I observed the same with Google's "Smart" display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US/Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn't effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US/Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped countries. Then there was the behavior of the "users" when they visited the site. A large percentage of them went straight to the search box (which literally no humans do on the site) and typed in something topical but completely unrelated to the site's topic, e.g. "covid". Another large percentage just scrolled up and down randomly. It was interesting to see the size and relative sophistication of the fraud going on but not exactly $500 well spent.
Wow, I had the same issue. I'm an ad-noob in the fullest sense of the word, but I tried the Google "Smart Ad". It turned out the same way you mentioned. I looked at where my clicks were coming from, and they were all pretty much from Hindi oriented Youtube channels. I was baffled at how that happened as I targeted US/Canada as you did.
It seems like pay-per-click and similar models should just be discontinued, they don't work since they can be exploited. An independently verifiable metric needs to be used (if the price for the ad should be traffic or interaction based) - or something completely different. Fixed prices?
There's a large circular economy with ad buyers, marketing/PR firms, ad-tech, and ad networks going on where a large amount of fraud is overlooked/ignored because everyone's jobs and ad budgets depend on ignoring it.
Sounds a bit like the "systemic failures" that brought down the housing market in 2008.
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.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when the jig is finally up, since there's so much stuff we're used to getting for free that is currently financed by all of this: email, maps and GPS navigation, staying in contact with college friends, ...
Honestly I think we'll be fine. If the services are worth something then people will be willing to pay for them. Newspapers, magazines, email, satellite radio, navigation systems etc. all existed (and were very profitable) well before online advertising became what it is now. We might even be better off that way.
For navigation to a known address, OSMAnd works great. Google Maps is better at search, particularly for commercial destinations, and has a slicker interface. For everything else, particularly navigation off road (on trails or otherwise) OSM excels. OSM has much more detail than Google Maps for things like parks and trails, frequently even having the locations of water fountains (this has saved my ass a few times.)
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.
Sometimes it's just priced in. If partner A has a 10% fraud rate and partner B has a 5% rate but partner A is 10% cheaper than partner B, while you'll probably complain to partner A it's still the sensible choice.
It's not just clickfraud. Attribution is a hard problem that leaves a lot of space to bullshit people. A/B tests require degree-level understanding of statistics to conduct properly, which isn't common in companies, particularly when correctness doesn't matter if the test is just used to confirm preconceptions or justify budgets. Etc.
Well, at my last employer we had our own systems analyzing traffic, we had integrations with third parties (DoubleVerify being the biggest) to detect fraud, our clients often had their own third party integrations to detect fraud and would complain if we hadn't found it but they did at too high a rate, etc.
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.
Every been to a big break and motor store and they asked for your zip code? That is because they have someone in the back office to wants to see if the ads - dead tree paper - they spent to your zip code worked. It isn't hard to work the numbers from there, but it is tedious and requires some statistics.
The vacuum problem... the issue is that it's kinda hit or miss to come up with items that are related to the vacuum and to do it over a time period.
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?
No actually. Post codes are a recent thing here, and are mostly not hierachical. Also the standard reaction would be wondering why they need any info to process an instore purchase.
actually it does. That is why you need a full time statistician on staff (likely a department), they spend a lot of effort finding and accounting for confounding factors.
Are they all like this, in that they're easy to exploit and there are high occurrences of fraud?
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.
All the metrics for advertisement sales have been gamed for as long as I know of (at least 20 years); this goes for paper, online, television, and radio. Smart advertisers know what's going on, and they take the 'gaming' into account.
I've been waiting so long for it to be a bubble that pops, web ads just can't be worth that much when they are so bad.
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.
the default setting on Google location targeting is/was "user in [geo] OR user 'interested' in [geo]." which is insane! but could explain the location weirdness
I know this isn't tech support, but is there somewhere I can read about changing this? And you are damn right, it's extremely astonishing seeing as how "target geo" != "interested in" at least on it's face.
> 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.
I work at Hotjar and love it that you're getting value out of the product! We do try to not record bots that advertise known user agents, like Google, Bing and other common ones. Reasoning being that recording non-humans will usually not tell you much about how your UX is optimized for humans.
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 promise I'm not a shill, but yes I do indeed love HotJar and find it essential for getting new sites off the ground. I've uncovered countless UX improvements by watching HotJar recordings. And thanks for your generous free tier!
I wonder what your users would think of the fact that their every click was being recorded. I suspect the reason most people are not worried about this kind of stuff is that they're not aware how creepy it actually is.
I can respect that some people find it creepy, and I personally use AdBlock, which blocks HotJar as others mentioned. That said, I find a tool that records anonymous sessions detached from any sort of PII or even IP address much less offensive than something like Google Analytics, social login, or literally any advertising pixel.
Can I do the opposite and only record events from known bots to determine their level of interactivity?
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.
Naah, just install adnauseum [1] and thank advertisers for forcing you to use adblocker. Let them pay for all the manace they couse to you and help ad networks to build completely wrong profile on you.
They should make it so that it talks to a VM (with no persistent storage) and sends the links to be opened to it (with the current browser's context such as cookies, etc so attribution still works).
I think it goes so far as to be unethical, because it takes advantage of a gap in understanding[1] where most users aren't even aware of the possibility of this being possible.
On the one hand, I agree that the capability is concerning,
but if it only records the behavior within a single visit and doesn't correlate it with an account, or across multiple visits, or across websites at all, I think that that probably wouldn't be much of an issue, for me at least.
However, I don't see a way to allow that without also making the aforementioned unwanted connections also possible.
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.
Hashing email addresses doesn't really work. Most people don't use unique addresses per service and its easy to get a large list of email addresses that you can hash and do lookups in.
What would the goal of the “users” (bots?) have been in this case? Is there any monetary gain for them? Would a competitor do this to waste your ad spend?
I used to do the same thing, but I don't think any of them were adult sites. It was all done through some kind of ads broker, and the cheques came directly from them.
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.
I mean in most cases Google controls both the Ad Network and the analytics people use to monitor those ads. It's easy to imagine some artificial inflation happening.
I ran ads with Google again recently after a long hiatus. Literally 0 conversions (free signup) but ads on FB/Reddit/Others performed fine. Just 100% worthless traffic. Google has gone very wrong.
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. :(
So would this then mean that Google's Adwords program for advertising your business based on keywords and target countries or regions is broken and unusable for business owners? (at least not profitably usable).
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.
I think it depends if you’re doing Direct Response Ads, or branding.
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.
I ran into the same thing. Until now I thought I was just a noob and couldn't figure out a way to exclude each country by painstakingly excluding each country manually. These exclusions did work for me though.
you sure you setup your campaign correctly? from what it sounds like, you didn't limit your campaign to search. also it would be VERY interesting to see how you not only setup your ad group but also what keywords you used for each group. typically when we see people complain about ad fraud we see alot of basic mistakes that they made when setting up their campaign. i hate to say it, but 99% of the people out that claim they know how to setup and manage a google ads campaign are amateurs at best and don't know the basic foundations of the way google ads works.
As mentioned, this was Google's Smart (display) Ads not their traditional search ads. I've had good success with the latter but decided to try the former on their suggestion.
Hard to know how much is ad fraud and how much is people just not being interested in what is being advertised. Don't see why I should care about yet another webinar especially if I'm already a successful CEO and get five thousand webinar requests a day. Might click for more info but then after 10 seconds on the page (and seeing it's more BS) I'll probably bail.
Same as this quote:
>“You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing.
No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail.
edit: Also at only 11 clicks, the metrics are pure noise. Sure they each cost $45 but it's still only 11 clicks. Can't even blame the CPC estimation for being off at such a low number.
> No, if the only option you give me is "Request Demo" but all I want is more info then I'll click "Request Demo." Then when I don't get more info or info that I like I'll bail.
Exactly. Even if I was thinking about requesting a demo when I clicked the ad, I then want to see a lot of information on the target site before proceeding. I'm not going to sign up for a demo unless I think there's a pretty good chance I'll want to buy.
Most vendor websites don't provide nearly enough information for me to make that judgment. As someone who doesn't consider talking to sales people to be a recreational activity, that leaves me with little choice but to bail.
Same. I hate when I need to get on a call to just get pricing for something, or even worse, to just renew a yearly subscription.
Plus this was analytics software which is a dime a dozen nowadays. So you need to make your value proposition known very well and very quickly. Even then you'll get a very low conversion rate unless you've done a very good branding campaign to get your name out there.
No, thanks. Unless the person giving me the demo is the CEO, their entire salary and taxes are being taken out of my price, and it's most likely not the kind of company I want to do business with.
"LinkedIn says 11, our server logs show 10, our actual reporting software's only showing 8 people. The only reason that we would not see them pop up in this logging tool is that they were on the site and bounced so quickly that the logging tool was unable to load and capture anything of their session [We've went back and forth will the session recording company multiple times to confirm that]"
Seems awareness of ad/trackblocking and disabling JavaScript is low in this space.
Still, he could absolutely be right some portion of them are misclicks.
> The only reason that we would not see them pop up in this logging tool is that they were on the site and bounced so quickly that the logging tool was unable to load and capture anything of their session.
I'm really happy to hear this shows up in site metrics, since it's exactly what I do when I follow a link into ad-laden crap. I don't block ads by default, but I also have zero tolerance for keeping crap open.
Or the pop-up filled marketing sites. "Come chat with us." "Click this big banner for a discount." "Come to this webinar if you can't find the small X to close this banner." "This site uses cookies." "Watch these fifty background animations play."
I'm sure Facebook will be lower than this in terms of awareness of adblock, considering the number of oldies there (including my relatives) who can't distinguish between sponsored content and original content. I'm honestly surprised LinkedIn has such high numbers, since I assumed the LinkedIn crowd would be more technologically savvy.
Tech savvy crowd and engineers probably only use linkedin once a full moon to fill out their details. The rest are recruiters, PR, management, students, and so on. Those are the regulars. You don't use linkedin when you have a job unless that is your job.
Employed engineer here. I use linkedin to network and as a result I get a few inbound recruiting requests a week. Most are contract roles I'm not interested in, but some are for interesting companies that I wouldn't have found on a job board. I try to take interviews for the latter.
Going through an interview with nothing to lose helps me keep up my networking and interviewing soft skills. The best time to find a job is when you don't need one.
I think the parent comment is about adblock awareness by advertisers. One reason their invasive tracking might say they have less visitors than their ad network is because some of the people clicking their ads block their invasive tracking.
For some reason or other LinkedIn keeps thinking I must be very interested in Shell and Raytheon, though that couldn't be farther off the mark.
Having selected "I find this ad annoying or not interesting" numerous times without any effect. What is this algorithm behind that thinking? Certainly not a good way to get some ad revenue from me (tbh I'm a lost cause anyway in that regard.. can count the no. of ad clicks I ever made on one hand. So I guess LI is helping me here).
Let's face it Shell and Raytheon have much much larger ad buying budget than probably any/all of your actual interests combined. If Shell/Raytheon/types target the same audience as smaller vendors with smaller ad buys, then they will always lose the auction. If someone has a $500/month budget, they will lose to someone with a $5000 budget. This is why I think these "targeted" ad pushers are the actual fraud.
Other mediums of advertising sell you a specific ad on a certain page of a website/newspaper/magazine/etc. You have no idea how many people really look at it. You make your decision on if the site/paper/zine attracts the crowd you are interested in. Buying TV/Radio ads also says for your ad buy you will get X number of ads in certain time spots, or for more money you can have your ad played during specific times during specific shows. Again, you have no idea on the exact number of people seeing/hearing your ad, but at least you know it's getting played.
If this is the case then why does LI even have the "I find this ad annoying or not interesting". I thought the whole point of that option was to counteract a company that the user is explicitly not interested in from winning the ad auction.
If the option doesn't work than that seems like an issue on the part of LI, either dishonesty (pretending it does something when it doesn't) or incompetence. Given the company we're talking about, neither would surprise me.
Perhaps we can find a reason in the article "Why the world is full of buttons that don't work"[0]:
"They're sometimes called "placebo buttons" -- buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who pioneered a concept known as the "illusion of control."
"They do have a psychological effect," she said in a phone interview. "Taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation, and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander."
You must be thinking that the button is meant to improve your ad experience. All ad platforms care about are fulfilling their obligation of serving ads. They claim they are targeted. Again, that's not for your enjoyment. It's a way to get advertisers to spend more money. You clicking the button says you're an actual human like the 'unsubscribe' link in spam while being a placebo. Am I cynical, maybe? Am I wrong, ??
I’ve done the same to at least a dozen “Daily Show with Trevor Noah” ads on YouTube. I’m pretty sure there is no algorithm behind it. A switch connected to nothing that exists only to provide an outlet for user frustration.
CPC estimation is not an exact science anywhere - most places are comparing it based on other ads with similar targeting to yours, they have no idea how much your ad content makes people want to click or not which is a big factor.
I lost a couple of thousand dollars using their services (literally 5x my ad budget) because they "refill" your ad account based on the ceiling you intend to spend - without an email notification or other notification in your main profile. It cycled through my ~$300 ad budget and charged me that amount multiple times before I caught it on my bill. Never received the refund they said they'd send either.
People say that half of all advertising dollars are wasted, you just don't know which half, but this company has perfected it to 5-10x what you mean to spend on advertising is wasted, and you don't know until they've taken it from you and then shown you the fine print.
What you lose in credit card points, you 10X in savings on:
1. Unexpected "recurring" charges and
2. Time spent avoiding unintelligible unsubscribe UXs
Plus, I feel a lot more comfortable trying services that require a credit card for a free trial which has led me to some extra value that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Just set the budget on the card to $1.
Some people might feel bad for all the SaaS companies that are getting failed payment alerts, but I don't. It took a lot of dark patterns and group think to create a market for something like privacy.com.
I'm still waiting on my $600 from Dropbox, which they charged over five years for an inactive account without ever sending a receipt. Never again with privacy.com.
Not all. A major US Bank (rhymes w/ Pace Bank) used to provide this feature back in the 2000s and then rolled it back. I discovered this ~4 months ago when I wanted to buy something online but didn't fully trust the vendor. Then ended up going with Privacy.com.
I'm a huge fan and would def recommend them to anyone looking for better control over subscription charges
I have a Capital One card and wanted to use that feature. As far as I could tell, the only way to use it was to install their "assistant" browser extension and give it permission to view everything you do. Then if you were on a merchant site it could suggest you use a new card number for it. I considered toggling the assistant on and off just as needed but instead said nope. Was there another way to do it?
You can give selective access[0] to the extensions in Chrome. The restrictive access is that it will get access to the webpage only when you click the extension. Read under "Let extensions read and change site data"
Totally bogus, isn’t it? I just did that very thing with CapOne. The only saving grace is that once you create the temp card with their definitely-not-spyware web browser extension, you can uninstall it completely and manage the card through the website. I’ve installed it, visited a single site, and uninstalled it several times so far and it seems to get the job done.
Apple Card does this (and obviously Apple Pay in general). It's not nearly as powerful as Privacy though since the card numbers can't be cancelled or paused from what I can tell.
What is the purpose of allowing the user to set a "budget" if they automatically refill it? That doesn't sound like a budget at all, and highly deceptive on their end if that's what they called it
Is it really that bad? I know land lords that have had to go to small claims court, they spent like a day dealing with things. I’m not totally sure you’ll break even but it’s not a total loss either.
If they advertise increased click-through rate and they increase it, what stops them from claiming they fulfilled their end of the bargain? It could even be click bots.
If LI were still a public company, this behaviour would destroy their stock price. There is something to be said for public markets and accountability.
Is there? To me, it seems like either this behavior would hurt their profits, in which case it doesn't really matter that much whether they're public or not (they get hurt either way), or it wouldn't but a public company would have more backlash, in which case it seems like an efficient market would have actors that look for companies getting backlash, buy the cheap stock, and then enjoy the (unaffected, by assumption) profits.
Except as a product, the company (MSFT) is insulated from their crappy behavior, where if it were a stand alone company, there would be more accountability.
Maybe that's a new platform company strategy: build a bunch of low-volatility/low-margin enterprise products for long term revenue generation, then fund a bunch of shadey operations as products to be pools for off-the-books bonuses and incentives.
When a company like Microsoft buys a company like LinkedIn, they aren't after direct profits. They're buying eyeballs and personal information for ad targeting. Microsoft already got what they wanted out of the purchase. It's the same reason Facebook buys tons of companies that will never directly turn a profit.
I agree with your larger point, that LinkedIn isn't really accountable to anyone; the Microsoft shareholders don't care what LinkedIn does.
this could very well be the case. in which case, using oculus as a model -- the company's promises to you as the user are only as good as the last company who acquired them.
I don't really know if a chargeback would work here, but the basis would be "I agreed to pay X and LinkedIn charged me Y", not "LinkedIn did not deliver the services advertised".
> “You’ll see the call to action is ‘Request Demo,'” Gellis said. “So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing.
This guy is deluded. People click random things to get more info, and they might not have liked the more info they got so didn’t go ahead with the demo.
I stopped reading the content of marketing websites ages ago, I just click on whatever is big and orange or other flashy colors until I see something that looks like a list of features, or whatever I'm looking for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to be the only one to have this marketing blindness. I guess I'm a bot based on my behaviour?
If the landing page has a bunch of soft stuff like 'expands synergy' on it I am just going to assume I was not the target audience. I'm not a CEO, I'm a practitioner. Put something crunchy in there. Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao.
> The point is to keep my real interests private from creepy marketing departments.
Which is why you block all ads?
Companies don't care about 'real interests'. They see the things you click on and show you more ads based on it. They earn money. That's it.
The marketing department knows the sites you visit because it has to serve the ad so this thing can click on it.
Exactly, there's more than 1 factor while his campaign didn't work at all.
As mentioned in other comments, his ad spend was pretty low anyway, you can't come to conclusions if a campaign is successful from 11 clicks.
The main problem is that his creative/lander or his copy didn't convert.
Having the clicks differentiate from the ad source compared to your tracking tool is pretty common as well. If you're using just GA to track it, the numbers are going to be wildly different with people having Adblockers.
I've worked on some large B2B ad campaigns on LinkedIn, some of them we only ever got 1 lead, but that lead was worth a lot more than that the campaign budget, so that was a success for us.
I advertised on LI about a year ago. I had reasonable success (in terms of new leads/signups). Here is what I remember from the experience.
I found that the interface for managing ads was terribly buggy and shouldn't even be considered production ready. One bug that I remember is that it wasn't possible to remove ads, and the button to suspend an add didn't work most of the time.
In typical LI fashion the interface was full of dark patterns, it was really tricky to limit the expenses. In the blink of an eye you could be spending hundreds of USD per day.
Analytics were somewhat available, but basically useless. For no reason the CPC could jump to dollars per click, and no way to discover why.
Advertising, especially for a tech SaaS, is hard. The tools available are usually terrible to use, expensive and often shady. In my experience, doing advertisements is one of the worst parts of starting a new service.
Strange. I always thought the reason they weren’t improving the Consumer end user GUI was because they focused monetization on Enterprise. I guess it was crap all around. (Perhaps they under invest because they have such a defensible position as the one place for online resumes)
Their Sales Navigator offering is utter crap, too. Borderline useless. I canceled after about a year because changes to the free version made it sufficient for my use.
As a further warning, don't even consider utilizing the LinkedIn platform as a creator or community builder. For example, I manage some popular groups, and one day LinkedIn decided that I send too many messages by welcoming new members. Even though their documentation still stated that group managers could message their members without limit, my account kept getting suspended. What did their support tell me? (and I was still paying $100/month at the time) "If you keep sending messages, then you risk being permanently banned." Creating value on the platform, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users, has no weight at LinkedIn.
It sounds like they are moaning that their client side rendered React-based landing page had a lot of bounces which they don't believe because client side rendered react pages are known to be "very very fast" and "some of the very fastest available technology". (This is around the 15:30 mark)
That's baloney, client side rendered JavaScript landing pages are much slower than server-side rendered.
App Annie actually banned me once when I logged with javascript disabled and privacy badger installed. I had to contact their customer support, and they just said to disable my extensions and don't do it again otherwise I'll be banned permanently.
I was about to comment the same thing. They talked about how it's a progressive web app: good, built in react: good, client side rendered: no no no why!
As a general rule, Web "apps" should be client rendered (think FB, Twitter, Gmail, etc), Web "sites" should be server rendered. I wish React made it more clear what the difference between the two is and why you should use one versus the other. I know frameworks like Next and Gatsby do it but I wish it was a more ingrained part of React.
I agree with you, no valid reason (even stupid) from a performance point of view to render on the client for such pages. Client-side rendering backed up by Server-side rendering could increase performance on _following_ navigation when the performance/payload-penalty has been taken on first page load.
LinkedIn is one of those things you have and probably only use when you need a job or are desperate for clients.
No one is there to get decent information or to genuinely connect with people. It's the digital equivalent of the super fake networking seminars people go to. Everyone is a seller and on one is a buyer.
Makes sense that their ad network is sketchy and buggy.
I know plenty of technical founders who are quite active on LinkedIn. Without disclosing any names, I can assure you they are not looking for new jobs or desperate for anything.
At one point I was convinced that everybody is leaving FB just because I and a few people I knew were leaving FB. Years later it's still a dominant social network. Beware of confirmation bias and the firehouse effect[0].
I know several very active founders on LinkedIn as well, but it’s clear that they’re all using LI for the intended purpose: Building their personal brand and business network. They may not be actively looking for jobs or desperate for clients, but they are working the system to elevate their own status.
It’s possible to find halfway decent content on LI, but it takes a lot of work to filter out the fluff. Even then, you have to be honest about why people are doing it in the first place: Networking and brand building. No busy founder is going to frequently take time away from their growing business to write LI content without expectation of personal or business gain.
That’s not to say you can’t find diamonds in the rough, but you need to be realistic about the context to separate it from the brand building.
Sooo, I've spent hundreds of thousands on LinkedIn Ads on behalf of clients. Here is my take:
Ad platforms work in varying degrees for different products and companies. You should not dismiss an ad platform based on poor performance alone without understanding why it performed poorly.
It's sort of like with airlines: If you boycott an airline for every minor offense, pretty soon you'll have no option but to take the train.
In this case, it's disingenuous to paint an entire ad platform--that does hundreds of millions in revenue[1]--as "awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic" based on a campaign that ran for just 1.5 days and resulted in 11 clicks. (They say they saw similar results from larger campaigns, but they don't show them.)
But Ok, let's say we take out the generalizations. I get that it's disconcerting for any company to find they were charged for traffic that bounced within a second. In that case you need to look for the root cause, and see if it can be resolved or worked around.
In this case the root cause should be painfully obvious to experienced marketers like the authors: Most of the 11 clicks seems to be from mobile traffic (as seen in their Fullstory report), where it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news feed. They do mention this possibility in both the video and the title, but they seem to underestimate the likelihood of this being the root cause, and talk too much about bots instead. I've seen this exact misclick behavior in Twitter and for that reason I stopped advertising there.
Unlike Twitter, however, LinkedIn lets you work around this. They offer a "lead gen" campaign type, which requires two clicks (one on the ad, and one more on the "submit form" button) and sharing of contact information before the advertiser is charged. I've still seen funky results from this--such as users saying they don't recall submitting any form--but in much fewer cases than with simple image ads.
Today, when I run LinkedIn campaigns, it is almost always with lead gen ads. The results are far better than this anecdotal post suggests. Some issues still come up, and I've found that attempting to troubleshoot them leads to a better outcome for the business than dismissing the entire ad platform.
Lots of people use it. The feed aspect of it is useless. But in terms of a network it's great. I've found 2 out of my last 3 jobs there. Assume it's also great for organic marketing as well where you target associates of your current clients.
I actually do have several friends and other people in my network (some quite accomplished professionally) who are very active on LinkedIn, and there's not much shady about them. But yes, it's weird.
Not just shady ones. I notice a lot of legitimate recruiters find me on LinkedIn and it leads to real work for me.
I personally avoid it like the plague, but I do keep my CV up to date there. (Actually it's out of date right now, but I'll update it when I start looking again.)
Well, that and colleagues of mine from over in the the marketing and sales departments, who can't understand why it takes me an average of 2 months to get around to accepting their connection requests.
I think Linkedin is quite useless as a social network - their business model selling your contacts to "digital strategists" who try to contact you. Most of the content is marketing spam, and nobody uses it.
Still, when we happen to recruit, we get like 10-20 decent applicants (of which 5 were pretty good) for $250 o so.
B2B SaaS founder here. I had exactly the same experience. I built my own code for tracking signups, and discovered that the actual conversions were a big fat zero. That's when I stopped burning money on LinkedIn ads.
Mind you, this experience wasn't much different for other ad networks. Quora was slightly better in that at least there seemed to be some interest shown by people landing (or perhaps this was the only ad site that sent actual people my way?).
> LinkedIn’s ad platform reported 11 clicks. RMG’s logs showed ten clicks.
This is well within the IAB's 10% discrepancy. Also that sample size is bullshit. I could show you the sample size of my $7,000 campaign from a couple months ago that recorded a slightly larger discrepancy, but the fact of the matter remains that LinkedIn was the best performer of all ad networks I tested.
Again: That's not to say there's no fuckery afoot but that is a hell of small sample size to refer to as a "study".
I deleted my LinkedIn account because it attracted an endless number of bad business partners. I got sick and tired of all the "Joe Blow"(s) on LinkedIn who claim to be "Joe Blow Inc." (I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one person.)
I've certainly found work on LinkedIn, but my experience is that for other kinds of sales and networking it is a terrible time sink.
Based on the intense level of BS I can't imagine that advertising would have really worked there.
Exactly - although most jurisdictions do require that a corporation have more than one person involved; in the UK you can have a corporation with one director but it must have a secretary as well.
When it comes to both taxes (in the UK you can be more tax efficient than trading as a sole trader) and limited liability, why wouldn't you want to have a limited company?
Considering all the new developments in the UK, all at the expense of the employee, there's a real business opportunity for someone who can help workers incorporate themselves as contractors under their individual limited companies. Especially when companieshouse has as much oversight on the database as I know about isolated Renshaw flux oscillation signatures.
In india, they added OPC (one person company) which is an extension of limited liability for individuals. I think it's becoming quite common across countries.
> LinkedIn Ads network is likely awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic
Just like every single other adnet? The very fact of massive adfraud groups allegedly specialising on one or another net means that they must be making money somehow.
By the definition, those guy must be one step ahead of the adnet, or they don't make money, and fizzle in a few months.
My impression is that there are groups which have consistently defeated all, and every bot detection method the entirety of ad industry threw on them.
Why I deleted my LinkedIn account? Literally the baddest UX ever. Lots of self-serving, self-promoting, click-baiting people. There is a thing called web. In this thing you can have a blog, in this thing called blog you can actually reach your ideal audience. LinkedIn is a tool created from the start to serve a corporate idea, which in my view is useful if executed with a boundaries. Where are LinkedIn boundaries? They don't exist.
Don't know if it's a personal site or not, it sounds like it is. But at least my case is that a VPS provider provides a hard stop to spend. Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill.
That said, I've topped HN before and nginx happily handled that load on a 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM host with a static site. A lot of these personal site meltdowns are Wordpress with no caching plugins.
> Sure, your service will go down if you get too much traffic, but that's a risk I'm happier with than a potentially unbounded AWS bill.
The last time an article on my site reached the top of HN, my AWS bill was a couple of dollars for the month, across S3, Cloudfront, Athena and SNS.
I get the concern that you'll spend more than you intended with AWS, but it's honestly hard to blow a budget on a static site hosted in S3 and served by Cloudfront. Those two services have heavy guard rails on what you can accidentally commit to doing, unlike the myriad compute services.
The problem is that this website is down and no-one can access its content. This problem would not exist if the author had simply released their static content on a CDN. Your 5€ DO droplet is not helping me access this content.
The point is this is static web content; it should be delivered by a CDN, but it's not, and that's why it's down. If it was delivered by a CDN it wouldn't be down.
A sample size of of 2,000 impressions is absolutely useless. Even the larger example is completely useless.
I don’t even considering analyzing a campaign with less than 50k impressions, and I won’t look at a variable if it’s under 10k. Realistically I want a few hundred thousand impressions before trying to make big claims about fraud.
I hear you, but often times in B2B advertising, your target audiences are going to be small. How would you suggest assessing the success/failure of your ad campaigns if it's an order of magnitude less than your 50k threshold?
Yeah, it was a wake-up call for me that b2b tech companies are first and foremost sales companies. Once place I worked the actual product was developed and maintained by a team of about 20 people that included dev, ops, and product managers but sales was about 200 people.
Just getting a meeting with a decision maker at a med-large company could take a whole team months. I don't envy their jobs.
So if your audience is actually that small, you should do account based marketing (ABM) which looks entirely different. Rather than spend money on LinkedIn ads trying to target “decision makers at IT companies” you spend your time actively pursuing individual companies.
I’ve never actually worked in a role like that, but have had clients move from abm to general b2b marketing.
I'm confused, why would a fraud bot click on ads that makes LinkedIn money? Normally ad-fraud is when a fraudulent publisher is set up, made to look legit, hosts ads, which a bot then clicks the hell out of. Where's the incentive here for a bad actor on LinkedIn?
So the same as every other ad network then? Only half joking.
Our niche SaaS sees 90% of Google Ad spend going to India, Russia and South America unless we create a short-list of countries to specifically target. And Google is full of dark-patterns around your targeted countries, by default it selects "people in, or interested in, your targeted locations" unless you drill down and find an obscure setting to change this. Then you only need to deal with the domestic and/or more sophisticated ad fraudsters, which will still probably end up as the majority of the spend.
Some apps, and many webpages on Android have this dark pattern of miniscule transparent x's to close ads and popups, that somehow don't register very easily. I'm on a Pixel 3 and I've replaced the device for unrelated reasons, it's not my screen. And my fingers are normally-sized.
What that means is that people get this popup video playing, get a little X, try to hit the X but hit the thing behind it, or click on something else taking you elsewhere, or starting the video if by miracle autoplay ISN'T overridden...
And so forth. I could go on and talk about how I have to zoom in with two hands, crane my neck and open the little x so it's a bigger X, so I can close it...
But I'd rather focus on the question - how is this sustainable? That hostility makes users hostile, and it makes your entire ad infrastructure feel like a dirty enterprise, not the "it runs the Internet" philosophy that I'm guess adtech says to itself. Here's the thing - if I'm the company trying to advertise, do I even want to pay for clicks that are unwanted?
Sounds like this person is bad at advertising and marketing, and looking to blame anyone but themselves.
My guess is the content of the ad was poorly paired with the landing page. For what it's worth, I ran a LinkedIn campaign, had a $10 CPC with about a 40% conversion rate from a click to lead.
Also that sure is a lot of "conclusions" to make very little data.
I may have a meagre business and live in a meagre world but would never hire a single person who subscribes to linkedin nor participates in their blatant games. It's the most ridiculous HR wetdream and yet some seem to have no problem playing along.
Lay your own beds with that stuff. It's only a matter of time before you'll live in shame for what comes out and probably write woeful blogposts about how fooled you were and now so enlightened never again to repeat such clear mistakes.
Having self-worth really isn't that hard. Selling yourself and all your friends for pennies is incredibly easy though, which is what is happening here.
Please keep digging those graves. The internet never forgets, nor forgives. The internet is forever, make no mistake.
Facebook gives you better returns as well as Google Ads, Linkedin was not a good convertion rate at all and they don't really care about it so yes you're correct about the statement of "Money Pit" it's because we're used to Facebook and Google conversions that we expect the same from Linkedin and actually it's different platforms with different goals and objectives, not sure why you should expect the same "money's worth" on every platform out there each one has a different objetive and different users that's how it works they're different.
This reminds me of our Google AdWords experience for our enterprise analytics product. We started with an experienced marketing consultant and later a Google-provided account manager joined. We were tuning our acct setup to get signups at an industry avg, yet some reason the leads rarely qualified. Checking in a month or two into their experiment, I realized half our budget was going to middle school students using google as a calculator for their algebra homework!
That was a bit of an 'aha' for me for their position in the market.
I know nothing about advertising, but does it really matter if you are getting bot traffic if you are still getting conversions from the ads? If you know that for every $10 you spend on LinkedIn ads, you get 1 person to sign up for your service, then it doesn't matter how many mistaken clicks or bots clicked on the ad since click through isn't the main metric you are using. Isn't that why websites have so much tracking? So they can attribute an ad to a conversion rather than just looking at the number of clicks?
Adtech companies don't really want to be held responsible for the effectiveness of your advertisement or the conversion rate of your landing page. When such models exist (called CPA or cost-per-action usually), there's a significant premium attached for that risk. Most advertisers don't want to pay that premium.
Google has a such product but I think it is nowhere close to the majority of ad spending. A part of the reasons is that it needs campaigns' conversion volumes to be above a certain threshold (so their model has a reasonable amount of training data) while advertisers may exploit the system by not reporting legitimate conversions. So Google requires them to be eligible by some unknown criteria.
Yeah, but affiliate marketing is a pretty raw deal for the person doing it because they carry all risk. It's just a job working in sales for other companies but without benefits.
There needs to be some adjustment for "your marketing/product is shit and will therefore be much harder to sell."
Those are very small sample sizes to make any assumptions from. 11 clicks for their test, and only 256 clicks for the larger referenced test. The larger test then makes a huge assumption in user behavior:
"So, arguably, a user who sees this ad and clicks legitimately on it will be looking to get a demo of the analytics tool we were marketing"
Uh, no. Just because the ad brought them to your site, doesn't mean the user wants to interact with your video. You got them there, you have to work to keep them.
I don't think they are intending to make money on the clicks itself, but having a bot click on ads would seem to make it appear more "real" and less likely to get discovered.
It’s very clear this company doesn’t have an experienced media buyer running their campaign. This blog post is /exactly/ like a nontechnical person spinning up a bunch of aws stuff and complaining about billing fraud.
Media buying is a niche skill, and you can’t just throw money at LinkedIn and expect it to work. (Especially for true for a /branding/ agency and not a media buying agency)
The biggest mystery for me is why so many people believe so strongly in Facebook Ads. I have never gotten ANYTHING other than bot traffic from FB, or anything above 0% conversion, after repeatedly (mis-)spending thousands on FB ads. I must really be going all backwards about it, or something.
(P.S. this is for content that otherwise gets a very healthy conversion rate from organic traffic)
All I get are ads for cheap consumer products off alibaba, some even having the audacity to claim they are made in USA, when I could do a reverse image search from their shopify page to the alibaba post.
I read all the happy comments wondering how many were bots. I comment about finding the product on alibaba and my comment is swiftly removed and the option to comment is no longer on the post. So much for freedom of speech, zuck.
My experience with FB ads stopped when they were estimating our target of interest as being 50% male and 50% female, with a large interested population living in Libya.
I’ve experienced the same with Snapchat and their geofencing ads. I geofence a perimeter around a venue where we run an event and run a branded filter. We have a team of 5 in the venue during the hours the ads run. None of them was able to see the filter come up. Snapchat on the other end shows hundreds of impressions and tens of uses. Surely a fraud.
Even the job posting on LinkedIn seems very shady. This was the result of $32 daily budget LinkedIn suggested us for running our job ad: https://i.imgur.com/7fYv6jy.png
Out of two people who applied, one seems like a bot/empty profile.
"FullStory reported mouse movements that were nothing like what an actual human would do."
That web sites can tell where I move my mouse is simply unacceptable. What can we do to block JS from reporting mouse movements? (Yes, I know I can turn JS off altogether, but most sites aren't fully functional without JS.)
I am so surprised to be redirected to rate the linkedin app while using their mobile web interface, I usually give them 1 or 2 stars for wasting my time. Maybe I actually misclicked on one of those pop ups that takes me to their app.
makes me wonder what I may have agreed to on various sites by pure misclicks.
We experienced a similar issue with LinkedIn ads, we had a small campaign for two weeks to a page which was only designated for this specific LinkedIn campaign. Apparently we got a few clicks (around 30) but there was not one single request for that page in our webserver logs.
My profile is on LinkedIn because I feel like I’ll miss opportunities if I’m not on there.
I’d love to remove it and go somewhere that doesn’t do this.
Are there any non-terrible, more purely motivated sites for an individual to post their background and what they’re looking for so folks can view them?
Certainly, but it doesn’t have the same effect of having you searchable in a general database for recruiters. I don’t need to share network updates but I do want to be able to look for jobs and have someone be able to offer interesting opportunities.
Ideally these connections are all personal anyway and you get poached because somebody knows you, but it’s nice to stay tapped into that virtually as well.
1. put utf8 emoji at start of your name with space following it and then your first and last name. whatever emoji do: smile, country flag, beer. you name it.
2. discard any connect request or inmail or message that starts with 'Hello <emoji>' - it is automated
it's pretty easy to click on competitors ads with bots to run out competitors credit and then run your ads for the rest of the day for cheap prices. But the same happens with Google adwords. I guess they don't have any way to prevent it
I logged into LinkedIn yesterday and it took me to a special page where it excoriated me for using “automated tools” to make fake activity or something. It demanded I click an “acknowledgement that I will henceforth comply” or I was subject to account termination.
Frankly I felt like refusing and telling LinkedIn to fuck off. I have no idea what it was accusing me about. I almost never use the site. I have a 25 year career in an industry where I am known and the industry knows me, so LinkedIn is zero value to me. I would never find a job there nor look for a candidate there.
So whatever their systems are doing, they’re incompetent and generate false positives.
Shamefully, however, I clicked “I will comply”. Bah bah bah bleets this Sheeple.
This is a reminder to myself to someday explain how these ad-click botnets work, how they make money directly and indirectly by clicking on your ads, and why the big ad tech companies need them to survive.
The open question is whether there will still be perceived value when these things are known. So far, I don’t see ad spending affected by these exposes.
I have never clicked on a Ad from linkedin purposely. The thing is, everytime I go to check my profile (which is on the left top part of the screen - I'm dextrous) I end up clicking on a Ad with the palm of my hand (smartphone).
The issue isnt the lack of clicks perse, its the fact that LI and others digital ad providers charge so much for something that is neither market driven nor validated by independent auditors. $45 per click? People need to know that LI just made that figure up based on cursory examination of competitive fees. They price their traffic based on guesses and and then add 10-30% every few days to see how much people will spend. If they spend more, its worth more... But its the furthest thing from market based pricing as there is literally no open market or visual competition for the traffic for 99% of all ads served on these platforms.
Imagine owning a gas station on an island and charging as much as you want. $50 per gallon, $100 per gallon and then, not even delivering a full gallon! That's the same thing here. Without competition or regulation the prices are set by greed and greed alone.
I dont agree with bowdlerization happening on Hacker News, wrt legitimate titles. This is effectively censorship @dang (I'm addressing it to you because you speak most often here, and set the tone, not because you personally did it. )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation
I do understand that having less clickbaity _content_ is noble goal (and reason we read HN), but let US do our job in giving upvotes to good topic or flaging bad ones, while having ORIGINAL titles author of the post intended, not the one the censor considers proper.
The problem is that a title on HN's front page doesn't just represent what the author believes. It also represents what "HN" believes, to some extent.
Of course, HN doesn't exist as a person and doesn't believe anything at all, but that doesn't matter, because people receive those titles as if it does. So there are multiple ways that a title can be misleading and we have to balance them.
Upvotes alone don't solve this. On the contrary: indignation routinely gets the most upvotes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not—people just upvote angry shit more than they upvote anything else. If we don't want the front page to be all-angry and mostly-false all day, then moderators have to intervene. Is that censorship? That's up to you—people use that word to mean whatever sort of intervention they don't like.
I can't read the source article (site is down) but judging from the header I'm kinda glad LinkedIn is not selling many ads. The last years it's become an even more fake stream of glossy PR marketing crap filled with stock photos of smiling faces, and people commenting how much they adore the company line. I get enough of all that on the company's own sites, thank you.
I get that people don't want to be critical in public, but you don't have to repost every piece of marketing BS that comes your way :) Especially when I know some of these people tell a completely different story in person.
And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now. There's constantly people bothering me with their 'services' which are totally not relevant to my role if they'd even bothered to glance at my profile. I wish I could report them somehow.
The only reason I still have it is because it's almost impossible to get a job without it :) Because the business world loves it. But it's more fake than FaceBook now. Everyone is one successful talented employee who is completely in line with the corporate hive mind.
I don't really use LinkedIn that much, so this confuses me:
> And the membership fees for being invisible are ridiculously high now.
Do you mean simply having an account? Or are there now fees for, e.g. avoiding recruiters? I thought that the business model of LinkedIn had only companies/recruiters pay to reach (free) users.
No, having an account is free. But many features are behind a paywall now, like seeing who is visiting your profile.
It used to be it was only not shown if you were browsing privately youself, but recently it changed and you can only see the first two.
Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option.
Especially lately I get a lot of spam from SAP related businesses even though I don't work with ERP systems nor have I ever done so. It's super annoying. If it was even remotely related to my work it would be much less so.
> Also, as you say as a free user you can be reached by more people more easily and I hate that. Some of the high-level contacts I know are not findable at all by using the public search and I don't have this option.
You do. Check your settings and privacy preferences closer. They employ some dark ux to make it less obvious, but it's there.
Ok fair enough, I will have a look again.. It is indeed all over the place, I went through it all once about a year and a half ago, so it could be some things have changed.
