Placement Bot % - When is it time to blacklist? (2)
In the past I was running mobile pops with ~$1 payouts, so I didn't concern myself with bot percentage, I'd simply blacklist a placement once it reached ~2X the offer payout with no conversions.
But now I'm running on native (Revcontent) with payouts upwards to $40 and using a real cloaker for the first time (Fraudbuster), so bot % and safe page visits are new to me. I'm aware that Revcontent is pretty bot heavy, so I'm trying to be proactive and kill heavy bot placements as soon as possible/acceptable.
If you take a look at this image:
For example:
Row 2: 320/68 - I know that 20% bot traffic isn't all that bad and I should simply look at the placements ROI instead
But...
Row 4: 25/25 - This piece of shit is 100% bot according to the cloaker. Should I really wait 2X the payout to kill this?
What is a good metric for bot %?
Also, any tips or recommendations for getting refunded for bot traffic would be appreciated.
Thanks y'all
This is a hard question, because you should focus more on ROI than bot %, some placements backup just fine even thou there is a high % of bot traffic. But you are right, there are limits. In case you are confident that your bot detection system is solid, there is no point in buying traffic from placements that are 100% bots, or even 90%.
In an ideal case, you should run long enough with a source to see what kind of bot % placements are still likely to turn profit. Let's say you will figure out that anything above 60% bots is usually loosing money, so you could cut all placements like this. You will loose some random sales this way, but it shouldn't be a big problem. But this could be pretty costly as you need a lot of data to spot these patterns with any source and any type of traffic.
I don't run much native, but with other traffic sources, I cut just the worst of the worst based on BOT %, 80%+ pretty much. The good thing is that the biggest BOT placements usually are in the 80%+ range so I can get rid of the biggest budget drainers pretty fast this way.
One thing to keep in mind : Don't cut after a few clicks, you don't want to loose a good placement just because some spider or automatic tool ran across it 
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