I read a post of caurmen, about bot test: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...highlight=test
That's really helpful. This method will catch bots who don't run javascript.
What if a bot can run javascript?
We can make a webpage, place a link on it, set the font color of the link to #ffffff, which is white.
Normal person will not find/see the link, so your ctr would be 0%.
If a placement has 20%-100% ctr, it's bot driven.
I used caurmen's method to test popads.net traffics, almost all placements have approximately 50% bot traffic. I've killed some placements which have extremely high/low ctr.
You can definitely do this, there are many methods to catch bots. You can also use a 1x1 pixel and link it, no human can click that of course ...
Just be careful when cutting BOT placements, even those with higher bot % can still be profitable.
Yup, that's a solid way to catch bots.
Pro tip: don't make the text color exactly the same color as the background. Make it very, very similar but a slightly different shade.
It's easy to write a bot to ignore background-color links. But not-quite-background-color links are harder.
Alternatively, you can do something weird like absolute positioning it off the screen, setting it up with a z-index of lower than your background container, or similar. Those will probably work even better, although I've not rigorously tested.
Thanks, caurmen, I'm currently using your JavaScript idea to test bots.