When SHOULD and SHOULDN'T you worry about bot traffic? (4)
When SHOULD and SHOULDN'T you worry about bot traffic?
When Should You Worry About Bot Traffic, And When Should You Ignore It?
Once you've got an accurate bot testing tool it's important to know how to use it, and how not to.
Bot traffic is an expensive pain, but that doesn't mean you should just nuke every site you see that has detectable bot traffic.
What Not To Do: Don't Worry Too Much
Bot traffic is more or less priced into a lot of placements.
If you're running a campaign and you see 50% of the traffic to a placement is bot traffic, that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.
The chances are you're competing on an auction system with other affiliates or performance marketers. They're only paying for a placement if it's profitable. So if they're paying for that 50% bot traffic placement, chances are the other 50% of the traffic is making them enough money to make it worth it.
Of course, that's not always the case (goddamn brand marketers 
) - but it's the case often enough that you shouldn't worry too much about a placement with a medium-sized or small amount of bot traffic. I generally only start eliminating placements around the 80% bot traffic mark, and even then, you should do some basic math to see if the placement could be profitable.
How to do that? Just eliminate the bot traffic, figure out how much you're paying for the rest of the traffic, and figure out if that could be profitable. For example, if you're paying $1CPM on a placement that's 50% bot traffic, you're effectively paying $2CPM for the traffic that isn't bots.
Is it likely that a $2CPM placement could make you money, given how your offer, lander, and/or ads usually perform? If so, keep it in the mix. Only eliminate it if it's obvious after running the numbers that it won't make any cash.
What To Do - Do Quickly Eliminate Timewasters
And that's where bot testing can really earn its keep. Early detection of placements that are very unlikely (or worse) to convert profitably because of the amount of bot traffic can radically lower your testing budget. Bot testing is ridiculously fast and cheap compared to the conventional approach of waiting for statistical significance on a placement, so it can be a huge money-saver.
For example: if your team is testing a source/geo combination that currently has 1000 placements, and 100 of those are so high-bot-traffic that they're spectacularly unlikely to ever generate positive ROI (say, above 85% bot traffic at the same bid as everything else), it'll cost around 200x - 300x your payout to filter all of those out by waiting for conversion results.
And there are plenty of those placements out there. I've seen a fair number of 100% bot traffic, high-volume placements. They'll eat budget and give nothing back.
However, your team can get solid bot testing results with 100 or so impressions on that placement, which (broad strokes here) is likely to be between 1/8th and 1/16th of the cost. (Depending on your methodology you could go even lower than that, but I'm being conservative here and assuming that the bot traffic isn't 100% consistent.)
That's a pretty big money saver any time you're testing a new geo or traffic source, and it's still useful on a maintainance-mode campaign if you can run the bot test with minimal ROI drop (say, using the zero-load-time tester I link above), because of the daily addition of new fraudulent placements to the exchanges you're using.
Heck, depending on the traffic source, it's even worth running a test like this just to filter out the 100% bot placements. They're definitely not going to convert, and you can run the test with even less traffic. If a $10 spend helps you eliminate 30 high-traffic placements that are just pure 100% fraud right off the bat, that's a pretty good investment.
What To Do 2 - Optimise Working Placements Further
Knowing what percentage of bot traffic your high-value placements have can be really valuable for further optimisation, as it gives you much more accurate information on what's really going on down there. And that's a significant competitive advantage if your competition aren't doing the same thing.
If you know, for example, that you've got a huge volume, borderline-profitable placement with 60% bot traffic, you have information that you wouldn't have otherwise: you know that placement's human visitors are super-high-value.
At that point, you can start looking for ways to eliminate the bot traffic from your bidding.
Are there useragents it always uses or never uses? Does it ebb and flow by time of day? Can you narrow down the IP block that the bots are coming from then eliminate that from your bidding? If you're buying at a large enough scale you can potentially even talk to the traffic source directly about incorporating better bot filtering into their technology.
Likewise, you can have your team look at the placement elsewhere and see if it's still producing that much bot traffic. Perhaps it's available on a bunch of other traffic sources but some of them have better bot filtering (and that implies that their other placements are better filtered too). Or they can check its bot percentage in other geos - I've noticed that bot traffic on placements varies widely by geo. You may be able to find another geo where that high-quality traffic has a lot less bots mixed in.
Finally, as you do more testing and run more campaigns, knowing what bot percentage each placement/campaign/source was running is a good way to further optimise. You may, for example, be able to conclude that 99% of placements with more than 40% bot traffic just don't hit profitability on Traffic Source A - and that may well be the only identifying factor all those placements have in common. You can tell your team to bot test and proactively eliminate those whenever they run a new campaign, giving you a close-to-unbeatable competitive advantage over someone coming in naively who doesn't have that information and thus has to eliminate those placements the expensive way.
P.S. - A Neat Additional Trick
One final neat bot testing trick: I've seen some success in the past identifying huge placements that absolutely won't convert, and that barring a sophisticated test I'd just have assumed were bot-ridden hellholes and auto-blocked.
I recall Grindr was like this: on general campaigns it converted horrifically, but bot-testing it revealed it had an almost zero bot count.
Low-priced traffic (because it doesn't convert easily), huge volume, and very high quality in terms of being actual humans - it was a super-valuable source if you targeted campaigns directly to it. But without a bot test, it just looks like another bot placement.
And that's it! When do you think you should or shouldn't worry about bots? Let us know below!
Great stuff again, thanks!
Great tips as always, thanks caurmen!
No worries!
I'm not done with my bot-detection work yet - the curlbots are so obvious that there's got to be a way to block them at a traffic source level. Working on that.
But I'll be finishing off the eCommerce Cookbook before I make more of these posts. So look for more bot work after that!
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