Hi HN

This is so common, I find it strange to see a whole article framing it as a shocking phenomenon. Like, have you heard of PostHog?

What do you think is the false negative ratio of the remaining 27%? A 0.1% total conversion rate would imply 1/270 visitors buying stuff and I am quite certain I buy stuff in maybe every 10th online store I visit or something.

Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to figure out if it was a successful campaign or not. When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that matters is impact on the bottom line.

I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry. We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%. In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. Bots are real people after all

> I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. Why not use Microsoft Clarity? > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care.

Yes, and a lot of the pain is self-inflicted. Too often I have been working on ecommerce gigs where the traffic comes from internal 'SEO' tools. Normally the person in charge is marketing, not technical, so it has always been difficult to get past identifying the problem to fixing it. Often ecommerce companies are very siloed, so one person in one part of the 'team' is scraping the site with their special tools, only for another person to be doing another scrape with their special tools. You can have the guy doing the newsletter doing his thing, the guy doing organic search doing their thing, the guy doing paid ads doing their thing and someone in sales doing their own thing. The sad thing is that they are typically just a few SQL joins away from exactly the data they want in a format they can digest. However, due to silo-ing, it can be hard to have that conversation. On top of that, you…

> "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown." The word "revenue" above doesn't sound right. Did you mean "ad impressions", "clicks", "visits", or something else? If the bot traffic is giving you 40% more revenue , well that's excellent news, right? If it's revenue , then keep doing it.

But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale? I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?