Human traffic: Paying people for clicks is real but costly
Advertisers may have wised up to bots and technical ad fraud, but they have yet to tackle incentivised human traffic – or people being paid cents to watch ads. It may drive clicks, but conversions will be 65% to 82% more expensive (AdWeek).
Key points:
- New report from Integral Ad Science finds paid traffic gets clicks but conversions much more expensive
- Behavioural targeting of the random ad clickers ‘almost impossible’
- People willing to be paid cents for clicks tend not to have lots of spending money
- Some write scripts to watch ads for them
- “You might be thinking everything’s fine so long as you’re ultimately advertising to a human, but we found that’s not actually true.” – IAS senior data scientist, Evgeny Shmelkov
Automation may be sweeping through media and advertising, but it appears the opposite is taking place in some parts of the ad fraud swamp. Only technically it’s not fraud: People genuinely are seeing the ads – just as a source of income, albeit tiny in most cases. Unless they are at the top of a pyramid scheme of referrals, whereby they take a percentage of every other tenant farmer’s click revenue. That can be as little as a fraction of a cent per click, a few more cents for watching a video, or perhaps a few dollars for filling out a survey.
Human click farms are not a new phenomenon - yet AdWeek suggests the number of people willing to be paid to click is growing.
The issue is that as pay per click/pay per action platforms design systems to weed out bots, they are all struggling to address what are effectively human drone networks. An automated filter won't cut it because these are humans, visiting a page, clicking on ads, signing up to a newsletter, or taking a survey. The big brands have yet to start shouting about it - yet many accept that it is wasting their budget, pushing up conversion costs and diluting their data.
Can human click farms be outmaneuvered and do brands care? We’d be interested to hear your views.
