When was the last time you checked your bot…?

If you’ve ever wondered how many of those banner and website hits and clicks came from humans, and how many from automated web bots, I’m afraid the news is not good.

Mercedes Benz recently discovered more web bots than humans viewed one of their latest online ads: 57% of impressions (of 365,000) in a recent 3 week period were of automated computer programmes.

They had commissioned the ad-fraud company Telemetry to check it out after they became suspicious – presumably of the low conversion rate!

It would be interesting and amusing to be a fly on the wall of that review meeting. But it does highlight a serious dilemma which is growing in our industry – how do you trust the data you are served? And how much of this traffic is malware?

Cyber start-up spider.io was recently purchased by google – seems like they’re taking it seriously too. I would hate to be told that all us digital marketers were living in a dream world of our own making.

Or more to the point, that we’re sitting on a time bomb!