zlacker

>>ColinW+(OP)
How can a bot create fake impressions? When a bot (or just a simple program) makes a http request he fetches the raw html code only. AFAIK if you don't actually render the html code in a browser or requesting all the contents afterwards again with http requests (like GET ad.jpg, GET logo.png etc.), no google ad server should be hit. Now you could argue that bots could inflate the popularity of a website and therefore the cost to run ads on it. But I guess websites that show ads have most likely google analytics running, one of the only ways Google can actually calculate the popularity (besides Google Search and maybe Chrome history). So it should be no problem for Google to exclude bots from the popularity calculation by analyzing traffic. Maybe I am just missing something, I am also no ad expert at all.

>>multic+bu1
It's not about bots creating fake ad impressions by accident. It's people writing bots whose purpose is to fake ad impressions and clicks. They'll then run it on their own website that's running ads, with the goal of being paid by the ad network for this fake traffic.

>>jsnell+1U1
But isn't this a win situation for Google to a certain extent? Since it uses up the budget of the advertiser much faster. And the accuracy of filtering new revenue coming from ads as a company is already fairly limited in general. But maybe there are multiple reasons that Google really only wants to serve real humans to the ads of its clients.

>>multic+pa2
It's not a win. The fake clicks will not convert to sales, and the advertisers are seeing a lower ROI on their ads and will go and spend their budget elsewhere in the future. All ad networks will try to filter out as many fraudulent clicks as possible, because they are not optimizing for the maximum revenue today but for the revenue in the long run.

But yes, of course this is not just about filtering out fake clicks. The draft proposal lists a bunch of use cases, most of which have nothing to do with ads.