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The point is, if $10k brings in 47 sales and that’s not enough then you stop buying those ads. It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working. You take your marketing spend elsewhere.

You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom. How much of ESPN’s viewership happens at bars where nobody is watching?

At some point it’s not reasonable to expect ad networks to be able to stop sophisticated bots or exclude them from your billed impressions.

They should definitely try to minimize it if they want to maintain the value of their impressions but I think there is a good argument that OP just isn’t the right customer for this type of advertisement.

If you’re trying to sell a t-shirt you don’t hire a salesperson to cold call people, maybe OP shouldn’t be using web ads in the first place. If fraud was cut down by half would their situation really be that much better?



> It doesn’t really matter why it’s not working.

It does, because it changes the strategy.

If you think the ads are working and have 10k potential customers then you start thinking about how to increase your conversion rate thinking you could get a chunk of those 10k, you might think distribution is solved.

But if it turns out only 2.5k are real humans then your conversion rate might not even be an issue and it’s just the marketing strategy that needs tweaking.

The whole point is that they are giving you fraudulent traffic which you use as real data to figure out the next steps. If you don’t know it’s fraudulent or how much of the clicks are fraudulent then you are taking decisions under the wrong assumptions.

> You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom

That’s not even a good analogy, we are taking clicks, not impressions.


> You can’t stop fraudulent clicks just like you can’t stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in the bathroom

Yes, you literally can stop fraudulent clicks. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it's not possible?

This is nothing like the Super Bowl analogy.




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