[seviu]

I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry.

We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%.

In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

Bots are real people after all

[mapt]

This is essentially fraud. Your company was made aware that it was selling a product with wildly different characteristics than advertised, and chose to cover it up.

There are defensible business reasons for this, in having a contract already in place at the old CPM, so being unable to double the CPM and half the views mid-contract... but still pretty much fraud.

[dietr1ch]

Sounds like even more fraud. Here you can apply the new filter to historic data or create a new metric version and keep the old version to avoid breaking continuity in what's measured.

[pjc50]

It sounds like the customers demanded the fraud remain, for their own internal Potemkin purposes.

[ww520]

Way back when I work in an ad based company, click fraud handling was under my overseeing. We caught about 20 percent of clicks as fraudulent and filtered them out before billing the ad placing vendors. It was a constant battle with the sales team to relax the rules, as any clicks filtered out cut into the sales revenue. Sometimes we got the customers on our side as they ran their own analysis on the billed click report and came back demanding refund as they found a bunch of fraudulent clicks.

[VBprogrammer]

Yeah, the incentives there are obviously misaligned. I wonder if there is a potential way of making advertising click through tracking following the "I cut the cake, you chose the slice" model.

Some countries have property taxes where you declare the value and the government retains the right to purchase the property for that value for example.

My first thought was to make the advertising cost driven by revenue on the site. But that just reverses the incentive.

[Kye]

Makes me think of the recent thing where YouTube stopped counting views with ad blockers. The Linus Tech Tips people worked out they were still seeing the same ad impressions and revenue despite views dropping by half. Unfortunately, sponsorship deals are often sold on viewership and I'm not sure even LTT has the clout to convince them nothing is functionally different.

[Gigachad]

YouTube didn’t stop counting views with ad blockers. It was one blocker extension that added the view counter api to the block list.

[at-fates-hands]

>> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

Did something similar at a small company I was working at. The VP of marketing sat me down and told me to do the same thing.

After the meeting, I was told by another dev that the VP was tying a monetary value to specific clicks and if I was filtering out the bots, it would make his data look bad and reduce the amount of potential revenue for the company he was touting.

I think you can see how the bots were actually helping him promote how awesome a job he was doing with our web properties to the owners.

[PedroBatista]

He idea of "reality" and how things work, even if the idea is "they work bad", is more important than any other argument or reality. That's true at personal level and even truer at any organizational level.

[wholinator2]

Well yes but seems business has decided truth is worth less than money. Or now that i think of it, everything is worth less than money. Even, money is the only thing worth anything. They don't care about people, pride, products, or truth.

[dcsan]

Half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half... In many corporate cases vague metrics meets the KPI better than accurate ones

I worked for one of the mag7 doing customer support bot tech. Clients internal metrics around containment consistently showed better results than ours - even though you'd normally expect them to be putting pressure on their vendor. because it was a kpi for their internal team to look good to their bosses

[pmarreck]

Could you have... maybe eased it in over time? So for example, every 4 days, filter out an additional 1% of the traffic detected as fake.

[crdrost]

That is worse. Now you have a bunch of companies wondering why their engagement is falling over a whole year, some dude's getting fired for not doing his job, etc. etc.

The correct thing to do, probably, is to just provide the new data to the customer without changing what they were already looking at. So a new widget appears on their dashboard, "52% bot traffic", they click on that, and they see their familiar line chart of "impressions over time" broken down as a stacked line chart, bottom is "human impressions over time," top is "bot impressions over time," and the percentage that they were looking at is reported either above or beneath the graph for the same time intervals. Thus calling attention to the bottom graph, "human impressions over time," and they can ask your sales people "how do I get THAT number on my normal dashboard?" and they can hem and haw about how you have to upgrade to the Extended Analytics Experience tier for us to display that info and other business nonsense...

Point is, you stimulate curiosity with loud interference rather than quietly interfering with the status quo.

[phil-martin]

With numbers like, if it scares customers a good strategy is to implement the filtering very gradually over time, over 6 months or a year. The fall off is way less scary, and it can be described as improving bot filtering.

It’s not as honest, but more palatable unfortunately

[nodja]

Couldn't you kept it in and labeled it as bots? i.e. using stacked barcharts and such.