Fraudulent Web Traffic Continues to Plague Advertisers...
Adobe found that about 28% of website traffic likely came from bots and other “non-human signals”
http://archive.today/2018.03.28-120234/https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudulent-web-traffic-continues-to-plague-advertisers-other-businesses-1522234801
In a recent study, Adobe found that about 28% of website traffic showed strong “non-human signals,” leading the company to believe that the traffic came from bots or click farms. The company studied traffic across websites belonging to thousands of clients. Adobe is currently working with a handful of clients in the travel, retail and publishing industries to identify how much of their web traffic has non-human characteristics. By weeding out that misleading data, brands can better understand what prompted consumers to follow their ads and ultimately visit their websites and buy their products.
“It’s really about understanding your traffic at a deeper level. And not just understanding, ‘I got this many hits.’ What do those hits represent? Were they people, malicious bots, good bots?” said Dave Weinstein, director of engineering for Adobe Experience Cloud. While hardly the first study of online fraud, Adobe’s findings are one more indication of how the problem has roiled the fast-changing ad, media and digital commerce industries, while prompting marketers to rethink their web efforts. Non-human traffic can create an “inflated number that sets false expectations for marketing efforts,” said Mr. Weinstein.