A must-see for bosses/directors! 18 cheating tricks for Internet marketing

Practitioners of online advertising in China all have a grateful heart: no matter what KPI the advertiser gives you, no matter how poor your traffic is, you will create conditions to complete the KPI. Some people jokingly call this "cheating." Of course, in addition to a grateful heart, one must also have the spirit of craftsmanship.

In order to help everyone develop smoothly in this industry, the author and the Seconds Marketing Science Academy have carefully compiled a list of 18 common methods that qualified advertisers should master. Let’s call them the “18 Martial Arts of Cheating”! With all these skills, move forward firmly on the road of precision marketing and big data !

Before we get started, let’s take a quick look at the entire advertising process and see where cheating may exist.

1. The advertiser signs an advertising contract with the media or agency, agrees on the settlement method and provides advertising creativity. The main settlement methods are: settlement by impression volume (Cost Per Mille, CPM) and settlement by click volume (Cost Per Click, CPC) as one category; settlement by conversion volume (Cost Per Action, CPA) and settlement by sales volume (Cost Per Sale, CPS).

2. In the advertising market, there are often third parties to monitor advertising effectiveness and ensure the advertiser's input-output ratio. If it is CPM/CPC settlement, the third party will add detection code/SDK during the ad display process, and it will reach the user end together with the ad. If it is CPS/CPA settlement, the third party will add detection code/SDK on the advertiser's website or app to perform effect attribution.

3. The media displays the advertisement and users see the advertising creativity.

4. Users interact with advertisements (display, click, download, register, etc.). Under the control of third-party code, these behaviors and user information are sent to the third party, which then conducts statistics.

5. The third party will give the statistical data report to the advertiser, and the advertiser will settle accounts with the media according to the indicators based on this data.

It seems that the logic and process of the advertisement are quite transparent and open, and there seems to be no room for cheating. So what went wrong?

Our modern history teacher told us that whenever we encounter a multiple-choice question asking about the “root cause,” we only need to look for the answer with the word “capital” among ABCD. In advertising, if you want to understand the business, follow the money.

Taking CPM as an example, advertisers settle accounts with the media based on the exposure data provided by a third party. The third-party data comes from the ad displays received by the user end, and the ad displays are counted through the third-party detection code. From data to presentation, and from presentation to testing code. As long as the detection code determines that the ad has been displayed once, the advertiser must pay for the exposure regardless of whether the user actually sees the ad.

Cheating is a method of making the code lie. So the question is, how can we make the detection code lie? This is what we are going to talk about, the “Eighteen Cheating Skills”!

Cheating methods are directly related to the KPIs required by advertisers. From a methodological point of view, cheating methods can be divided into two categories: one is targeting CPM/CPC (denoted as M); the other is targeting CPA/CPS (denoted as S).

From another perspective, advertising fraud can also be divided into fake traffic fraud (denoted as N) and traffic attribution fraud (denoted as A). The so-called fake traffic, also known as Non-Human Traffic (NHT), refers to the fact that the display, click or conversion of the advertisement itself is forged; while the latter is to record the traffic from other channels or natural traffic under one's own name. Generally speaking, CPA/CPS ads often use attribution cheating because of the high cost of faking conversions.

In addition, advertising cheating can be divided into machine cheating (denoted as R) and manual cheating (denoted as H) according to the means of cheating. In comparison, machine cheating is very cool, easy to scale, and has the technological feel of big data and artificial intelligence ; while human cheating is delicate and meticulous, with a long-lasting charm, reminding people of the mellow smell of smog in their hometown.

1. Direct access monitoring code (M, N, H)

Monitoring codes refer to those codes that have the function of collecting client information. Its main job is to piece together the client's information into a URL in the form of parameters, and transmit it to a third party in the form of an HTTP request, informing "who, when, saw the advertisement from which media, and which advertiser." Taking the mobile terminal as an example, the common client parameters are as follows (data from the "Advertising Industry Standards of the People's Republic of China"):

In addition to these, common parameters that need to be collected include display ad timestamp, operating system, browser , device type, networking method, APP information, and standard UA information.

When an ad is exposed on the client, the monitoring code will record the exposure and collect user information. The generated URL is as follows. Except for the first parameter which is connected using “?”, the following parameters are connected using “&”. It is easy to read several pieces of information from this URL: the user's IP address is 10.26.78.45, the device UA used is iPhone, the IDFA is 70E0E6465B7B12C844C63EC681C7507C, etc.

By directly initiating an HTTP request to this URL, the third party www.xxxxx.com can parse the three-party information of the advertisement, media, and user based on the URL, and generate a log in the background as a normal advertisement exposure. In the industry, the "detection code" often refers to this detection URL, not the code that fills in the URL, and this is also the case in this article.

www.xxxxx.com/imp?CID=ad20&CPID=1321&CRID=20&OS=1&IDFA=70E0E6465B7B12C844C63EC681C7507C&OpenUDID=F1C7976BC455CB548BFC550EB7687F06&IP=10.26.78.45&UA=iPhone;%20CPU%20iPhone%20OS%206_1_2%20like%20Mac%20OS%20X)%20AppleWebKit/536.26%20(KHTML,%20like%20Gecko&TS=1198628984102

Since it is a URL, rigorous big data practitioners will definitely think: if this code is directly entered into the browser address, will it record an exposure for the advertiser? Yes, this is the simplest philosophical principle behind cheating. This is actually not a weapon, it's just a toy. We use it to illustrate the basic CPM cheating principle. It's the same with CPC!

2. Server monitoring code (M, N, R)

Although it is feasible in principle to increase exposure by manually inputting monitoring codes, it is useless in actual production because the quantity is too small to have a qualitative impact. So is it possible to write a crawler program that automatically loads various parameters and automatically initiates HTTP requests? Ahem, look, if this person wants to become a bad person, it’s really easy! You can rent some cloud servers, move all the codes to the sky, and cheat in the cloud with one click.

As for the cheating method of brushing code on the server, the third party is very difficult. Not only does it take up a lot of server bandwidth, but the influx of fake traffic also poses a severe challenge to the statistics of the real effect. Of course, the method of flashing code on the server still has loopholes: the IP addresses of cloud data centers mostly belong to the same IP segment, so you can just block the IP segments of major cloud service providers - who would have the time to rent a server to watch ads?

3. Client-side monitoring code (M,N,R)

Although it is simple and direct to use the server to monitor the code, it is difficult to achieve natural statistics on user identities such as IP and cookies. Therefore, the hardworking and brave cheaters came up with a new method, which is to directly flash the monitoring code on the client. You think you have visited a web page, but in fact the JS on the web page has given you several free visits and perhaps one click. In this way, it is difficult to find any clues from user behavior .

Of course, such cheating is not difficult to spot: last time I happened to see the user frequency of an advertisement placed on a certain car website, most of them were auspicious numbers such as 8/16/24/32. Why is this? It means buy one get seven free for normal browsing!

How to automatically detect such cheating? I will mention two key words : Fourier transform and frequency domain. Programmers who understand will naturally understand them. If you don’t understand, you may need to take a class on "Signals and Systems". However, most companies will have their own technology, so if you give the above two key words to the technology, you will naturally know them.

In addition, no matter it is server brushing or client brushing, there will be a flaw in the click link: when normal users click on ads, the natural click distribution is related to the ad creativity, while the brushed clicks are either more concentrated or evenly distributed, and are not difficult to distinguish. Draw a click heat map and it will be clear at a glance.

4. Frequently changing user identities (M,N,R)

The user identity used in advertising will not be PII information such as email and mobile phone number. Generally, cookies are used in web scenarios, IDFA is used in native applications of Apple phones, and AndroidID is used in native applications of Android phones. If none of these are available, FingerPrint (IP + User Agent) is used.

No matter what method you use to increase the traffic, you generally have to change your user identity more frequently. Otherwise, if you try to make a lot of money from a cookie and a user has thousands or even tens of thousands of impressions, you will know at a glance that it is fake. Therefore, frequently changing user identities is one of the basic skills in the cheating industry, and it is also something that must be understood when fighting against cheating.

How to deal with this method? For DSPs that can select traffic, there is a simple solution: if you see a cookie or device for the first time, just don’t bid.

However, this approach does not work for supply-side products. However, suppliers have their own advantages. For SSP products that embed into the media via SDK on mobile devices, they can obtain a lot of terminal information. To give a small example, if a mobile phone’s battery is always full (terminal information), there is a high probability that there is a problem. Do you understand?

5. Place iframe to fake display (M,AR)

Iframe is an HTML tag that can insert the content of other pages into the current page and is often used as a carrier for display ads. There are many attributes that can be set for iframe, among which the most popular among advertisers are width and height.

By setting these two parameters, the ad size can be changed from 220 140 which is visible to the naked eye to 1 1 which is invisible . It's just a change of size, how can it be considered cheating? Ladies and gentlemen, after the size is changed, although you cannot see it, the detection code can see it. This is a normal ad display and you can charge the advertiser.

It can be seen that cheaters still have compassion for our majority of users: I just make money from advertisers, and lend you a pixel so that the ads will not be displayed and will not affect your normal Internet access. Doesn’t this just prove the old saying: “Not disturbing you is my gentleness”.

Using iframes to cheat in display ads will naturally result in poor advertising effects. Users will not see the promotion, and advertisers will lose their money. In addition to display ads, video ads face similar problems. For example, on some news pages, video ads are played in a very inconspicuous position, and the effect is extremely poor.

6. Broiler and Root (M/S, N/A, R)

"Zombie machines" refer to machines and devices that are infected with Trojans and can be remotely controlled by hackers. When talking about hacking, everyone may think "Wow, that's awesome", but it's actually not difficult at all. I don't know if you have heard of the "gray pigeon". Someone was a scratch kid in the 4th grade of elementary school and successfully caught a broiler chicken. Just when I was about to log in remotely, the zombie computer disappeared. It must have been killed by the antivirus software, and it has since retired and become a good person.

Let’s get back to the topic. This chicken, oh no, a zombie chicken, is a normal user who can initiate browsing and clicking behaviors because there is a real person behind the zombie chicken. I would like to remind everyone to pay attention to Internet safety and be careful of being scammed. You never know what kind of mess you might click on.

Root refers to the super administrator privilege in the operating system. Once you get the Root privilege, the entire system is your home and you can dismantle it at will. The root access ads mentioned here mainly refer to the situation on the mobile side where some apps obtain root permissions and can quietly perform various access, click and download operations in the background, and these are all real data.

The difference between botnets and roboviruses is that there are real people behind them, while Root is more of a program being executed. However, in terms of effect, all kinds of advertising operations are performed in the background without the user's knowledge, deceiving third-party detection codes to generate real user behavior data.

Speaking of Root, it can be said to be a magic weapon for "performance advertising" in the mobile era! Last year, a Chinese company's root program even alarmed the FBI, and was almost used as a typical example of stealing American user information and undermining the friendship between China and the United States. In fact, they just wanted to earn some advertising fees.

Another listed company (please don’t ask me which one) acquired a master-level Root monetization company in the industry. The phones rooted by them are basically useless except for 24-hour pop-up ads. It is said that the investment can be recovered on the same day, but the user retention is very poor. Why? Even the phone fell!

7. Tricking users into clicking on ads (M, A, R)

Tricking users into clicking on ads usually happens on BBSs, where ads are often disguised as posts that use eye-catching content to trick users into clicking on ads. After clicking, the page will jump or trigger the download of software, and users can easily fall into the trap. In addition to BBS, some download websites have a lot of "click to download". I believe you have all seen it. You don't know where you will jump to after clicking. Anyway, I was taken to a special sale website and took a look around. I saw a mink coat at 0.2% off and was about to buy it when I remembered that I wanted to download the software.

From the above-mentioned CPM/CPC cheating methods, it can be seen that the general idea of ​​advertising cheating is to carry out various hacks around the detection rules, use false or low-value traffic to complete orders, and defraud advertisers' budgets. As long as we grasp this essence, it will not be difficult to understand the cheating methods in advertising. As for what the cheater's bottom line is, I'm sorry, I'm afraid they don't even know what underwear is.

Generally speaking, cheaters may have the following typical identities:

1) Media cheating: This is easy to understand. It is the media’s unshirkable responsibility to create fake traffic to generate more revenue.

2) Advertising middlemen cheating: Advertisers often make quantitative and qualitative requirements to advertising agencies, DSPs, etc. What if they cannot meet the requirements? I had to fake it.

3) Cheating by enemies of advertisers: When settling accounts based on CPM/CPC, if an advertiser has offended someone, they may keep targeting your ads and keep clicking on them, exhausting your budget without any effect. Of course, to brush hard and fast you need to deceive the anti-cheating system at every link.

4) Advertisers cheat themselves: This is actually not difficult to understand. In order to make the data look better and gain an advantage in platform rankings, almost all advertisers have thought about this. From the advertiser's perspective, this is called " ranking rush ", but from the platform's perspective, it is also cheating.

Next, let’s take a look at what cheating methods are used in the CPS/CPA settlement situation, which seems to guarantee advertisers a stable income. For the meaning of the subtitles after each title , please refer to the introduction in the previous article "18 Strategies of Internet Advertising Cheating (Part 1)".

8. Operator pop-up window (M/S, N, H)

Do you still remember the Linghu Clinic for treating body odor in the black frame floating above the TV program?

Do you still remember the mobile business hall that saved money and trouble in the pop-up window at the bottom right of the computer?

Do you still remember the traffic ball hanging on the screen of your mobile phone, reminding you that the remaining traffic is 388M?

If you haven't forgotten yet, then congratulations, at least it means that someone is still thinking about you.

Operator pop-ups may be a cheating method that everyone has always been disgusted with, but is powerless to stop. These advertisements are of various types and have similar characteristics, and the owners behind them are all operators who serve the people. Since advertising placement occurs at the data transmission layer, no matter what program you watch, which website you browse, or what mobile phone you use, as long as you are connected to the Internet, you will receive love from the operator.

In addition to this kind of forced pop-up hijacking, there is another way that ordinary users are completely unaware of, and it exists silently. For example, when a media outlet displays an advertisement at a certain location, in the data link from the web page to the user's browser, the operator performs deep packet inspection (DPI) on the web page data, replaces the media outlet's advertisement with its own advertisement, and sends it to the user.

In this way, the exposure opportunity of this media advertisement was snatched away. Is this called robbery? No, it’s the operator’s business, how can it be called robbery?

9. Landing Page Hijacking (S, A, R)

Although it is also operator hijacking, the pop-up window is relatively gentle. It just seizes some exposure opportunities. In actual CPS affiliate advertising , hijacking is often carried out in a simpler and more concise way.

What is the CPS Alliance? Taking Taobao Alliance as an example, the webmaster's page can be used to place Taobao advertisements. When a user clicks on the advertiser's advertisement, the Taobao embedding code on the webmaster's page will give the user a cookie, marking that the user came from the webmaster. If the user subsequently makes a purchase, Taobao will pay the webmaster based on CPS.

What is operator landing page hijacking? For example, you open your browser and visit JD.com :

http://www.jd.com

But the moment you press Enter, the URL in the address bar becomes like this:

http://www.jd.com?utm_source=ABC

what happened? It turns out that the operator replaced your website address with an advertising source address. In this way, your consumption on JD.com will be recorded in the "ABC" channel!

Using the landing page hijacking method to do CPS advertising is really cheap and sufficient! And the best part is, no matter how you examine the subsequent data, you won’t find any problems: Nonsense, how bad can the quality of organic traffic be!

To be frank, I think that the real and effective normal traffic in the CPS alliances of major e-commerce companies accounts for no more than 20%. Of course, the invalid traffic does not only come from operator hijacking, but also includes some weird methods mentioned below. Some people may ask, since CPS traffic is useless, why should we still do e-commerce? Regarding this philosophical question, you can think deeply about the last of the eighteen martial arts.

Is there any good way to deal with traffic hijacking ? Complain to the operator? Don't be funny. Currently, the better solution is to use HTTPS instead of HTTP to encrypt the data, making it difficult for operators to parse the data content. What's more, you can never wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.

Of course, in addition to operators, mobile phone manufacturers also have the ability to replace the download packages of other advertising channels with their own application markets . The principle is the same as landing page hijacking. Well, I won’t say much. The Android application market is currently a severely affected area, and several well-known mobile phone manufacturers are also having a lot of fun with it.

10. Cookie Stuffing (S, A, R)

“Stuffing” means “filling”, which is also an ancestral cheating method against the CPS alliance.

Under the CPS Alliance mechanism, the webmasters' cheating methods appear particularly pure. In one word, stealing! Without the user's knowledge, a cookie identifying the webmaster is given to the user. If the user later makes a purchase on Taobao, due to the existence of the cookie, this natural purchase result becomes the webmaster's traffic result.

The main implementation methods of Cookie Stuffing include image + .htaccess jump, 1*1iframe and Flash, etc. The basic principle is to quietly initiate an HTTP request to Taobao's promotional link on the user's browser, and put the webmaster's Cookie without the user clicking on the advertisement. The cheating method of Cookie Stuffing is similar to the download attribution to be introduced later. Both of them convert natural results into their own promotion effects in order to defraud more conversion payments.

There is nothing new under the sun, and the mood of the main effect of e-commerce advertising is understandable. However, I can say responsibly that effects that are ridiculously good are most likely problematic. Some time ago, a DSP giant went to court with a client over the source of traffic and suspected hijacking. Although an out-of-court settlement was finally reached, we cannot help but doubt that the effectiveness of their advertising may also have a logic similar to Cookie Stuffing.

11. Flashing Wall (S, N/A, R)

Flashing the machine wall is a simple and crude cheating method, which refers to operating multiple mobile phone terminals at the same time, manually or automatically, to batch brush various conversions. The mobile phone is a real phone, but the traffic is garbage. The so-called zombie accounts mostly refer to this type. Weibo fans, WeChat readership, top posts and likes, everything is connected. 800 yuan for 100,000 views, do you want it?

Flashing the system wall may seem simple and crude, but it is actually a technical job. How to get enough IPs, how to carefully simulate user behavior to make it look real, these things really require the spirit of craftsmanship.

If one pays careful attention, it is not too difficult for the media to judge this kind of fake traffic, because mobile devices have rich sensor information. Think about it, isn't it easy to distinguish these poor paralyzed mobile phones whose lifelong mission is to flash the system from those lively mobile phones that jump around following their owners?

12. Game Self-Charging (S, N, H)

It has long been an open secret in the industry that game developers recharge their own games. Why do you need to recharge yourself? Because only when the data performance is good can you get a higher ranking in the channel, get more traffic, and make more money. This is called a mouse pulling a shovel - the big head is at the back. The essence of this self-charging is the same as that of Taobao stores’ fake orders and mobile apps’ ASO rankings.

Interestingly, in gaming ads, there is a situation where advertising agencies secretly recharge the game. The agent recharges the game without letting the developer know? Isn't this just because you have nothing better to do? In fact, this is not the case. There is a lot of depth here.

For example, an advertiser requires a 100% recharge recovery rate within three months after launching an advertising campaign, but the quality of my media is very poor (or I have no intention of investing at all), what should I do? Just top up the money yourself within three months. In this way, advertisers will see good results and increase their budgets, and I will then recharge them myself. This cycle repeats itself over and over again until the advertiser has become a big fat sheep (the budget is large enough), and then hehe, hey, hey, hey, hey, just stop investing!

Who says the Ponzi scheme is only effective on gray-haired uncles and aunts? If you grasp its essence, seemingly shrewd but actually greedy businessmen will also be fooled.

13. Wool Party (S, N, H)

The "wool-gathering gang" is a very interesting organization, characterized by "large number of people, large scale, and small amount of money". Wherever they go, advertisers will be fleeced to the last penny left. This type of cheating is common in activities such as "register to get phone bills/vouchers", where real cash incentives can be obtained at a very low cost.

Taking phone bills as an example, usually, the recharge cards obtained in exchange for registration will eventually be collected in a Taobao store at a 20% discount, and the store will sell them at a 99% discount when recharging for users. Look, what a complete industrial chain, with some people responsible for the underlying collection and some responsible for the distribution channels. All in all, the only ones who get cheated are advertisers. Although they get a large number of registrations and conversions, what value can a group of zombie accounts bring? Speaking of this, let me give you another real-life example.

During the takeout war at the end of 2014, various takeout platforms took turns to stage money-burning dramas, such as offering 12 yuan off for purchases over 15 yuan, and using red envelopes, so a meal would cost no more than 5 yuan. However, this is not the point. The most memorable thing is an event where you could get 12 off for every 12 you spend.

Because of this discount, all the drinks in the restaurants around the school were sold out at once, because everyone stopped ordering takeout and ordered drinks instead. A bottle of drink costs 3 yuan, and you can order 4 bottles for 12 yuan. Place an order, get discount, and get 4 bottles of drinks without spending a penny. As a result, the campus is filled with a sweet atmosphere. Everyone is a freeloader and when they meet someone, they greet each other by asking "Have you had a drink?" After this farce, a new round of subsidies came, but I still can’t remember the name of the food delivery platform that offered the “12 off for purchases over 12” offer. I only remember how disappointed I felt when I saw that the Coke was out of stock.

By the way, after several years of booming, China's P2P industry has shown a trend of cooling down this year. Why have so many P2Ps disappeared? There are only two possible outcomes: one, running away with the money; two, being fleeced by the wool-pulling party.

The market sensitivity and organizational ability of the wool party are astonishing. Haven’t you seen that from Meituan to Didi , and even the recent Taobao’s incentive policies for newly registered users, they quickly became a carnival feast for the wool party. "Earn 7,000 yuan in one day", "Profit 50,000 in 3 days", getting rich through labor is no longer a dream.

14. Taobao consignment sales (S, A, H)

Taobao consignment sales is a type of cheating method that transfers money from one hand to the other to earn commissions. The scenario is like this. Suppose an advertiser asks an agent with a No.1 store channel to help with brand promotion and charges based on CPS, hoping that the products can be sold on No.1 store and complete the accumulation and sedimentation of the brand. In order to increase revenue as much as possible, the agent turned to open a store on Taobao, which has a larger population, and sold the advertiser's products. After the user places an order on Taobao, the agent ships the goods directly from No.1 Store to the user, which completes the sale.

If you place an order on Taobao and receive a package from No.1 Store, don’t feel strange. The product is fine and you can use it boldly. It just makes the agents rich and the advertisers poor.

15. Cloaking (M/S, N/A, R/H)

Cloaking means "covering, hiding", which means that during the advertising process, some IP addresses are blocked and ads are not displayed to them. It is equivalent to a "blacklist" maintained by cheaters. So the question is, who will be on the cheater blacklist? Of course, it is the people who regulate the advertising market, such as search engines or company IPs of major advertising platforms.

Considering that it is costly to maintain an advertising account, in order to gain more profits from a single advertising campaign, cheaters try every means to extend the advertising time. If this ad appears on a search engine, the cheater will use the Cloaking method to block all IP addresses of the search engine company, making it difficult for relevant regulators to quickly reproduce the scenario complained by the user when handling complaints or reports, thereby delaying the review process.

From this point of view, Cloaking is not a cheating technique, but an auxiliary means, and even a means that cheaters currently use. By increasing the review costs for regulators and extending the advertising time, every bit of money earned is earned.

The principle of cloaking seems simple, but it makes a big difference if it is done well. Cheaters who pursue perfection sometimes get bored and go to the airport at noon, take whichever flight they can catch, stare blankly at the Facebook campus alone, silently memorize the IP addresses of all nearby wifi networks, and fly back that night.

16. Download Attribution (S, A, R)

The so-called attribution can be simply explained as what factors ultimately lead to the achievement of the goal. Let’s take a simple example. On the football field, A kicked the ball into the goal and said, "I scored the goal and the honor is mine." However, A's ball was passed to him by B, and he would not have scored if he hadn't passed the ball to him, so B said he also contributed. At this time, the aunt who cooks in the cafeteria said, it is because I have provided you with good nutrition that you are in good health, so I also deserve a share of the credit.

To sum up, who should this ball belong to? Normally speaking, everyone has this honor; but in reality, A snatched away B's passing contribution and the cafeteria aunt's cooking contribution, and enjoyed the honor of scoring the goal alone. This is attribution.

Download attribution is a cheating method that exploits loopholes in the mobile app download monitoring logic. In mobile app download advertising, third-party monitoring generally stipulates that the download behavior generated within a period of time after the user clicks the ad is counted as advertising effect.

Advertising practitioners with a scientific spirit will inevitably think about how to turn natural downloads into money. This is too simple. For every user who visits, whether they download or not, just record a click first and that’s it! In this way, as long as the user downloads the file later, Hitler will be looking at the earth - it's all mine!

What are the subsequent effects of download attribution? Of course it is good, because it is essentially grabbing natural downloads.

Of course, money is not that easy to earn. There is another problem here. If all users' clicks were marked in advance, the number would be too large and it would be easy to see that the data was obviously fabricated. In order to make things look better, the app market also needs to conduct audience targeting, ad recall and CTR estimation for visiting users to see which apps are most likely to be clicked by users, and selectively add clicks in advance. You see, a set of cheating and teasing advertising system has been put together. It is really not easy to cheat money.

For personal safety, we will not discuss here how to accurately determine download attribution, how to avoid anti-cheating tracking, and what more advanced new methods are there.

17. Buy chestnuts (S, N, H)

"Buying chestnuts" means buying sales leads, which refers to an advertising technique that uses "precise" advertising to bring sales leads to advertisers. In today's Chinese advertising market, even large advertising platforms such as XXX and XXX basically rely on fraud to complete advertisers' lead requirements, not to mention other third-party advertising platforms.

Of course, it is not difficult to fake sales leads: just find some idle people in society and train them to click on ads, leave information, answer calls from manufacturers and even go to stores, just like extras. A friend once told me that when he was running a car advertisement, 90% of the leads collected from two channels overlapped. It is really sad to see such poor directing standards. It is said that in the area from Langfang to Sanhe in the suburbs of Beijing, the industry of mass human production of sales leads for advertisers in various industries is booming, and all in the name of big data. If I had to give a numerical estimate, I would say that at least 70% of the automotive sales leads generated by display advertising today are not real.

Of course, just because the leads are fake doesn’t mean the advertising is ineffective. However, in actual operations, the pursuit of leads, an incorrect KPI , is likely to greatly reduce the effectiveness of the execution of correct market goals. Is this so-called data-driven method of evaluating the quality of a partner based on the number of children born really a historical progress? Don't embarrass yourself!

18. Get the people (M/S, N/A, R/H)

Even if you have mastered the above 17 martial arts, if you don't know the last one, then all your efforts will be in vain. And this secret skill is - to deal with people.

It is always people who determine the direction of the advertising market. If you investigate the market in depth, you will find that most cheaters’ methods are not only not sophisticated, but can even be described as clumsy. Why do simple and crude methods still work? Are all the people from Party A from Mars? Of course not, because they have already become half Party B.

A typical example, of course, is the case a few days ago where the marketing department of a certain animal car brand openly collected kickbacks through DSP and laundered money with low-quality or even fake traffic. It is typical because behind every large-scale cheating activity there is often a touching business story.

For media and advertising companies, being able to deal with people means they can cheat with confidence; and for advertisers, if they don’t take care of the people responsible for buying their traffic, no matter how advanced the anti-cheating technology is, it will be of no avail.

Okay, that’s all I have to say about the Eighteen Martial Arts. Due to space limitations and ideological concerns, many details are not discussed in detail. You are also welcome to leave a message and tell us your opinion~~

This article was compiled and published by the authors @曾宪超 and Liu Peng (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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