Fraud - How to deal with Bot Traffic? (7)
We all know fraud is one of those monumental issues that threaten our business.
Bot traffic, which has been predominant on both CPM and CPC campaigns, can be a real drag.
Adnetworks should be able to deal with this; to filter this sort of shady traffic that ruins our lives.
However, they also need to be careful: if they’re too demanding and start filtering bot traffic like crazy, they risk losing their margin while reducing the publisher’s payout; if they are too lenient, they are basically showing they don’t care about those of us who are out there trying to play by the rules.
What do you guys think of this?
Any opinions on how to deal with this problem?
Cheers!
Isn't it in the traffic source's best interest to reduce bot activity? Bots still take resources when going through campaigns and, in an RTB environment, they reduce prices since performance drops.
No bots and RTB means higher prices but correct prices at the end of the day, based on performance.
The only issue is when there's no RTB and the market doesn't drive the price, but prices are artificially set by the ad network or the publisher.
My 2 cents: The more the market sets the price, the less profitable bots are and end up being neutralized anyway. The less the market is allowed to set the correct price, the more likely bots can exploit this imperfect pricing.
"The more the market sets the price, the less profitable bots are and end up being neutralized anyway. The less the market is allowed to set the correct price, the more likely bots can exploit this imperfect pricing."
Exactly! That's a great way to perceive this whole issue.
Detecting bot traffic is easy nowadays with a service such as Forensiq. You can filter out all the traffic that gets a high fraud socre and redirect that to a service like the theparkingplace.com
Two birds with one stone. Your campaign won't get any fraud traffic and you'll still make some money with the remnant traffic via the parking place.
Bot traffic is so obvious that it will get 100% filtered out by Forensiq, what is harder to detect and hence control is fraudulent traffic placed by real people with fake credit cards, fake user details, etc
Although there's also ways to do that. I wrote an article about it on my linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-d...?trk=prof-post
any other services you can recommend other that Forensiq?
Needless to say that we cannot fight with all the scam traffic on the Internet. Since rules of the game are the following: traffic flows are being resent among different ad platforms. And these flows consist of some portions of bots. Some affiliate marketers buy such kind of traffic on purpose. Why do they do it - is another issue.
Nice article @Christopher, I agree that the real difficulty is fraudulent conversions. From an advertiser/network perspective it's a huge pain in the but.
I remember statistics from fraudbuster on bot traffic % that were pretty horrific. Desktop campaigns can get pretty bad.
But easy to filter out and mitigate so you can make the right decisions for your campaign.
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