
Ad Fraud on LinkedIn - sbachman
https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/
======
picodguyo
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.

~~~
vasco
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.

~~~
beervirus
Sounds creepy af. It's stuff like this that makes me keep javascript disabled
whenever possible.

~~~
drdeca
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.

~~~
lmkg
Here's the documentation for passing a user identifier to Hotjar:

[https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360033640653-Ident...](https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360033640653-Identify-API-Reference#handling_user_ids)

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.

~~~
capitol_
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.

------
marcinzm
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.

~~~
3np
"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.

~~~
fakedang
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.

~~~
searchableguy
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.

~~~
jlj
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.

------
motohagiography
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.

In short, avoid.

~~~
derwiki
This sort of reason is exactly why I started using one time credit cards
(privacy) for new service signups.

~~~
bradstewart
What do you use to generate the one-time numbers?

~~~
WY3JBHIL3KLPN5B
Priavcy is the name of the service.

[https://privacy.com/](https://privacy.com/)

~~~
achairapart
Any EU alternative for privacy.com or similar services?

~~~
thiscatis
Revolut offers virtual and disposable cards. I've been (unethically) using
them for these 1GBP / month trials a certain online newspaper offers.

~~~
AlexandrB
Revolut was featured on HN just this morning:
[https://thehftguy.com/2020/08/12/a-haven-for-fraud-and-
stole...](https://thehftguy.com/2020/08/12/a-haven-for-fraud-and-stolen-cards-
or-how-my-wife-was-forced-to-quit-revolut/)

~~~
thiscatis
Guess she should have used a disposable Revolut card then

------
chrisseaton
> “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.

~~~
dgellow
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?

~~~
jabroni_salad
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.

~~~
searchableguy
> Sorry you guys wasted your marketing budget on a mistargeted ad lmao

Ad nauseam did exactly this until the extension was banned from chrome store:
[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

~~~
ffpip
If anybody is considering using this for privacy reasons don't.

If you want to piss off as dev or act like a bot, only then use it.

~~~
paulie_a
You can use it for privacy, by ruining the tracking data.

~~~
ffpip
No it won't. Clicking on random ads doesn't increase privacy. It just changes
what the advertiser thinks of your interests.

To load an ad, you have to allow trackers. If you allow a tracker, you might
as well allow the ad instead of hiding it. AdNauseam just hides it.

~~~
AlexandrB
> It just changes what the advertiser thinks of your interests.

How is this _not_ increasing privacy? The point is to keep my real interests
private from creepy marketing departments.

~~~
ffpip
> 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.

Use uBlock Origin.

------
LeonM
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.

~~~
mathattack
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)

~~~
BrianOnHN
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.

------
glutamate
I don't know anything about LinkedIn ads, but I watched some of the video that
this post is based on:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKuyxgWuiRM)

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.

~~~
_jal
I'm pretty sure I'm a bot to a lot of these sites - JS is disabled by default,
selectively enabled sometimes.

When greeted by a blank page, I frequently "react" by just going elsewhere.

~~~
bogwog
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 don't use their service anymore.

------
socrates1998
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.

~~~
gk1
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].

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-
mart...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517531-veteran-trader-marty-o-
connell-calls-this-the-firehouse-effect-he)

~~~
PragmaticPulp
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.

~~~
gk1
> Building their personal brand and business network.

That's the very purpose of LinkedIn, no?

~~~
CarCooler
But seems like the majority ain't using it for that purpose.

------
gk1
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.

[0] [https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-
fail/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/) [1]
[https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-
statistics/#3](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/linkedin-statistics/#3)

~~~
datenhorst
> it is remarkably easy for users to accidentally click on an ad in their news
> feed.

This is especially true in a mobile browser. The website is incredibly slow
and borderline unusable on a mobile phone.

------
josefrichter
LinkedIn is the weirdest product ever. Everybody is there, nobody is _using_
it for anything. Except shady recruiters.

~~~
treis
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.

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
So it's a digital rolodex. That's not terribly impressive for the weight of
the name.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _it 's a digital rolodex. That's not terribly impressive for the weight of
> the name._

It's an automatically-updating and linked rolodex. Rolodexes tell you that you
know X. They don't say who X knows.

------
jwr
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?).

------
ffpip
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200908115120/https://www.samue...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200908115120/https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-
ad-fraud/)

~~~
Scandiravian
Thank you and well played
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193))

For future people getting here - the site went down. Most likely from the
massive attention from this post.

------
dumbfounder
The use of the term "study" is quite misleading. This is hardly a "study".

I think the title should be "Someone has a bad experience marketing on
LinkedIn, gets frustrated, and assumes LinkedIn is to blame".

------
maxk42
> 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".

------
tempsy
Amazing how much wealth in Silicon Valley has been built on top of profits
from rampant ad fraud.

------
PaulHoule
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.

~~~
pixl97
>I thought the whole point of a corporation is that it is greater than one
person.

No, it is the limited liability. Don't want to lose your house because of a
bad business deal.

~~~
pjc50
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.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
When I was contracting a lot of my peers got forced into having a limited
company as their clients didn't want to be deemed their employer.

~~~
Nextgrid
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?

~~~
fakedang
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.

------
baybal2
> 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.

------
nbzso
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.

------
baobabKoodaa
> Error establishing a database connection

Based on the title I'm guessing this could have been delivered as a static web
page delivered by a CDN.

I've never understood why some people want to set up their own web servers to
deliver static content.

~~~
Macha
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.

~~~
fractionalhare
_> 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.

~~~
paulgb
There's also services like Vercel, Netlify, and GitHub pages with generous
free tiers and minimal setup for SSL, CDN, etc.

If you're more comfortable paying for something, it's easy to set up a prepaid
BunnyCDN to hit an S3 bucket.

------
12xo
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.

------
soared
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.

~~~
gknight
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?

~~~
rtx
Let's not start with the assumption that we can reach c-suite at large
companies in 25 dollars per lead.

~~~
Spivak
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.

------
JonoW
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?

------
nadohs
I am not convinced by their single ad, one day of data (11 clicks total) that
they have proven anything.. This was a waste of time unfortunately...

------
mancerayder
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?

------
koverda
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.

------
ShorsHammer
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.

~~~
friendlybus
The internet forgets all the time. There's a bunch of videos I can't find
anymore and information on famous people and plebs alike goes missing.

------
ramon
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.

------
Androider
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.

------
lmeyerov
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.

------
GhostVII
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?

------
mgav
A pay-for-performance model (e.g. pay per sale) eliminates all the risk for
advertisers.

Does this exist anywhere, aside from affiliate deals?

I'd be happy to pay 50% for each digital product sale, since those are 96%
profit.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
You just described affiliate marketing. For example, sponsored content on
YouTube =>
[https://youtu.be/kUFWalEf31w?t=572](https://youtu.be/kUFWalEf31w?t=572)

~~~
Spivak
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."

------
fimoreth
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.

------
michaelbuckbee
I don't quite understand the economics of the ad fraud on the closed (on site)
LinkedIn ads.

How does a third party (not LinkedIn, and not the advertiser) make money from
this?

~~~
topkai22
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.

------
soared
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)

------
jd115
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)

~~~
jazzyjackson
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.

------
caetris1
Here is a recent video from a meetup hosted by LinkedIn where an engineer
explains exactly how LinkedIn advertising works.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YLoyFXvIY&list=PLihIrF0tCX...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2YLoyFXvIY&list=PLihIrF0tCXddhXkQdAdnmfs8FtYMfrbTl&index=3&t=0s)

------
martokus
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.

------
scottydelta
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](https://i.imgur.com/7fYv6jy.png)

Out of two people who applied, one seems like a bot/empty profile.

------
dreamcompiler
"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.)

------
jbj
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.

------
Scotrix
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.

------
chungalunga
I’ve never used LinkedIn, do they have any real competitors or is this just a
monopoly being a monopoly?

------
sailfast
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?

~~~
fakedang
Personal websites?

~~~
sailfast
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.

------
rdslw
Simple linkedin lifehack:

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

3\. profit :)

------
ajimix
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

------
audiometry
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.

------
kristopolous
I've long contended that linkedin is essentially like a seedy dating site
where we're all the women and the recruiters are the men hounding us.

------
Taylor_OD
All LI Marketing I've done has resulted in net zero leads. My own content
create if free, apart from my time cost, and is much more fruitful.

------
jl2718
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.

------
penal_pilot
I can't think of anyone who uses LinkedIn for anything other than finding
jobs.

------
atum47
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).

------
holidayacct
likely? It's completely filled with bot traffic. At some point someone needs
to create verified accounts on LinkedIn.

------
rdslw
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](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.

~~~
dang
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.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dan...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
GekkePrutser
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.

~~~
hyperdimension
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.

~~~
GekkePrutser
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.

~~~
3np
> 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.

~~~
GekkePrutser
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.

