
Report: 40 percent of mobile ad clicks are fraud or accidents - thedoctor
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/31/report-40-percent-of-mobile-clicks-are-fraud-or-accidents/
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wazoox
I had mistakenly activated the mobile ad option in my company's google ads
account. We had about 5-10 calls a day coming from mobile ads, and 100% were
accidental. In fact, we had to track down the source for all these calls for
weeks, because it didn't make any sense to anyone (neither us or the callers).

After that I carefully digged through all of our google ads activity. I
finally deactivated absolutely all automatic placement and authorized only the
main search page and a few selected sites, because none of the placements made
any sense. Most of the clicks came from video pirating site and the likes.

My impression now is that 80% of all web ads are slightly disguised scam, and
completely useless unless you're selling stuff targeted to the most clueless,
naive consumers (ringtones, phone games and the like).

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xanados
Honest question. How does accidentally clicking a mobile ad lead to
accidentally calling the vendor in question?

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kanzure
> How does accidentally clicking a mobile ad lead to accidentally calling the
> vendor in question?
    
    
        n("AFMA_PlaceCall", function(a) {
            var b = i;
            0 == a.indexOf("tel://") && (a = a.substring(6));
            0 == a.indexOf("tel:") && (a = a.substring(4));
            if ((Ma || Na) && !navigator.userAgent.match(/3_0/i)) b = confirm(a);
            b && Z("open", {
                a: "call",
                u: "tel:" + a 
            })  
        }, h);
    

<http://media.admob.com/gmsg.js>

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mistercow
More reason to switch exclusively to CPM. Impression fraud is not particularly
easier or harder to detect than click fraud, so if a typical CTR is generously
estimated at 3%, then switching to CPM would knock the fraud rate down to less
than 1%. And the concept of "accidental" simply goes away.

I understand why CPC is favored; it gives an economic incentive to make ads
more prominent. But surely there's a better way to handle that which doesn't
also offer an economic incentive to cheat. After all, direct conversions are a
tiny part of an ad's effectiveness; otherwise television and radio advertising
wouldn't work for grocery stores and soft drinks. Getting the brand into
people's heads ("message association" as marketers call it) is the main impact
of ads, and that is better measured by CPM than CPC.

~~~
majani
One golden rule of business is to commoditize your complements, to kill off
any competition they might pose. CPM display ads are complementary to search
ads, hence Google commoditized them by making AdSense primarily CPC.

It will be extremely hard to reverse the effects of this action.

~~~
mistercow
That's an interesting argument, but I don't think it quite adds up.
Complements don't compete, they complement. The reason you commoditize them
(like releasing them as an open source project) is not to kill them off as
competition, but to let them thrive cheaply so that they build up the product
you are selling. For example, Google's AdWord/AdSense product is complemented
by monetized blogs, so Google commoditized monetized blogs with Blogger. Many
other free Google services like Gmail can be seen in a similar light.

In addition, CPM ads are a substitute for CPC ads, not a complement. So
commoditizing CPM or CPC ads would be a very, very bad idea for Google.

Furthermore I don't think that making AdSense CPC can be said to commoditize
CPM ads. Nor did it really commoditize CPC ads; AdSense has been close to
monopoly status for a very long time, whereas the goal of commoditizing is to
increase competition with no regard for controlling the market.

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jasonkolb
While I don't agree with a lot of what twitter has been doing lately, they
seem like the _only_ company out there that has a non-gimmicky way of
delivering mobile ads. If they can actually tune their ad delivery to be
relevant to the user--which I think they have a chance of doing better than
most--they may actually pull off mobile advertising. If Google can retain the
search result screen real estate they also have a chance here--but delivering
at most one ad per search.

I think that expectations related to advertising revenue will undergo a big
adjustment due to mobile. You simply don't have the same amount of screen real
estate to display ads on mobile without resorting to gimmicks, and so the
overall pie is shrinking rapidly.

Email marketing is the one type of marketing that I think still works just as
well on mobile--each (opted-in) marketing offer in my email still gets 100% of
the screen real estate... and my full attention for a few seconds.

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rotation1
I don't think this would surprise anyone who has seen how mobile ads are
implemented, especially in games.

What would be more surprising is if the accidental rate isn't actually much
higher than reported here.

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brianfryer
I was just talking about mobile ads yesterday saying they feel like they're
designed to trick me into clicking them.

This article confirms my suspicions :-/

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nilburns27
it sounds too low mainly the accidentals, I thought it was more around 50-60%
and another 20-30% fraud. All in all 70-90% BS clicks

