Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views (“impressions”) to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).
For that reason, I don’t think they’re trying to get rid of human users completely, just the “troublemakers”.
I think they want to lead the “silent majority” users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.
Yup, I can echo what that commenter said. The bounce rate (when someone clicks on your ad) is atrocious, and there is extremely high competition for getting ads to US/Canada/Australia/other high income countries, which drives up the price further.
I only advertise on Reddit because I have a really great discount, but even then it sucks and always has.
Ever clicked on a link and noticed that the URL ended in something like ?campaign=twitter or something? Advertisers regularly track which advertising campaign got a user to click on a link, and they’ll also track what proportion of those users eventually lead to a sale. If Reddit eventually has no users and just bots, advertisers will quickly notice that ad spending on Reddit isn’t producing profit and kill it.
Not really (at least at my company). You pay for the campaign (display this content in this location for these dates) and you track your outcomes (number who viewed the ad, number who clicked, number who shopped, number who purchased). If the number who shopped and purchased and is low you might not be interested in continuing that partnership.
I always recommend based on shop and buy (heavier focus on buy) outcomes so I wouldn’t know bots but they’d need to be able to make purchases.
Lol I guess maybe! My industry isn’t set up that way (I don’t work in retail e-commerce) but that’s obviously the bigger ad targets on social. Retail can definitely track return metrics though.
I think it would be hard to get bots past most sophisticated purchase data tracking, but it depends on what you target for that tracking. Like I know a lot of TikTok marketing is built around understanding you aren’t going to get a lot of click throughs on the ad but it is about building brand awareness. If you are just looking at impressions it is a lot easier for bots to sneak in.
I would definitely expect purchase tracking to be stricter than ad view metrics, yeah. And I know a lot of companies that used to have customer-friendly return policies have rolled back most or all of those policies (with or without non-enhshittification reasons). So I was at least partly joking, though I am getting less and less surprised about what bots are able to do. AI technology advancement just keeps accelerating.
Good point about brand awareness. In all seriousness, I think there’s psychological research suggesting that brand awareness is valuable in and of itself, though I think there’s a limit to how negative the publicity can be and still be valuable to brands. Otherwise, I don’t think there wouldn’t be the concept of “brand safety” for ad placement.
I feel like bots are basically the optimal tool for cheating automated systems, since it seems reasonable to fight automation with more automation, like the cat-and-mouse development race for captcha. I don’t have the technical expertise to back that up, though, just a general feeling that Murphy’s law applies to all engineering.
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Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views (“impressions”) to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).
For that reason, I don’t think they’re trying to get rid of human users completely, just the “troublemakers”.
I think they want to lead the “silent majority” users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.
deleted by creator
So basically Reddit sucks at ads too 😂
Yup, I can echo what that commenter said. The bounce rate (when someone clicks on your ad) is atrocious, and there is extremely high competition for getting ads to US/Canada/Australia/other high income countries, which drives up the price further.
I only advertise on Reddit because I have a really great discount, but even then it sucks and always has.
Ever clicked on a link and noticed that the URL ended in something like
?campaign=twitteror something? Advertisers regularly track which advertising campaign got a user to click on a link, and they’ll also track what proportion of those users eventually lead to a sale. If Reddit eventually has no users and just bots, advertisers will quickly notice that ad spending on Reddit isn’t producing profit and kill it.Not really (at least at my company). You pay for the campaign (display this content in this location for these dates) and you track your outcomes (number who viewed the ad, number who clicked, number who shopped, number who purchased). If the number who shopped and purchased and is low you might not be interested in continuing that partnership.
I always recommend based on shop and buy (heavier focus on buy) outcomes so I wouldn’t know bots but they’d need to be able to make purchases.
…so the endgame here is bots that can make purchases, but immediately return what they bought for refunds?
Lol I guess maybe! My industry isn’t set up that way (I don’t work in retail e-commerce) but that’s obviously the bigger ad targets on social. Retail can definitely track return metrics though.
I think it would be hard to get bots past most sophisticated purchase data tracking, but it depends on what you target for that tracking. Like I know a lot of TikTok marketing is built around understanding you aren’t going to get a lot of click throughs on the ad but it is about building brand awareness. If you are just looking at impressions it is a lot easier for bots to sneak in.
I would definitely expect purchase tracking to be stricter than ad view metrics, yeah. And I know a lot of companies that used to have customer-friendly return policies have rolled back most or all of those policies (with or without non-enhshittification reasons). So I was at least partly joking, though I am getting less and less surprised about what bots are able to do. AI technology advancement just keeps accelerating.
Good point about brand awareness. In all seriousness, I think there’s psychological research suggesting that brand awareness is valuable in and of itself, though I think there’s a limit to how negative the publicity can be and still be valuable to brands. Otherwise, I don’t think there wouldn’t be the concept of “brand safety” for ad placement.
I feel like bots are basically the optimal tool for cheating automated systems, since it seems reasonable to fight automation with more automation, like the cat-and-mouse development race for captcha. I don’t have the technical expertise to back that up, though, just a general feeling that Murphy’s law applies to all engineering.