conductor of this outrage. Moreover, the rotation of the advertising system does not matter. Everything will be repeated in another system.
That is why, when my tmilid asked how we would now deal with paid motivated clicks from sites like “Wmmail.ru”, I told him that compared to botnets, at least real people click on us, so as a problem compared to bots, say no problem at all.
Today, on the Internet, the biggest money is earned on the internet advertising. And you can’t do anything with this, except for one thing: stop buying clicks and especially shows! Put cancer on your advertising system. Raise a rebellion against your agencies! Stop doing self-deception and finally see the simple truth - on your blindness, as well as illiteracy, people earn big money!
Demand work on CPS!
However, please note that CPS CPS is different. Never buy from CPA networks that buy from the same webmasters through offers, in essence being the same cheat agent. Buy from networks that buy by impressions or clicks, and sell you on CPS.
Demand from the network advertising report as he buys traffic: for impressions, clicks or offers.
From now on, you should know that the webmaster (publisher) is your enemy. SSP and DSP are your enemies. 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 subject has not been working for a long time, and almost everything is played. And the top 10 Runet will not save you either. And buzz words like "Retargeting", "Programmatic", "Publisher", "antifraud" and others will not save you either.
The only way out of the pitch darkness that has been formed is for you to flee from any form of payment, except CPS, as if from fire.
But not so simple. Type abandoned clicks and happiness came. Be prepared for the opening of your CRM, deep integration and the fact that the advertising system will see your customers. Believe they don't need it. This 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 with sales. And stick your pixels away! It is deep integration in CRM! You have to understand one more thing - there are no miracles. Advertising is expensive and leads for 200 rubles. - This is a hallucination. Call them and understand what you are dealing with. Get ready for CPS advertising to be effective, but expensive.
The quality of the advertising system can be judged if it buys by show, offers CPS, requires deep integration, and also swears at your sales managers and its services are expensive. These 4 factors in the aggregate are your salvation.
Perhaps with this article I’ll call a flurry of criticism and boiling from colleagues in the shop of the form “We don’t understand what you are talking about, everything is all right” or “Learn to deal with the wrap first like us and then write little articles from Trololo” you knew all the power and power of programmatics and retargeting, you wouldn’t scream here, ”as well as other nasty things. The problem is that the root of the problem is not technology, but, as I already wrote above, in the mechanism for extracting profits and sharing responsibility. But it does not matter. It's time to finally 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 will tell you directly - we are suffering enormous losses precisely because of bots and clicking. At the same time, advertisers are dissatisfied with only one - few sales, but no one shouts that the traffic is turned on. They don't care. If we don’t find a solution, we’ll leave the market. And any system that cannot find this solution should go away. And that office, which will find the solution before anyone else, will fly up with a rocket with the power that Google once took off.
Put this market with cancer and start bending it today, giving up all clicks and impressions! Let these risks be borne by the advertising system, in the end it is her work. And when the advertising system starts to think with its head due to the loss of money on bots, it will eventually begin to think greedily about the quality of traffic. At the same time, once banned by all systems, resource owners can come to their senses, who knows. Perhaps the public blacklists of cheating sites will be revived again and will serve as a reminder of the past era of click fraud.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/356582/
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