The bots are coming: follow up
To those of you who managed to make it along to our Leeds Digital Festival event – the bots are coming – on Wednesday, April 24th, thank you!
We appreciate your support and interest and hope that this follow on blog will be useful for you to get some of the detail you may have missed in the heat of the presentation.
For those of you who didn’t make it along, we hope that this will be useful for you and we look forward to meeting you in future.
Veracity runs an extensive educational seminar program, with regular events in Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, London and along the South Coast of the UK; more venues to follow. Please join our newsletter or follow us on Twitter to keep in touch.
Our presentation
Everyone wants success, but we don’t operate on a level playing field.
All you want as marketers, as business owners is to get leads or orders drop out of the end of the funnel. We all spend a lot of time and energy getting to that, starting with vanity metrics, through impressions, clicks, behaviours, all with that goal. And we often spend a lot of time and money on bringing people into the funnel – but if 50% of those arriving aren’t even real people, what does that mean to us?
This marketing ecosystem is is rife for abuse by fraudsters using bots. Google made $105 billion in ad revenues in 2018, Facebook £54.9 billion; yet there was an estimated $66 billion of ad fraud in 2018, against a market size of circa $250 billion. The Wall Street Journal, working with Adobe estimated that about 28% of website traffic comes from bots – other sources, and we agree, state that this figure is much higher for ad generated traffic, generally between 40% and 60%.
Methbot is one of the most infamous botnets – discovered in 2016 – was making in excess of $3 million per day. Many others are active today.
Download the presentation slides to learn more.
Veracity are focused on adding transparency and integrity to website traffic reporting, especially when it comes to identifying and mitigating ad fraud. As Forbes say “blocking on its own, without sampling bad traffic and finding the source of fraud, won’t work.” The answer is continually evolving systems using AI, deep learning and recent technologies such as blockchain & distributed ledgers to detect and combat bots and all malicious traffic.
This is where Veracity operate. We are dedicated to sharing our knowledge and skills and platform with our customers and the industry as a whole. Come join us.
Help us make the first ever “state of ad fraud” report.
We ask that everyone who is reading this blog help us by using Veracity to run a paid campaign in May; it doesn’t matter if you are sending a bunch of emails, doing some promoted posts on Twitter, or running some PPC. It also doesn’t matter if you spend £100 or £10,000 on the campaign.
We will help you set-up and run the campaign in May and then we will will talk you through the results, so that you can better understand what you are seeing so you can make improvements for your next campaigns.
The anonymised data from your campaign will be included in our first “state of ad fraud” report and you will be listed clearly as a founding supporter.
