Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Adult Traffic (NSFW)

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I am thoroughly confused. CTR through the roof, close to ZERO CVR. I suspect a robot! (29)

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I'd like to get some opinions/advice on a very unique situation I am experiencing. I found a few adult sites that get consistent banner CTR ranging from 5% - 27% CTR (Yes, not a typo), depending on the banner. Normally in this industry we (speaking collectively) aim for anything in the 0.30% and up, so something special is definitely going on, because my banners are not anything new or innovative. Just your usual stuff. There seems to be no patterns going on, the conversions I get are completely random, even with such high numbers, I would expect the numbers to eventually level out (statistical significance), rule of large numbers seems to not exist here. After getting over 1m impressions and thousands of clicks costing me only several dollars, I thought I found a pot of gold, only to find that it only produced 2-3 conversions. So I basically broke even. Even the shittiest LP in the world would have made more leads than that considering the volume. I immediately thought this had to be a bot, mixed in with some legit clicks causing the few leads I got. So I wrote a little script to log some info to a text file when the users mouse moves over a certain part of the page. Contrary to what I expected, The users visits WERE getting logged, javascript was registering the mousemove event, and logging it, meaning 1 (or more) of these 4 possibilities (among others probably):

1) These are real users clicking over-eagerly on my banners for whatever reason, and I am just very very bad at converting them (unlikely, again, due to the sheer volume and history of the campaign on other sites)!

2) There is a more advanced web-bot with some kind of headless-browser built in, triggering the javascript mousemove event (never seen this before, maybe some fellow coders could chime in?).

3) Some kind of technical error is preventing them from submitting leads the majority of the time (i've clicked on my own banners, everything looked/behaved as expected, so also, this seems unlikely).

4) The users on the site I am advertising are simply not buyers/convertable... I considered this, and used some banners that CLEARLY advertised what they would see if they clicked the banner, and still, the same amount of clicks. I don't understand why so many clicks and ZERO interest in the offer! Its a SOI so they don't even need a CC. It makes no sense. That'd be like "Click here for a free hamburger *user clicks*, now here's your free hamburger! *user no longer wants a free hamburger*". huhhh???


Have any of you ever experienced such a thing as I am describing? Are web-bots common on adult sites? And I might add, I didn't simply give up with 1 banner, 1 LP combination. I tested many banners, many LPs, direct-linking, and even multiple other offers, each giving me a very similar resulting situation.

The fact that this is all US traffic I am talking about, the numbers just sound TOO good to be true. I am only competing with 1 or 2 advertisers...

What would you do in this situation? If as you watched your stats, you saw over 1k clicks without a single conversion, using the same setup that had WAY higher conversions on different sites in the same country (US), would you keep trying to optimize, or accept that something strange is happening and move on?

Its very frustrating because If this site was even remotely close to my normal CVR, I'd be making several thousand per day easily, considering the volume I can get for only a few dollars...

Would love to hear your guys' thoughts on this.

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1) The average CTR internet-wide on banners is .2%. A good affiliate shoots for .4%+. The highest I've personally gotten is 2.5%. Now I havent worked in the adult industry, but im pretty sure 5-27% is wrong. Check the exact sites they are on when they are clicking on your banners and use your gut to see if it makes sense (i doubt it does). If you are running on a 'blind' network, and cannot see the exact webpages you are showing on, you have much, much bigger problems

2) Probably not

3) It doesnt have to just be a technical error, maybe the LP doesnt work with the screensizes/browsers/devices/countries you are advertising to. One of your settings could be off, or the offer could just be the wrong offer for your audience, and that would explain why conversion rates suck.

4) This is very possible. People on meme/photo-sharing sites dont want to do shit but stare at random pictures of lolcats.

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I know it sounds untrue, but its not, the 5-27% is accurate. here's a couple campaigns that I paused early:




All variables that you mention are exactly the same as from another campaign that converts normally. The ONLY difference is the website. And I've tried direct-linking, still no difference, so I highly doubt its the LP.

Thats a good point, but I used banners that clearly state what they will see/get when they click! There is no mystery! Why would someone click on something SO MANY TIMES if they didn't have genuine interest... I am tempted to put up a banner that says "CLICK HERE FOR A $500 MEMBERSHIP", and see how many people click, that actually might be a good test, if I still get the same click ratio, it must be non-human clicks.

The only way this makes sense to me is if its web-bots... I even considered the possibility of some jackass manually clicking my banners thousands of times for some reason, that also is not the case, I've analyzed the IPs, they're all unique/legit.

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They could be clicking bc of your images are interesting, and not be reading the headlines

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Where is your tracking data? That would be the obvious first port of call - IP ranges clicking, dupe IPs, ISP/carrier and user-agent if possible, etc.

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Whats the traffic source? I've seen these figures through in-player ads but even then, conversions do occur. What is the LP CTR? If its 0 then its likely bots- lots of clever blackhatters out there that make things look legit but never back out conversion wise.

I get a lot of this with JA, PR etc, I usually just block them off and focus on P/L.

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You're right, that is obvious, but for some reason I didn't think to check those things! *dohh*

I'm going to set up a little program today or tomorrow and monitor every single variable you've mentioned, then do some comparative analysis, I think thats the only way to know for sure. But, lets go ahead and assume they are not bot clicks, have you or anyone else ever experienced such a drastically poor CVR with such high numbers? I've ran some bad converting campaigns on top sites like xHamster, PH, etc., but even then, as my impressions and clicks go higher and higher, eventually the leads catch up. This is not the case here. I know that those sites are known for high quality traffic, but still, seems like with so many impressions and clicks, there should be more than a few leads... I'll report back and update after I run more tests.

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I'm confused - are you not running the traffic through a typical tracking system as is?

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I'd rather not give specifics like the traffic source for everyone to see and jump on, I worked hard finding it, but the LP CTR is not zero, its super low like 2-4%... On other sites the exact same campaign had around 70% LP CTR. So If it is bots, its at least mixed in with some real users since its not 0%. Yea, it could very well be some kid in his basement who made a bot to go screw with people's stats, but he'd really only be helping me by making CTR high => CPC insanely cheap.

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@zeno, Yea, I am, but all I can see in my tracking is the banner's keyword, the clicks they got, etc. Not detailed enough for trying to decipher bot or not. Aside from the things you've mentioned tracking, I want to track the mouse-movement coordinates, if they click anything, how long they are on the page, do they exit before the page finishes loading, how close to clicking through my LP are they, etc. Those micro-stats will give me the data I need I think. I think its worth the time and effort given the potential of the traffic source, If I can make it convert normally.

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Just exported my tracking data to excel and found no strange data in terms of dupe IPs, user-agent, etc.

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I have seen similar behavior on my own adult campaigns. Very high CTR, but low LP CTR and therefore also only a few leads. I analyzed the target websites. A lot of them were just tricking visitor to click on ad. Like ad displaying over video, but when you click X to close it, you actually click on ad. They were a real visitors, but only a few were actually interested in offer.

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@grikis, very interesting. What you're describing makes a lot of sense. I wish that this was the case for my campaigns, but my banners have no trickery, I intentionally made it blatantly obvious that it's an advertisement because of the huge CTR I'm getting, but my experience remains very mysterious because none of my efforts seem to effect the CTR drastically. I picked the worst banner I could find, and that still got a 2-3% CTR. Something is up with the site, just need to figure out what that is now...

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Could they be auto-popping your URL? Or are you 100% confident that the only source of the clicks is users clicking on the banner?

The low CTR is a tell-tale sign that users visiting are a) bots or b) arriving there unintentionally.

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I think he means the website in question had some javascript that when someone tried to close the ad it clicked on it in anyways, it'd happen irregardless of the content of the banner

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@craigm, ah, I see. I just checked for that on the site I am getting the highest CTR on, and no such thing was there at all, its almost identical to any other site, there is not even any option to close the ad.

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I've perused the site a lot, trying to simulate the route of an actual user of the site, and I can see my own ad all over the place when viewing on my own IP address. On the many pages that I checked, there was no auto-popping. But as far as certainty of clicks; no, I am not 100% positive that the source of the clicks is completely from clicking the banner. And I don't know how I would even verify that? since I can't put any scripts on the website I am advertising on, how could I verify such a thing? The traffic source does not provide any dynamic variables such as "[click_coordinate]" or "[referring_page]" or anything like that. One very strange thing I have noticed on the site, is that when I view the website on US proxies, my ads do not show! In fact, ads in a different country target are showing! I went and checked out the site a few days ago on a US proxy and a bunch of Chinese ads were showing. There are so many weird things like that going on with the site, my gut tells me there is some invalid activity going on, there just has to be...

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Mate, you are being scammed by the traffic source or ad network.

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I have had bots doing random mouse movements, random time on site and even clicking through on anything that that would be clickable even if it's a 1px white button. I would sugest installing mouseflow to check what's going on.

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I'm not saying that this is the problem, but it would be very easy to build the bot that you described in #2. It is actually extremely simple, and wouldn't take any more than 30 minutes. I doubt this is the case though because other people would be complaining if it was happening to everyone.

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in short terms...

if it is too good to be true... then it probably is...

the usual suspect is when your banner is put into a video player... where the user have to close the banner before they can click play...

and when they click close they are actually clicking on your banner...




this is the only possible reason why you cannot find a pattern of bots/scripts/etc... because the visitors are real.. but they are tricked to click..

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You are getting scammed, these numbers are not even remotely possible for proper banner clicks. Are you sure you are only buying banner clicks? My bet is they are either selling you skimmed/blind traffic that is normally used to feed trades or its a hitbot. Or they geo targeting is fucked to the max and they are sending you people from china ��

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From your guys' responses, Sounds like I most likely am getting scammed by either my traffic source, or the website itself. Damn.. I just started another campaign like 5-10 minutes ago on the site, here are the stats from the traffic source and the corresponding stats from my tracking in prosper:




So again, nothing changed, same thing as before...

They aren't sending me people from china.. I just checked again the IPs and the ones I checked are US.



Does look a little strange how there seems to be a pattern of very similar IP ranges occurring one after the other....


Would you guys bother to run some technical tests, or just accept that its crap traffic at this point?

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Upload images to http://imgur.com/ and post the link instead of doing as attachment

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Before spending too much money in this game, you probably should get a better understanding of how this game is played, at least by some of the participants.

Otherwise, you should stay away.

As the old poker saying goes, “If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, then the patsy is you.”

If you don't do this, you will be just another wide-eyed tourist in Barcelona (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/tr...ckpockets.html) inviting pickpockets with your fat wallet sticking out of your back pocket. You WILL get your life savings emptied out.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/11/dark-un...of-online-ads/
http://www.benedelman.org/presentations/ria-030409.pdf
http://www.dailymotion.com/dm_50fbf1d73b7c9
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-...rowser-2013-11
http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/
http://www.businessinsider.com/adtec...-fraud-2013-10

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Thanks for those links, I'm going to read them all.

Before I paused my campaign, I added in another feature to log the click coordinates, and sure enough, each user was producing unique click coordinates on my LP, thought they would be worth sharing...

A few lines from my logged text file:


IP:69.204.161.223 | date: April 16, 2014, 3:00 pm | click-coords: 139,32

IP:69.22.184.162 | date: April 16, 2014, 3:02 pm | click-coords: 89,21

IP:68.229.91.155 | date: April 16, 2014, 3:11 pm | click-coords: 111,18

IP:174.140.71.194 | date: April 16, 2014, 3:11 pm | click-coords: 123.75,31.09000015258789

IP:150.70.173.41 | date: April 16, 2014, 3:13 pm | click-coords: 123.75,31.09000015258789

IP:68.199.133.95 | date: April 16, 2014, 3:13 pm | click-coords: 99,21

If this is indeed a bot making these clicks, someone put a lot of effort into making it look like a real human!

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http://digiday.com/publishers/confessions-bot-traffic-buyer/ interesting article ^^

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Yes, very interesting! basically according that that article, I am without a doubt getting bot traffic. My CPC is less than half a penny, basically the same as the guy in the article.

Either way, bot or not, the cons outweigh the pros, so Im giving it the boot for now. Maybe I'll mess around with it later when I have some stable campaigns rolling.

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Yes, its not legit one way or another, you have 3 options basically :

1. bots
2. skimmed/blind/popup traffic - the ctr would be about right for skimmed or blind but too high for pops
3. combination of the above, you could be getting some banner clicks (hence the random conversion), but they are inflating the numbers with bot/blind/pop traffic.

One way or another, you cannot do much with this traffic as the results will be erratic and you're most likely gonna run into quality issues anyways.

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