According to their Blog SpiderOak ditched Google Analytics for their website a few months back, in favor of their own home grown analytic software running on their own servers. They were also testing Google AdWords, which inserts small ads in pages, for which Spideroak would pay by the click.
One thing they noticed was that their Google AdWords click counts didn't seem to agree with their own analytics and web logs. They were getting billed for clicks that never did arrive at their servers.
I dug into Google AdWords Reporting — which I can report is pretty nice — and was able to learn a little bit more about the numbers. Seems that that over 85% of our clicks were coming from the Google Display Network (not Search) and well over 50% of the clicking was happening in Romania, Brazil, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, Philippines and Bangladesh. After a bit of sorting and filtering of the data I get another surprise, . When I compare all this info with our analytics data I see that most of the UIDs (unique identifiers of those who click) have more than one click — in fact most have dozens and several are over a hundred. Why would the same people keep clicking on the same ad?
Their ads were all in English, but their clicks were from non English speaking countries.
Further when they started comparing the click data from Google to their own analytics they found that half those clicks never arrived at Spideroak servers:
SpiderOak just spent $1,168.01 and nearly half of those clicks didn't result in a visit?
Google AdWords offered this explanation in their documentation:
"A click is counted even if the person doesn't reach your website, maybe because it's temporarily unavailable. As a result, you might see a difference between the number of clicks on your ad and the number of visits to your website."
Bullshit. Our site was certainly not unavailable.
What experiences have other Soylentils had with web advertising that seemed a little questionable?
Questionable? (Score:3, Interesting)
is *any* "web advertising" NOT questionable?
Mozilla fundraising on google home page.
Wikipedia asking for money on every page?
All of it is bad.
(Score: tau, Irrational)
Bullshit? (Score:2)
If advertisers refuse to "donate", then how could Google-do-no-evil offer free email to all, research driver-less car and nose-riding technology, create value for their shareholders and pay their you "shouldn't-be-doing-it-in-the-first-place" executives [eff.org] as well as the accounting critters to avoid taxes?
I mean... com'on... $1,168.01 is small change nowadays, why are they complaining?
In fact, here's an idea: the govts everywhere should implement the Google-tax in reverse: collect it from their citizens on behalf of Google. And Faecebook. Don't forget Twitter, last I heard it's not doing too good profit-wise [fortune.com]
Re:Bullshit? (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't make the adword billion$ without screwing over a lot of small customers.
Google is in the great position of having a nice, large cash reserve to throw around and weather them against a potential adwords backlash. They are attempting moonshots and diversification of the company so that 90% of the revenue is not coming from adwords. Yet even though that is not happening, revenue, income, assets, and equity [wikipedia.org] are all up. It's the Standard Oil of the Internet age and as long as adwords revenue growth continues, they will only get stronger.
[SIG] 03/03/2016: Soylent Upgrade v12 [soylentnews.org]
Parent
1/2 point? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google's reply seems to be evasive, and maybe even bullshit, but I think they get a half point for this:
""A click is counted even if the person doesn't reach your website, maybe because it's temporarily unavailable. As a result, you might see a difference between the number of clicks on your ad and the number of visits to your website.""
If Google is counting clicks, but my browser prevents the page from loading, then Google may have a legitimate count. But, I doubt that there are so many poeple running script and ad blockers that the numbers can be made to match. There should be a discrepancy, but that discepancy should not be anywhere near 50%.
We've been wishing Jews a "Merry Christmas" for about 2000 years. They don't shoot, bomb, or behead us in response.
Re:1/2 point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't think that this is an ad-block issue. Ad-Blockers wouldn't even fetch the ad, Let alone click it.
This seems more like an intentional fraud.
The pages hosting those ads get some part of what SpiderOak set their bid price to each time the ad is clicked.
So Joe Blog writes about cloud storage, and agrees to host google ads, and SpiderOak bids the highest, their ads appear on Joe's page.
Joe being a bit of a shyster subscribes to a service (or has a lot of friends), who rush into Joe's page, and click the SpiderOak ad.
Each click brings Joe some coin.
But the service, or Joe's friends (or was it Joe himself?) have no interest in loading SpiderOak's page so after they load it once, they add the spideraok ad-server to their hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1.
Then they click it like crazy, perhaps interspersed with many others to mask their intent.
The click arrives at google. Ca-Ching! - coin in Joe's account.
Google sends a re-direct back to the clicker's browser
But the re-direct hits the Host file and goes nowhere.
Somebody decides to make a business of this:
Automate the click
Ignore the re-direct
Convince a hundred rubes to run his script (or install it as malware)
Profit.
SigsЯus. Guaranteed Retro-Active.
Parent
On the other side: no visit... blessing or curse? (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppose that it would have been result in a visit to the site, would it have been better?
Based in the described behaviour, highly probable those clicks came from bots (either automated scripts or just paid human bots, doesn't matter) which didn't wait for or followed any http redirection responses.
Now, suppose those bots would actually follow and reached SpiderOak's . Would it have been better?
I mean... look... would you be happier to pay for a traffic on your website that for sure won't result in any sale or advantage? ('cause those bots for sure will be discarding any info your site will send them).
Even more... why hold Google responsible for it?
Because, technically, once Google site delivered the "http redirect" answer following an adword click, it has no way to know or control what the recipient has done with that info.
Isn't it amazing that a company, which is supposed to be tech-savvy by the nature of its products/services, is able to show such a knee-jerk reaction?
Should I trust SpiderOak's expertise?
Re:On the other side: no visit... blessing or curs (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, suppose those bots would actually follow and reached SpiderOak's . Would it have been better?
Well it would have slowed them down a little I suppose, but yeah if you have the bandwidth you could just let the page come.
Problem is:
1) The web site hosting the ads has no incentive to avoid click-fraud until it gets egregious enough to attract google's attention.
2) Google has no incentive to shut down click-frauders until they get egregious enough to attract attention from the advertisers.
Both of them make money with a process they both know to be fraudulent.
In the past, ending about three years ago, I use to manage google AdWords for a part of my day job. We were placing ads, not hosting them.
When my account rep called up (as they do once or twice a year), I once mentioned in passing that our clickthrough rate (and count) was way higher than our page loads (for the page the ads landed on). I gave him numbers (simple log greps from the web server). It was all rather casual and matter of fact, I wasn't actually lodging a complaint.
Without even blinking an eye he rolled back about 30% of the charges we had paid, and upon a couple more questions he rolled it back for three additional months and said they would put a click-fraud detection on the account.
Came as a revelation to me. I was pretty naive about all this. I handed this task over to my replacement and gave her a huge clue about it, and how to check it out. She canceled AdWord advertising 6 months later. (Smarter than me).
Oh, and another game, is your competitor will click the living hell out of your ads so that you hit your daily dollar limit, and then their ad gets featured with a bid one cent less. You can't really prove that, because you don't get reliable IP addresses, mostly just regions, and some UUID. You can't use google to track your hits to an individual.
SigsЯus. Guaranteed Retro-Active.
Parent
Sturgeon's Law (Score:0)
It says that 90% of everything is crap. Those who understand it are spared disappointment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law [wikipedia.org]
Script blockers? (Score:4, Interesting)
I surf with javascripting disabled.
A lot of business sites I land on come up blank. Nothing works.
Unless I have already formed a relationship with *that* business and am willing to risk "dropping my shields" for them, I abort that site and move on.
Google has usually found hundreds of alternatives. No use putting up with business sites that do not work or require me to use risky practice.
I do not know if my visit was even recorded. Google knows they linked me to the business, but the business website may have been so insistent that I bend over and take whatever scripts that they may have never seen me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
obvious fraud (Score:2)
...well over 50% of the clicking was happening in Romania, Brazil, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, Philippines and Bangladesh.
In most of the countries mentioned google could get some shady deal with ISP, possibly without them knowing it, where they get some rotation of IP addresses and just run a clickbot.
And, in those particular countries, it would be probably really difficult to investigate, trace this.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
Possible sources... (Score:4, Informative)
The key bits regarding click fraud are: "only 30 of our 10K+ clicks were from the US" and well over 50% of the clicking was happening in Romania, Brazil, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, Philippines and Bangladesh.
It seems unlikely that Google would be paying people to click on ads. However, that is not the only possible source. Competitors may click on your ads, hoping both to cost you money and (more importantly) to cause your AdWords setting to hit a ceiling and stop displaying. Secondly, there may be some motivation to manipulate the bid prices on various words and phrases, by clicking on corresponding ads. Finally, the Google Display Network: don't the sites displaying the ads get a cut of the pay, thus giving them an incentive to play stupid games?
There are ways to defend yourself. We haven't used AdWords for years, but (as I recall, anyway) I believe you can restrict your ads to display in certain regions. If you aren't marketing to Bangladesh, there is no reason to allow your ads to display there. Also, we never did see the purpose of the Google Display Network - and you can prevent your ads from displaying there. As the blog article notes, that seems to have been the main source of the click fraud.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
Prefetch (Score:0)
Hey, suddenly the prefetch feature of browsers makes sense...
bid bounce (Score:2)
I was concerned about the load time for a clients page after we had implemented all the usual bundling,minification, gzip etc tricks. I ran the Windows http monitoring tool fiddler and noticed that for each ad from different vendors a dance was done.
The client had Google ads and a separate ad network .
Even the Google ads bounced requests around Google servers (3 or 4) and the other ad network averaged 6 including both Google and Yahoo's servers. Investigations showed that the networks pass the request between different parties looking for the best/highest bid before finally showing you the final ad.
No wonder it was slow!
and every now and then one of the servers in the chain would be unavailable or the dynamic JavaScript would have and error just stopping the whole thing flat.
To intentionally waste a competitor's money (Score:0)
It can be used to make one's competitors waste money on online advertising.
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/ [bloomberg.com]