Help detecting bots in my campaigns

[Bardum]

Hey everyone,I am new to paid traffic and I wanted to make sure of a few things before starting to blacklist placements:

- If an IP has 1 or 0 views, but a lot of clicks, can I automatically assume it is a bot?
- How soon should I blacklist a placement if it has had no conversions?After how much cost?

So far to detect bots I have made a trap landing page that just has a javascript redirect to my actual landing page: by seeing it's ctr I can know what percentage are real viewers. Is this enough? I am aware there are bots that can read javascript. Can anyone share a more effective method to detect bot traffic? Also, I am getting a lot less clicks in my affiliate network than what Bemob says I have, could this also be because of bot traffic?

 

[azgold]

I am getting a lot less clicks in my affiliate network than what Bemob says I have

If it's clicks (not conversions), is it unique vs repeat clicks? I mean does your network report only show unique clicks?

 

[A.A. Qureshi]

Automated clicks or bot clicks are all a part of Click Fraud. It is a writing problem in the world of PPC. Have a look at how much every year is lost to click frauds.

In late 2018, the FBI arrested an ad fraud network 3ve that used to create malware packages for mimicking mobile and desktop traffic to produce fake clicks on the online advertisements.

But what is the main objective behind this?

A click fraudulent generally has one of the two purposes:

• Sabotaging the competition
• Generating excess revenue

Also, added to this there are two types of click frauds:

• Manual: Carried out by humans themselves. Almost 1 in every 6 clicks is carried by humans as a fraud clicks.
• Automated: Done with the help of an automated tools and software bots. 20% click frauds are carried out by bots.

Here are few tips for safeguarding yourself from click frauds:

1. Identify For Bots
Abnormally high CTRs for your campaigns, a sudden spike in traffic on pages with PPC media, you suddenly start to notice some underwhelming traffic, and not able to find any correlation between higher advertising costs and incoming traffic are signs that you have become prey of click frauds.

Here is where you've have to play smart and find clicks by bots and block them for the future. Search Engine Land's columnist, Ben Goodsell, has a perfect solution for this and that too in just 3 steps.

2. Trick The Spambots With Honeypots
Captcha code is a conventional technique that can frustrate your users and can ruin their user experience. Instead, make use of honeypots to trick the spambots. These are CSS or JavaScript based fields that are not visible to the naked eyes of the user, but spambots often get ticked by it and fill it, this where you can catch them and block or reject them from filling the fields.

3. Regularly Check Your Performance Audits
Regularly check your analytics and performance reports. Using your own institutions look for any abnormal activities, like abnormal spike in traffic, sudden ballooning of your ad spends, or anything that looks fishy.

4. Be more careful about your ad placements.

 

[Vizil]

You should blacklist if your ROI will not be positive in the long run, for example like 30 clicks on SOI offer and no conversion and like 50 on DOI and 100 for sale offers. And similar ip's with no conversions at all entirely and possibly.

 

[Graybeard]

Try an image redirect image => 302 => your REAL landing page
Learn to read your server logs
if the user's IP does not load that image is most likely a bot ...

 

[Phill AdsBridge]

Try our bot-filter and anti-fraud detector. It is based on 10 matrics which give complete picture about the quality of your traffic. You can also prevent bot traffic going to your offer links.

 

[Anna Voluum DSP]

Hey Guys,

Invalid traffic is definitely a growing problem in the advertising industry. It generates no income for the offer owner yet it skews visit statistics, damages your reputation with an affiliate network platform and may result in real costs… However, you’ve to keep in mind that not all bots have bad intentions. Some of them go through links of your campaign funnel just to index the web page content.

That’s why Voluum, as well as Voluum DSP introduced the Anti-Fraud Kit, that consists of several tools, aimed at identifying different characteristics and addressing different problems caused by invalid traffic. The Anti-Fraud metrics show you what portion of your traffic is considered to be suspicious.

Feel free to ask Karolina with @voluum Tracker team for more details.

Hope it’ll help!