<story><title>Ad Fraud on LinkedIn</title><url>https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>picodguyo</author><text>I observed the same with Google&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Smart&amp;quot; display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US&amp;#x2F;Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn&amp;#x27;t effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US&amp;#x2F;Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped countries. Then there was the behavior of the &amp;quot;users&amp;quot; when they visited the site. A large percentage of them went straight to the search box (which literally no humans do on the site) and typed in something topical but completely unrelated to the site&amp;#x27;s topic, e.g. &amp;quot;covid&amp;quot;. Another large percentage just scrolled up and down randomly. It was interesting to see the size and relative sophistication of the fraud going on but not exactly $500 well spent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>x86_64Ubuntu</author><text>Wow, I had the same issue.  I&amp;#x27;m an ad-noob in the fullest sense of the word, but I tried the Google &amp;quot;Smart Ad&amp;quot;.  It turned out the same way you mentioned.  I looked at where my clicks were coming from, and they were all pretty much from Hindi oriented Youtube channels.  I was baffled at how that happened as I targeted US&amp;#x2F;Canada as you did.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ad Fraud on LinkedIn</title><url>https://www.samueljscott.com/2020/09/08/linkedin-ad-fraud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>picodguyo</author><text>I observed the same with Google&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Smart&amp;quot; display ads. I ran a campaign for a couple of weeks and watched all of the traffic with HotJar. The first fishy thing was 99.9% of the traffic came from foreign countries despite the target being US&amp;#x2F;Canada. When I saw the targeting wasn&amp;#x27;t effective, I even set up specific geographic exclusions for every country != US&amp;#x2F;Canada and still the traffic was from mostly underdeveloped countries. Then there was the behavior of the &amp;quot;users&amp;quot; when they visited the site. A large percentage of them went straight to the search box (which literally no humans do on the site) and typed in something topical but completely unrelated to the site&amp;#x27;s topic, e.g. &amp;quot;covid&amp;quot;. Another large percentage just scrolled up and down randomly. It was interesting to see the size and relative sophistication of the fraud going on but not exactly $500 well spent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>huac</author><text>the default setting on Google location targeting is&amp;#x2F;was &amp;quot;user in [geo] OR user &amp;#x27;interested&amp;#x27; in [geo].&amp;quot; which is insane! but could explain the location weirdness</text></comment>