Is it just me is Decisive full of bot traffic? (9)
Hey guys.
I know a lot of you are doing Decisive and all the stackers are recommending it, but how come I don't hear people complaining about bot traffic on STM?
A lil while ago I tried Russia. Almost ONLY bot traffic. A few days ago started testing Turkey, 35% bot traffic. Wtf is this? I tested this with javascript 300ms delayed pixel and compared clicks/pixels fired.
Also I didn't set up the bot buster but I have very good feeling that Norway was also 99%$ bot traffic as my LP CTR was about 1% and ya'll know that's not normal.
Of course there are some good placements, but I dont think it's normal for and Ad network to have so much bot traffic.
Can anyone else relate?
I had the same experience and posted about it. And I've seen a lot of posts come by that imply others are experiencing the same but seems like they just think their LP or the offer is not working.
I quickly moved on because it wasn't worth it to waste any time on trying to make it work with my campaigns.
Intresting indeed, well if its bot traffic there it will for sure come out sooner or later..i was thinking about to start there myself ..but i get scared now
Hey @tomsko - David here from Decisive. Thanks for the feedback. It helps improve our product.
We take bot traffic very seriously. We are one of the only ad companies that actively blocks apps or sites platform-wide that we find to be fraudulent. It's not a perfect answer, but we are also the only company that provides detailed click information that you can download via the click explorer. We used this initially to help us diagnose bots internally. It is our goal to be bot free, and if bots do slip under our radar we work to block the offending placements as soon as we identify them.
I say this to most of our customers, but our goal is to build the best platform for you to advertise. We work to provide a simple interface for you to buy across all of the exchanges, dynamic pricing & optimization via SmartCPM, and provide a centralized reporting interface. Unfortunately we will always be subject to the inventory the exchanges send us. This means that we partially rely on our customers to flag inventory that looks fishy so that we can investigate.
We do have a number of cool features coming soon that make it easier to block the placements that aren't working for you, and more quickly find only the placements that work for your campaign. Definitely stay tuned for this.
Bot traffic hurts our business just as much as it hurts yours. If you come across anything that looks strange please don't hesitate to email Ramneek, Andrea or me and we'll look into it right way.
Thanks David. Simply addressing the complaint at the very least shows that you do value the customers input. I know peps appreciate that..
That's great to hear, David.
Do you have any specific thoughts on the kind of bot testing I've been doing over in this post - http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...367#post180367 ?
If failing that test constitutes reasonable proof for you that the traffic is bot-based, then I think that'll be great news for everyone on STM. Alternatively, if you have any concerns with the methodology or suggestions for ways to improve, I'd be very interested to hear that.
I was having a similar feeling. Thanks for chiming in David.
@caurmen - That's a pretty good heuristic. We've thought about doing that ourselves, but we don't have the timestamps after the click happens. This would certainly catch many bots. However some of the smarter bots can also delay the click for 1-2 seconds that wouldn't pass your test. Unfortunately its always a game of cat and mouse :-/.
We block placements but we also do a combination of ip/user agent clustering to determine high density occurrences with no conversions. We're always looking at ways to get better at this. By working with some of customers we've been able to identify it quickly and stomp it out once identified.
Keep in mind that it also depends on the types of offers you run. We've found that placements that accept antivirus/adult ads and have really low CPMs are more susceptible to invalid traffic.
Many publishers who have ad quality restrictions and block low CPMs get higher CTRs and higher conversion rates.
For example: the average conversion rate across the platform on campaigns running at under $.10cpm is .56%. For all campaigns running at greater than $.50cpm is 5%. Thats a HUGE difference.
Good questions and feedback here. Thanks Guys!
Originally Posted by David Decisive
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Mobile