Hi guys, I decided to type up and share my first experiences using your ad network. It seems like a great idea and I'd like to see it succeed.
I decided to try your network for a few reasons: 1.) you accept bitcoin! 2.) I like the anon/privacy aspect of your service 3.) I saw your site mentioned here on bitcointalk and also involved in the European bitcoin conference 4.) I wanted to test advertising a gambling-related site, and I see many ad networks do not support that type of link.
My main concern with using this network was click fraud. I know this a major issue with all internet advertising (I recently read this:
A quarter of online ad traffic is fraudulent / The Amount of Questionable Online Traffic Will Blow Your Mind) but I was especially concerned using this network, because bitcoin and anonymous seem to attract the worst of the scammers. I have some confidence that big advertisers like Google can do some things to fight this, but less confident that new/small networks like this one can do anything.
I used a link-shortener that gives me some tracking/analytics as my advertised URL in an attempt to audit where some of these clicks are coming from.
So here's some "results" from my first campaign:
I've just shut it down and requested a refund of my remaining balance because my guess is that nearly 100% of the clicks I paid for were fraudulent.
I turned the campaign on before I went to bed last night, now turned it off this morning, and paid approximately 0.05 BTC while it ran.
I had three places to measure "metrics" on how this fraud campaign was doing: 1.) a-ads.com itself said I got 1,039 clicks, 2.) the link-shortener analytics said 2,437 clicks, and 3.) the destination gambling site registered 1,293 new cookies, but apparently ZERO new "conversions" (i.e. someone actually depositing bitcoins and gambling).
Here's some analytics from the link-shortener on where most of these clicks came from:
Referrers
amnhac.co.vu 674
tinhot.co.vu 521
tieuthuyet.co.vu 382
ad.a-ads.com 300
briankt.co.vu 194
stevenkt.co.vu 153
sharetut.co.vu 101
emtoikhong.co.vu 98
direct (email, IM, apps) 13
If you take a look at any of those .vu referrer pages, it seems that some "clever entrepreneur / scammer" has been gaming your system.
So in conclusion, great idea, I would love to see it work, but I will not be attempting any further campaigns here until I have some kind of assurance that I'm accomplishing something besides making professional scammers slightly richer.
Thank you very much for this research.
You are right, filtering the traffic is not trivial for small companies. And we don't do it. What we do is we shift the responsibility & control towards advertisers as they are the only ones that know if their advertising campaigns are efficient. We don't charge per click or per impression. If one generates tons of clicks - that doesn't mean he receives tons of money.
We just redistribute advertising budgets among ad units with respect to their globally-unique traffic. Advertisers get a proportional share of impressions in return. Advertisers can select specific traffic sources they pay to. In fact they have full control over their money via Goal Tracking API (though it appeared to be complicated, so we plan to simplify it somehow).
The idea is that you start an advertising campaign, track efficiency of ad units, filter out the ones that are inefficient or fraudulent, reward the ones that are good and generate registrations/sales/deep views (and thus get more impressions from them). That's up to you. Just enable the checkbox "Goal tracking" in the campaign's options and you'll receive a GET parameter (that identifies campaign and ad unit) with each visitor.
TL;DR: So, yes, scammers will always generate fake traffic, but we don't pay per click. Advertisers can pay selectively to the ones that work good for them. You can enable goal traffic for your campaign to track the traffic sources and reward the ones that are good.
Thanks again for your time & feedback. This is a very common problem for our new advertisers. We plan to make it easier for advertisers to pay selectively and to blacklist ad units they don't like.