Posted on 08/25/2017 10:30:41 AM PDT by Enlightened1
Some advertisers question level of refunds, want more details about fraudulent traffic
Google is issuing refunds to advertisers for ads bought through its platform that ran on sites with fake traffic, people familiar with the situation said, as the company develops a tool to give buyers more transparency about their purchases.
In the past few weeks, Google has informed hundreds of marketers and ad agency partners about the issue with invalid traffic, known in the industry as “ad fraud.” The ads were bought using the company’s DoubleClick Bid Manager.
Google’s refunds amount to only a fraction of the total ad spending served to invalid traffic, which has left some advertising executives unsatisfied, the people familiar with the situation said. Google has offered to repay its “platform fee,” which ad buyers said typically ranges from about 7% to 10% of the total ad buy.
The company says this is appropriate, because it doesn’t control the rest of the money. Typically, advertisers use DoubleClick Bid Manager to target audiences across vast numbers of websites in seconds by connecting to dozens of online ad exchanges, marketplaces that connect buyers and publishers through real-time auctions.
The ad spending flows through to the exchanges. The problems arise when ads run on publisher sites with fraudulent traffic, such as those where clicks are generated by software programs known as “bots” instead of humans. This is an issue of growing to concern to marketers. It is difficult to recoup the money paid to those sites when the issue is discovered too late.
Advertisers often receive small credits from Google and their other ad-tech vendors when they detect discrepancies, but in this case, for some buyers, the instance of fraud discovered was larger than usual.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
They are going to refund 99.99% of their revenue?
I highly doubt that, but they had to do something to avoid lawsuits and criminal charges.
Anything that damages Google, however slightly, is a good thing.
Maybe “Brave” will inflict some damage to Google and Failbook:
Will that include sites like Drudge, that force a refresh every minute?
Yup, sounds familiar. The 2000 tech boom/bust was about eyeball counts. Companies then were all hyped on little or no revs.
Ads don't generate revenue by being displayed on the page, no matter how many times or how often it refreshes. (impressions)
Revenue is only earned by clicks.
Ads displayed on a web site that has a bot running can generate hundreds of thousands of clicks per day, and thus can 'earn' a fairly large amount of revenue.
Typically, ad revenue is paid 3 months down the road so that companies like Google or Yahoo can review their logs to detect fraudulent traffic. When they do, they will 'claw back' the portion of revenue they determine to be fraudulent.
They (Google & Yahoo) never reveal their methods or sources and their word is final. If they say you have fraudulent traffic, you have no say or recourse.
I talked to a retailer who said it costs him $8 every time someone clicks on his advertising link. When I search for a business, I look for a non-advertising link.
Google screwed me about 5 years ago. I went to my Visa card for a chargeback. Got a verbal and emphatic ‘you cannot dispute Google’
I shut down my account at google. But still out about $75.
The ‘out of control’ charges started Feb. 21, 2014
Went from $2 to $3 a month to over $50 a month. And email from them said “It’s been 137 days since you last logged in. View your March AdWords report.”
Proving I had not changed anything in my ad whatsoever.
Yep. They accused me of it and pulled my ads. I complained but they didn’t appear to care.
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