The saying in marketing used to be: "Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but we never know which half".
In the internet, it seems to be more like "90% are wasted" and literally never even get a human impression, nevermind a human click-thru and sale.
What was always surprising to me was how the advertisers just went along with the scam. Perhaps as if the marketers' bonuses depended more on advertisement budget spent instead of sales increased.
If that's the case, what is making them catch on now?
What's happening now is the retreat from the open internet; users are either taking the Google AI search summary as gospel and not clicking through, or just going to chatgpt by themselves. Traffic from actual humans to non-FAANG pages is falling.
Perhaps the threat that "AI" will soon be the only "eyes" that see (and subsequently ignore) their online adverts?
With the amount of bot traffic I'm seeing these days, I would guess that the waste ratio is more like 99% now. That means a 90% reduction in conversions for the same ad budget. Surely someone is feeling the difference.
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
colesantiago•43m ago
What makes a click 'verified', bots can still click links with browser use anyway and you will not be able to tell.
bitwize•39m ago
VladVladikoff•29m ago
pjc50•37m ago
mananaysiempre•5m ago
garciasn•35m ago
The article is about email marketing. Some company has a proprietary algorithm that purportedly detects whether a click is legitimate based on 8y of development and data collection.
It’s definitely a race against the growing capabilities of the models in use and one that will be very difficult to win which is why there has been a significant push toward verification across the Internet—not because of the children, but because of the revenue.
Retr0id•29m ago
garciasn•4m ago
Email marketing is inexpensive, easier to measure, relies on the ridiculous CDPs and ESPs they’ve been tricked into investing in, and the measured numbers are larger than other digital channels.
The problem isn’t that bots are clicking, it’s that those big numbers aren’t going up and to the right in a reliable way any longer and those CMOs need to change how they’re measuring media.
At the end of the day, CMOs need to be measuring contribution to revenue, not meaningless marketing metrics the rest of the C-suite doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about. But that’s super hard. So; they continue to push what they know as well as chip away at their budgets with silly providers who provide little value instead of biting the bullet and doing the right thing.
blooalien•4m ago
My "Magic 8-Ball" says: "Signs point to yes."