So here's what happened. We were running campaigns, watching our click metrics climb, feeling pretty good about performance. Then we started digging into where those clicks actually came from.
Half of them were bots.
Not simple ones either. Headless browsers mimicking human behavior perfectly. Selenium scripts automating clicks at scale. Click farms using mobile devices. Advanced stuff rotating IPs, spoofing geolocation, faking mouse movements, generating realistic referrer patterns. Fingerprinting evasion. Timing tricks. Some were so good they looked completely human.
We realized most link tools just count clicks. They don't ask if those clicks are real.
For me, it will be - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The book has helped me to understand the world a little bit better and make me rethink a lot of topics. Which one is your favorite?