[whistle650]

This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a competitive market. If they don’t deliver the ROI because of bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an e-commerce site is profitable (enough) after the ad spend, period. If they are not, why do they spend what they spend on the ads?

[pixl97]

Google is a competitive ad market?

[toast0]

There are certainly competition concerns about Google's advertising programs.

But within their advertising market, you compete for placement with other advertisers. If everyone is getting lots of fraud traffic, presumably they adjust their bids for it, if you're getting outbid consistently, it's reasonable to expect that the other advertisers are either getting a better ROI or they have a lower ROI target than you do.

About a million years ago, I was on a team that had a significant ad program, and it was primarily data driven, we'd come up with keywords to advertise on, measure the results and adjust our bids. With a little bit of manual work to filter out inappropriate keywords or to allow a lower ROI on "important" keywords. Of course, our revenue was largely also from advertising, so it was a bit circular.

[bluGill]

At google I would expect no. However I don't understand why other "portals" are not running their own ads (some are of course - but I think more should). If you are a portal your value is the eyeballs you sell to advertisers, so why are you out soucing this critical part of your business value? This needs to be a core competency you keep in house.