Hilarious fake clicks on your ads; fake clicks on your sites, shown by FouAnalytics

Bad guys use their bots to click on your ads. This way, there's a non-zero click through rate; otherwise you'd be too suspicious. Bad guys know that many advertisers use clicks as a measure of performance, and report those to their bosses. If bots clicked on all ads, you'd be suspicious too (e.g. if you saw 100% click through rates). I've literally seen this a decade ago. But you'd only see this if you pulled a detailed placement report by domain. The slide below shows 100% CTRs on fake medical sites running paid search ads, and using bots to click on all of them, to rip off large pharma companies. If you only get the end-of-month summary reports, you'd only see the 9.4% average CTR. Seems high for a click through rate, but you'd just think your ads are performing really really well, and keep wasting your money.

We've also seen faked clicks on programmatic display and video ads, and even clicks on CTV ads, if you'd believe that (how do you click a streaming ad on your big TV? have you ever clicked a CTV ad? if you have, let me know). Most of you have seen the following slide with 15 examples of clicks from programmatic campaigns (utm_source=programmatic). Most of the clicks are orange (declared bots) and red (bad bots). And a tiny sliver of the donut chart is dark blue (human clicks).

Further, advertisers have used FouAnalytics to see faked clicks on their landing pages/sites. Some are comical, like the following. Larger circles means repeated clicks on the same x,y coordinates. These are trivial for bots, but impossible for humans. Note the yellow highlight - 74 - 95% of the bots clicked something on the landing page. This is not real engagement, but it is sufficient to trick platforms like Performance Max into thinking there was low bounce, and high engagement, and therefore allocate more of your budget incorrectly to the fake sites and apps that were using these bots.

By way of contrast, see the following click maps from FouAnalytics. Note the color coding -- dark blue means humans. Humans click around the site. The clicks are grouped by screen resolution. The clicks are individual dots. The green highlight shows that 55-64% of the humans clicked something on the landing page. This is a large retailer. You will note that most of these are mobile screen resolutions (portrait orientation). And there is one desktop screen resolution (1920x1080) which is in landscape orientation. There are some clusters of clicks near site navigation at the top. You will also note the touch charts further below, corresponding to the same set of screen resolutions. Humans have to touch the screen in order to click something, so the percentages of touch events (yellow highlight) should be higher than the percentages of clicks (green highlight). Note that 1920x1080 has no touches because that is a desktop monitor; and that makes common sense.

Do your legacy fraud verification vendors show you any of the above data? Of course not. Have they been helpful in protecting you from bots and fraud? Of course not. Have they given you sufficient detail to understand why something is fraudulent and whether you need to take action? Of course not. Time to upgrade your analytics, both for your digital ads and your websites, so you can "see Fou yourself" and do better digital marketing.

Further reading, case examples, and screen shots from FouAnalytics: