Stacking Growth | The B2B Marketing Podcast · Refine Labs

Stop Wasting Budget on BOTS

·58 min·2 clips

Matthew Chanella says LinkedIn audience network is a free fraud fix: “uncheck the checkbox.”

Matt Chanella opens the conversation by bringing Dr. Augustine Fu into a practical discussion of ad fraud. The episode does not stay abstract for long. It treats bots as a moving target that has grown alongside marketing media, and it treats wasted spend as something marketers can cut down with discipline. The conversation keeps returning to one basic point: buying ads is not the same as knowing where those ads actually run. That matters across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, programmatic, and CTV. Dr. Fu and Matt walk through controls that limit exposure to fraudulent traffic. They also keep the defense grounded in measurement rather than magic. A central point is that analytics should let marketers see the quality of clicks reaching the site. If you can judge click quality, you can tell whether fraud is showing up. That keeps the problem concrete. It also keeps it from turning into something bigger and murkier than it needs to be. LinkedIn gets a lot of attention because it creates an illusion of control. Marketers think they are targeting job titles and staying inside the LinkedIn feed. The episode points out that LinkedIn can auto-enroll advertisers into audience network and audience expansion, and those settings behave very differently. Audience expansion is described as LinkedIn guessing who your ICP might be. Audience network is treated as the more serious exposure point. The episode argues that fraud is more common there. The practical advice is blunt: uncheck LinkedIn audience network unless you have a specific reason not to. The logic is simple. Keep ads on the main property, where the humans are logged in. Everything outside it is more exposed to fake accounts, scrapers, and bad inventory. The episode does not claim LinkedIn is free of fraud. It just says the main property is the safer place to stay. Dr. Fu also notes that audience network inventory can include some reputable sites. Even then, those sites are not automatically bot-free. Public web properties can still have scrapers and other fraud. The point lands as a habit, not a slogan: do not confuse distribution with quality. The fraud discussion is not limited to one platform. It becomes a model for how marketers should look at every channel. A platform interface can make a setting look safe, precise, or premium when it is really widening exposure in ways the buyer did not intend. The episode keeps separating promise from mechanism. The tone stays measured and diagnostic. It does not drift into alarmism. Instead, it keeps asking what the marketer can inspect, disable, or measure directly. That makes the episode useful for operators who want specifics instead of slogans. Another recurring thread is the difference between human intent and platform inference. Audience expansion may still stay inside LinkedIn, but it is still a guess. That guess can be useful, but it should not be mistaken for hard control. The episode holds that line throughout. The conversation also reflects Dr. Fu’s role as a fraud specialist who has spent years thinking about these problems. Matt introduces him with a comic-book analogy, but the episode itself stays serious about the operational details. The show keeps turning those details into things a media buyer can actually change. What comes through most clearly is that fraud is not only a security issue. It is also a budget discipline issue. The show wants marketers to think about wasted spend as a structural problem that can be reduced with setup choices and measurement habits. The episode finishes by returning to the practical goal: protect spend from robots and make the traffic you buy easier to read. That keeps the conversation aimed at action. It is less about naming the threat than about narrowing the surface area where the threat can operate. The episode’s value is in its repeatable rules. Check the analytics. Watch the quality of clicks. Turn off audience network unless there is a strong reason not to. Keep the target where the humans actually are. For listeners in B2B paid media, that is the point. The episode gives them a way to think about fraud as a series of controllable settings rather than an unavoidable tax. It is a working conversation for people who want cleaner traffic and fewer excuses.

As heard by us

A practical fraud-control conversation for B2B marketers focused on cleaner paid traffic.

Stacking Growth treats ad fraud as an operating problem, showing how bots have kept pace with marketing media and why tighter controls matter if spend is not to drift into junk.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you run B2B paid media, this shows you where bot waste actually creeps in.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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