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One shocking trick to increase your campaign ROI by 30% (13)

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The affiliate industry is getting harder and harder every year. Competition is higher than ever. Easy money is gone and you can’t just rip someone else's campaign and profit.

Have you lost hundreds or thousands on some campaigns only able to barely make it profitable?

Have you ported a successful campaign to another traffic source, but only to lose money when everything else is the same?

If you answer yes to the above question, then you might be in luck.

One of the reason that affiliate industry have gotten so tough is fraud. Everyone is scamming everyone, especially in buying and selling traffic industry. There are millions of websites out there and a considerable portion of their traffic comes from bots. Shady webmasters would build hundreds of websites and run bots to click their own ads.

If you ran any considerable amount of traffic in the last year or so, I guarantee you that you were scammed out of quite of bit of money from bot clicks.

It is estimated that on average, 30% of all web traffic is bots. From my own internal testing, some traffic sources have as much as 50% bots (*cough*Exoclick*cough*).

What I’m about to show you is a tool designed for internet marketers to drastically reduce their bot traffic and increase their campaign ROI. Is it a silver bullet? no. It is actually an advance tool designed for experienced affiliates who understands tracking. If you are a newbie affiliate just getting started, this probably isn’t a tool for you yet.

However, If you have been running traffic for a while and words like tracking variables and SID is in your daily vocabulary, then read on. What you will earn next will help you dramatically reduce the money you are wasting on click fraud.

Having an edge over your competition is what it takes to make it now days, and detecting bots is one edge that you need to master to make it.

ClickFraud.co is a new tool developed specifically for internet marketers to detect bot traffics.

ClickFraud works with your existing campaign tracker, and it analyzes the behavior of each click on both the server side and the client side. Each click that is going to be send to your landing page will be algorithmically analyzed by ClickFraud to see if the click is a real or fake. It works with any traffic source, web or mobile.

Here are some real number from my own internal testing on Exoclick RON with a dating offer. I had an campaign that was doing about -20%. I added ClickFraud and let it run for a couple days to build up statistical significant data. When I looked through the data for my campaign, I was shocked that 50% of the traffic coming from Exo was bots. I exported a CSV and put it in excel, sorted based on percentage of bot traffic and number of clicks, then I copy pasted the the blacklist of websites with high bot percentage over to Exoclick. The next day I saw an 30% increase in ROI, and the campaign became profitable.

Setting up was easy. My campaign was already running, I only had to to swap out my Voluum landing page to point to ClickFraud.co’s tracking url and make sure that the tracking variables from the traffic source was passing through.

Like I said earlier, this tool isn’t a silver bullet. You will need the following to maximize the potential of ClickFraud.co bot detector.

1. You have existing campaigns that are profitable or almost profitable.
2. You understand how tracking works
3. You understand how to optimize your traffic placement

If above sounds like you, then you need to give ClickFraud.co a try.

Edit: The $500 coupon is now expired. However, you can use STM200 for a $200 coupon for a limited time.

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Sounds like a great solution! How fast is the redirect speed in milliseconds, as the user would have to pass through another redirect before the LP loads? Which hosting solution do you use for your servers?

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50-100ms or so for the redirect. The analysis is asynchronous so redirect is super fast. There are 6 geo available to reduce latency and more is coming. The app is running on Digital ocean with SSD, can be easily scaled up as customer demand grows.

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sounds good but only few advertisement networks have IP filtering (btw exoclick IP filtering doesn't work quite well)

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You don't need to filter ip. You can filter placements, or any targeting variables the traffic source provide, eg device type or OS

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Why don't just cut them based on performance? At the end of the day it all comes down to it, no matter what % of traffic is bot traffic.

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Efficiency. How much do you want to be in the hole before you decide a placement won't convert? Whereas if a placement is 80% bots right off the bat. Also there are many long tail small sites that is won't give you enough data to cut if you just look at performance because they won't send you that many clicks but all their clicks are bots, which can increase your eCPA by 20-30%.

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This only helps to minimize costs by cutting placements faster. You would've cut the placements anyway after spending enough money on them.

Can you give more details about the bot detecting technology? I checked your website and from a picture you show there it gave me the impression that you just try to load a javascript on the landing page. If it doesn't load, then the visit is marked as bot traffic and you can view the subids passed earlier in a nice centralized panel. If that's how it works, then I can say your service it's overpriced for what it does.

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Minimizing cost is the key to many campaigns these days. It's the edge that can break or make a campaign.

There is more to loading the JavaScript because many bots can load JavaScript too. But what bots can't do are human like behaviors which we can detect once the script is loaded. Exact method is secret sauce or bot operators can try to work around it.

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I was surprised to see that one of our customer's Google mobile campaign was sending 100% bot clicks from lot of apps from the app store. I confirmed with the customer that his trackers are correct. He said he was suspecting bot traffic because 0% LPCTR and weird looking user-agent. We were able to confirm his suspicion was true.

Edit: Sorry I have to remove the screenshot by request of the original customer. I made a mistake of posting it without his permission and I apologize publicly for that. Also to correct my original statement the traffic wasn't 100% bots because he only sent the suspected bot traffic to clickfraud. The actual percentage is about 40%

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Just signed up. Will update when I have some data

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The $500 coupon is now expired. However, you can use STM200 for a $200 coupon for a limited time.

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Thanks for sharing this article and the solution you are proposing. Fraud is indeed a massive problem that everyone here has to deal with.

We work with Forensiq which seems to be very comparable to ClickFraud. Each click gets a fraud score appointed based on a set of metrics they use. The higher the percentage the higher the fraud probability.

Your suggestion to cut the placements with high fraud seems like a good suggestion and we also did this...until the advertiser still approved some conversions that we thought were fraudulent (high score).

A solution like Forensiq or ClickFraud only gives an indication and a suggestion on Fraud, its not waterproof as many times high score conversions get approved and low score conversions get disapproved for fraud. Of course the real obvious cases of fraud (score = 100%) get filtered out automatically which is already a huge step forward.

We haven't seen our ROI increase with 30% (and I also think this is not possible) but we have seen a big decrease in the number of advertisers that stop working with us because of fraud reasons. This is a big win as getting a new client in is a timeconsuming and long process

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