Latest / Talk Commerce / How Bots Are Stealing Your Digital Marketing Budget with Rich Kahn
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:01.124) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I Rich Kahn. He is the CEO and founder of Anura. Rich, go ahead, do an introduction. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Rich Kahn (00:12.16) the CEO and co-founder of the company. So I originally started by writing all the code myself, doing all the sales myself. My partner was handling all the financing and all the business aspect of stuff. Today, my role is really just guiding the leadership to make sure their teams are doing what needs to be done, getting involved on some key accounts where needed. So I get to spend a little less time working in the business, more time working on the business, which is nice. Yeah, it's kind of what I'm doing day to day. Rich Kahn (00:48.078) I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Brent Peterson (00:49.84) Sorry, I'm going to go off on a limb. Traction, EOS, are you running any operating system in the background to help you run better? Rich Kahn (00:55.63) Yep, we're using EOS. We started EOS probably about four or five years ago. It's great because I've been building businesses on the internet since 93. Never had structure, just kind of just did my thing and it seemed to work out. in this company, it's a very different company. We're working with bigger clients. We're working with different situations. And a client of mine actually recommended EOS and we Brent Peterson (01:01.209) Awesome. Rich Kahn (01:22.712) heard it up a couple of times. We looked for an implementer, got set up, brought them in and been happy with it ever since. It reduces the amount of meetings that we have throughout the week with the leadership and increases productivity of the meeting that we do have. with EOS, it's one meeting a week with leadership and it becomes very specific of what has to get done, goals to accomplish and keeps the beat of the other company running, which is nice. Brent Peterson (01:49.776) That's great. Yeah, we won't go into EOS, but I'm a big believer in EOS and it definitely helped me in my last company. So Rich, before we get started talking about, we're going to talk about bots today. Before we do that, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. So I'm just going to tell you a joke and you just gave me a rating eight through 13. So hopefully I can get it out of here. Here we go. Not all construction work is equally enjoyable. For example, enlarging a drilling hole is boring. but fastening a piece of metal together is riveting. Rich Kahn (02:25.048) We'll go with a 10 on that one. My kids would call that a dad joke. Brent Peterson (02:27.108) Yeah, it's definitely a dad joke and I kind of screwed up the I kind of it was too long for me to read. anyways, all right. Well, let's let's talk about bots. I know we in the green room, we talked a little bit about my past glory days and magento and how bots would take down websites and I'm sure they still take down websites. Tell us about the bot business. Rich Kahn (02:35.246) It's all good. Rich Kahn (02:48.942) Well, bots, you know, they can take down websites if they're a strategic attack and they want to take down a site. what they're like the bots that we're catching and we're focusing on as the ad bots, the bots that are clicking on your ad units. Let's look at it this way. Last year, as a global society, the globe, the world spent a little over 700 billion dollars in digital marketing. Of that, 140 billion was stolen by fraudsters. taking advantage of bots, malware, human fraud farms, whatever their, their choices. But, so instead of taking down websites, they're taking your money. So on average, we find 20 to 25 % of anybody's traffic that they're paying for is fraudulent, which means that audience is not going to convert because it's not real audience. It's fake. It's fictitious. I should say fictitious. so really that's, that's what we're seeing now. And and like I said, Back in, I've been doing internet businesses since 93. The internet was made public in 91. Bots used to be like, know, DDoS attacks for taking down websites and stuff like that. Those type of bots are different types of bots. And they're designed for destructive purposes, like, example, taking down a website. That still happens today. But there's more technology out to prevent that kind of stuff from happening. Most, most... Back in the day, you used to host your own web server. You'd have a T1 coming into your office. You put a couple servers on a rack and manage your website. Now everybody uses cloud computing because it's cheap, it's fast, it's easy to use. And we're an AWS shop, example. AWS includes types of DDoS attack prevention. So it minimizes that type of attack. But again, if a fraudster wants to take your site down, they will find a way to use bots to take you down. What we're seeing bots take advantage of is really trying to steal money, you know, because it's so profitable. Brent Peterson (04:54.02) Where do you see the biggest impact then from a fraud side? How are bots getting in and what is it exactly that they're stealing from the merchants? Rich Kahn (05:03.534) So there's a lot of different scenarios on how this works. Let's use a Google example. right. When because Google is one of the biggest places where you can buy internet advertising. So a mazel stick and use them as an example. But it happens in every channel. Doesn't matter what channel you're buying from. So with Google when you're building your campaign you start building it out and put your basic information together your targeting criteria. There's a little checkbox that's pre checked. that says includes partner networks. Right. Most people skip over that because it's kind of hidden and you just keep building out your campaign and it's recommended to use by Google because it gives you more traffic access to bigger audiences and things like that. Well what that is doing is it's saying you're not going to get all your traffic from Google dot com. You're to get traffic from millions of websites around the globe. Some of these websites are well known like a CNN or weather dot com stuff like that might have Google ads placed on it. But then you have these lot of small sites that might be blog sites, maybe informational sites that have access to it. So now what happens is Google takes a client's ad puts it on that website depending on how it's built out. Somebody clicks on it. That website owner makes money. So now you can see they're incentivized to generate more clicks on those ads. So either a knowingly the site owner decides, hey, I can make bot I can get a bot download a bot and get AI to write me a bot click on that ad you know and make me more money or they realized or hey I've got you know 10,000 visitors a month hitting my site which is a small sweat site and I'm making so much money for these clicks what if I bought some more traffic and they go find cheap traffic and the key in that is cheap traffic cheap traffic tends to have a lot of fraud in it and they buy this cheap traffic, think they're doing a good thing. Meanwhile, that cheap traffic is generating false interactions, which is making money. And the problem is the advertiser is never going to get any type of true conversion out of that because it's not real. It's not a real audience. So they want to do is the goal of what we do is to help people eliminate that audience so they can spend their money and their budget on real audiences that convert. Brent Peterson (07:21.082) How do you help the merchant to make sure that their bot or that their site is ready for a bot and do you distinguish between different types of bots? You had mentioned the fraudsters, but there's legitimate bots out there too. And sometimes the legitimate bots can be a little bit overzealous for scraping your site. How do you lead through that? Rich Kahn (07:44.088) Well, most good bots, should say, we'll say most because it's never, there's no such thing as ever and always, right? Most good bots will identify themselves as the Google bot, the Bing bot, the SEMrush bot. they'll, in their description when they hit the tap to the site, they'll tell you what kind of bot it is so that you can deal with that if you know it's a good bot. Like a scraping bot, like a Google bot, you want them to scrape your information so that you can get included in their index and get free traffic or get earned traffic. But the bad bots are the ones that try to make themselves look like real humans by mimicking an iphone Coming from you know some city in america because most campaigns are built I think that there was like 50 or 60 percent of all digital marketing is spent by us companies so we're the biggest consumer of the digital advertising and That's what they're trying to do is they're trying to steal that money by clicking on those links generating money And again, every channel has got a different way of doing it, but that's example using Google. Rich Kahn (08:47.776) I can't you. Brent Peterson (08:48.324) What do see for users who are trying to either increase that or encourage the bots to come to their site? Is there anything that you help in that regard? Rich Kahn (09:03.116) Well, if it's the site owner and they're knowingly letting bots in, they're not our ideal client because they're committing fraud, However, what we try to do is help the advertisers that's showing up on that website identify where the traffic's coming from and then start putting blocks in place to prevent that traffic from hitting their ads. Brent Peterson (09:25.68) How about the idea that now bots are changing, they're going to bore LLMs, perplexity and chat-chip-e-tee are going to start scraping. Does it matter what's out there and are there potentially frauds within that community? Rich Kahn (09:40.718) The general sites like a chat GBT or all this other AI that's out there at scraping content does it the right way. They all have their bot signature says, hey, this is a chat GBT bot. you know, coming in what they're doing and why they're there. It's the ones that try to hide themselves. The ones that we're looking at and trying to protect. Because if a bot impersonates a real person and they're using AI to do this, you know, it becomes very difficult to identify that it's a bot. because the signature of bots not there looks like a real person. AI knows what a real person looks like. And what we're trying to do is uncover the fact that it's a fraudulent visitor so that our clients can do something with that. They can either prevent them from filling out a form, prevent them from using a credit card, prevent them from seeing their ad again, whatever is gonna help them depending on, and every client's a little different. Brent Peterson (10:33.003) Is there, I think that there's this thing called click bait. Is there a thing called click bot? Rich Kahn (10:39.266) Well, click bots with an S. Bots that click on ads, yeah. In fact, if you decided to go on the dark web and search for fraud GBT, you'll find a piece of software, a piece of AI software that will actually physically write bots to click on ads. So you can say, I want a bot. You can actually just tell it, I want a bot that's going to click on ads. Here's a website I want to attack, make it look like it's coming from all over the country, or whatever, all the different feedback that you want to give it. Go and it'll build you a bot. And if you don't know how to, if you're not technical enough to deploy it, it will tell you step by step how to deploy the bot so that people without technical skill can now get involved in this type of crime. Brent Peterson (11:20.65) I saw on your website you had bot farms. Tell what is a bot farm and what does that entail? Rich Kahn (11:27.768) So bot farms are literally just, you know what a server farm is, right? So they're taking advantage of server farms and running bots across dozens, if not hundreds of different machines. And they're all acting, and they don't have to be in the same physical location or the same hosting provider. They can be all over the world. And, but they all have the same common purpose. They could be bots all over the globe that are attacking one site. So like we talked a little bit about bots taking down sites, that's a DDoS attack, right? Distributed Denial of Service attack. So that can happen when a bunch of bots attack a site using a special type of attack to take it down. The same thing happens with click bots. You can have click bots running all over the globe because you don't want the clicks coming from one server, one device, because it becomes pretty obvious what it is. So you have to have lots of bots all over the world to make it look more legit. And that's kind of what a server bot farm is all about. Brent Peterson (12:26.874) think a little earlier you had mentioned authenticating users or making sure that the forms are right. Is the current way of doing recapture, whatever is that the type of system we should have in place to stop bots from scraping your site or from putting forms in and creating leads? Rich Kahn (12:48.814) Yeah, the problem is um Captcha has been beat I want to say Early 2000s, it might have been back in the 90s, but early 2000s Soft regular plane software was able to use put into a bot to be able to get around that So it doesn't serve the purpose that it that it once did in fact You've we've all seen it if we've been on the internet for a little bit. We've all seen the yellow the evolving of Captcha it used to be hey, just check this box that I'm not a robot, right? That was the first one just check a box The next one was the puzzles, know, you know Line this puzzle up so it matches the next one after that was click all the street signs right on all these pictures and what's happened is they're trying to evolve the Captcha to keep up and stay ahead of bots, but They just haven't been able to as soon as a new new version is out within I want to say within hours. They're beat And now with AI, I mean, you don't even have to program it as a new one in the walls. The AI itself will figure out how to get around it. But really, what is it? What does Captcha do? There was a study at a Harvard and I want to say the number was 34%. So what they were saying was 34 % of the time, real humans fail at Captcha. And we've all we all know this, right? You come up to the Captcha, you, you typed it in. you missed the character. you clicked on a box. You missed one. It does it over again. You know, and it just upsets the buyer's journey. So instead of protecting the site and keeping bots off, which is really not doing a good job of because bots get around it, it's really hurting your buyer's journey, which is interfering with your site's ability to convert. And that's a big problem. So. Captchas is the last thing I would put on somebody's website. Brent Peterson (14:36.836) What do you do then to get around that? What is your solution? Rich Kahn (14:40.182) Our solution analyzes over 800 data points on the visitor landing on the webpage. And from that information knows how the data comes in, how those data points interact with each other. And from that, we can give a definitive thumbs up or thumbs down if it's a real person or not. And then based on that, someone could take real time action. Like if it was a bot, hey, don't let the credit card go through. Don't let them fill out a form. Don't, you know, don't let them go to a different page or whatever you want to do with them. You know, each client does something a little different, but At least you know what you're dealing with and then you have the ability to deal with it in real time. Brent Peterson (15:11.376) Do you have a percentage of fraud that happens from bots? Is there a calculator that you have that can help understand what the percentages that would impact you as a customer, depending on your traffic? Rich Kahn (15:25.228) Yeah. So initially we tell everyone on average is about 25%, but it really depends on the channel marketing that you use. So if you go to anura.io we have in one of our resources, there is a fraud calculator and in that fraud calculator, you can select which channels of digital marketing you're using. Each one has a different percentage of fraud and we'll add them up and just give a simple average across the board. like if you picked programmatic and affiliate marketing, Those are the two highest levels of fraud. And you put in that you were spending $100,000 in digital marketing a month, it's going to tell you you're losing $47,500 a month. So it actually puts a dollars and cents on it for you. But it depends. There's a couple of different things you can play with so you can actually get an idea of, I'm spending all my money on Google or I'm spending it all on Facebook. How much fraud am I dealing with? That would give you some idea. Brent Peterson (16:19.248) about from an implementation we've got people are getting ready now for Black Friday hopefully you've probably already locked on your site is it too late for a merchant to get get something like this in place before Black Friday Cyber Monday Rich Kahn (16:31.02) No, not at all. fact, most of our clients, think it's the last number I saw was about 75 % of the internet is powered by Google Tag Manager. We're pre-built into Google Tag Manager. So within three minutes with no tech resources, you can have us deployed up and running. So it's a simple thing to deploy, but all the heavy lifting is done in the backend. So that protects the client. Brent Peterson (16:54.128) That's awesome. Rich, we have a few minutes left as I close up the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Rich Kahn (17:02.488) So what I always tell people, it's no longer a question of if you have fraud, it's a question of how much fraud you have. And for that, we offer a free 15-day trial where we can actually scan your traffic, find out exactly how much fraud you have, where it's coming from, and if it makes sense to put a game plan together to mitigate it. So if you're curious about it, take advantage of the free trial. Like I said, it's free. There's no obligation after that. Brent Peterson (17:25.72) and tell us how they get a hold of you. Rich Kahn (17:27.938) The best way to get a hold of the company is anura.io. That's A N U R A.io We do own.com. but we, we bought it a while after we didn't want to mess with our SEO. So we just, we keep our main site as.io. or you can find me, Rich Kahn K a H N on LinkedIn. I post on a regular basis. I take podcasts like this that I'm on a regular basis, post them as well. So people have plenty of content to, to absorb. Brent Peterson (17:54.082) Awesome, great. Rich Kahn is the founder, CEO of Anura. Thank you so much for being here today. Rich Kahn (17:58.85) Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.