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Cool bot-catching trick for natives (low-tech) (28)

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Hey you guys-

I'm sure this will be ridiculously old hat to most of ya'll, but for any fellow rookies out there you might appreciate this as much as I did.

I had never heard about it until yesterday when I randomly came across it while searching for other info.

But yeah, with natives one trick you can do is to turn some random, unobtrusive word on your landing page into a link that would very rarely if ever be noticed or clicked by a human, then run a report in your tracker seeing which widgets clicked on it.

The gentleman I read about it from would turn the word 'Advertorial' at the top into a link for this purpose.

I tried this out today on an MGID India campaign and its crazy when you actually see it in action.

Was only about 1-2% of overall clicks but was some widgets I had assumed were good because of landing page ctr's being medium high (52%, 68%, 78%, etc).

I think its *possible* that a small % of humans could click on the word 'Advertorial' at the top, so the first time I saw it on each widget I just changed the coefficient to 1.01 so I would see it next time and then block it at that point.

The ones where it already happened on multiple landing pages though I blocked.

So yeah, definitely low-tech but I found it very helpful!

I may experiment with creating an 'invisible' word that is the exact same color as the background, just to make 100% sure that its a bot and not a person.

To do it in Thrive you have to use 'branches' fyi, so that you can still have your other links go wherever you want them to go. I just made the bot-trap link the same offer but different branch and used a different tid.

-Jack

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Great and simple "hack"! I haven't read this before on the forum so thanks!

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Cutting bot-traffic can make campaigns red to green sometimes. So yeah nice and simple "tip" (0% bot traffic is not possible at all, there will be some bleed rate for sure ).




LeadCloak

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Thanks leadcloak I'm getting close to green so I'm hoping this will help push it over the edge

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Update for anyone interested...

With the word 'Advertorial' at the top of the page hyperlinked in an ub-obtrusive way (no bold, no underline, normal black color), these were my results:

US MGID Campaign: 20% of lp clicks were on 'Advertorial' vs 80% on regular links (button, image, etc)
India MGID Campaign: 3% of lp clicks were on 'Advertorial' vs 97% on regular links (button, image, etc)

Interestingly all those widgets had average lp ctr's of between 30-80%, so not anything super obvious like 100%. Two of them clicked on the word 'Advertorial' 10+ times, the other widgets that clicked on it it was just a single time.

On all the other campaigns I created a fully invisible link out of a single underscore _ the exact same color as the rest of the page, so when I look at those results later they should be very unambiguous and I'll know with certainty to block those widgets (although I blocked all the ones that clicked on 'Advertorial' too).

Anyway I don't worry too much about the 'bot' thing, at the end of the day all that matters is cpc vs epc, but I figure if I can use this to optimize a bit more it will make my campaigns that much more competitive.

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This is quite an old trick, some people call it a bot trap. For the best results, use a color similar to the background, not the same. Some bots are coded to detect this, so they look for links in the same color as the background and ignore them to not get detected, but if the color is only looking the same to the human eye, they won't detect it

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Thanks Matuloo that's extremely helpful!

Is that basically from site owners scamming the ad network then or are there other scenarios that lead to bot traffic like that?

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Nevermind reading your very excellent post on the subject now... great stuff!

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Another random update for anyone interested... I did find one widget with a click like this that also has a definite documented conversion... so that would seem to validate the fact that a site can have some bot traffic without it being all bot traffic..

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Based on some reports I've seen, about 50% of the entire internet traffic is BOTs ... not all of them are meant to scam someone, though ... think about SE spiders, all kinds of archives, content scrappers etc ... tons of them out there. It's virtually impossible to buy traffic 100% without BOTs ... the problem is that traffic networks (pretty much all of them) turn a blind eye on this problem, when they could easily catch quite large % of the bots ... but they prefer to make some shady coin on this.

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This is true.

Just on this note..

There is no problem getting bot traffic, unless the traffic source does not charge for it.

(this will show costs in your tracker, but not on the traffic source side)

Unfortunately there are many trafic sources that do charge for this traffic, many times even not intentionally, but because the publishers itself try to scam them.

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For me personally, the biggest problems that BOTs pose is how they mess with the optimization ... since trackers send bot clicks to offers too, which screws up the final results. Plus the possible quality problems with the advertisers. I'd happily pay more for traffic, if it was BOT free...

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This is true!

The biggest problem with bot clicks is that they screw up stats and optimization.
The best one can do using a standard tracker is to redirect the click on a dummy offer in order to at least understand if the click came from a human or not.

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Yes, I totally agree.

It's already quite messy when for example running on a CPM model, this one just adds up to the mess.

Trackers should be also more proactive with filtering such traffic to make optimization easier.

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Hey guys,

We’re actually working on a solution to detect and handle suspicious traffic directly within Voluum – so far we’re analyzing behavior of visitors – so, for example – time between a visit and a click, number of visits from a certain visitor across all your campaigns, visitors with suspicious User Agents, or UAs from known software libraries (ie. Python Requests), and much more. We’ve also integrated a DB of known datacenter IPs, to mark those as well.

There’s also a honeypot in the works, that you’ll be able to embed on your LP, which will catch bots and report on them

The feature is currently in beta, as we’re still working on a few upgrades and the honeypot, but it provides a lot of insight into traffic quality already – so if you’re interested in testing it out – send us a PM. It does not affect redirect speeds and traffic flow, as it analyzes the data after it’s collected.

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What the OP is describing is pure click fraud, and not SE spiders (or other spiders for that matter). We need to differentiate heavily here between click fraud bots and search engine bots which is two completely different things. BTW, I have never seen googlebot clicking a hidden link :-)

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Thanks for the responses everyone- very helpful!

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There is not just SE bots, think about spytools, various analytics tools, tools that archive the web ... plenty of projects that are testing something... various AI projects ... some of them actively browse the web and do follow links, even hidden ones ... clickfraud is obviously our biggest problem, but it's not the only bot activity browsing our landing pages.

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Yeah, seeing clicks on the invisible links on a couple LP's that already have had sales made me realize I shouldn't go too overboard blocking these.

I'm just going to keep an eye daily on any widgets that have more than 1 invisible link click in a given day, and then once a week run the report and see which ones have had multiple ones in a week.

If its 5 of 5 or 10 out of 20 clicks in a given day I'll block the widget, but if its 1 of 9 clicks or something on a given day for that widget I won't worry about it or I'll just catch it on the weekly inspection.

So far its only about 3% of the total widgets I'm getting clicks from that have any clicks on the invisible links though, so I guess even if I blocked all of them every single time one happened it wouldn't have too negative an impact.

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Yup, it's not necessary to block every widget with bot clicks, just focus on the worst ones.

Here is a nice thread from caurmen on this topic : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ut-bot-traffic

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SE bots, spytools and everything else related is a such a tiny percent of clicks compared to all the bot traffic that it basically shouldn't be mentioned at all

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Yup, totally agree. Nowadays everyone is scraping and bot traffic is just growing and growing! Click fraud is problem for sure but bot traffic is not only just click fraud. Scraping is becoming too easy - python is playing great role in data scraping world.



LeadCloak

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Hey Leadcloak-

What would you recommend as best practices re: bots and native ads?

As a newbie I would welcome any advice on the best methods and also the best 'healthy medium' as far as dealing with them.

(I did read the other linked threads and they were very helpful so thank you to everyone for those too! just trying to gather as much info and expert advice as I possibly can)

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I don't know man, obviously I didn't do any personal research on the subject, since I don't have the resources or knowledge to do so, but based on some reports from people who focus on the subject, "good bots" account for a pretty significant % of the overall traffic too. Check this infographics for example:



That infographics was from 2016, but here is a newer source if you wanna look : https://www.globaldots.com/2018-bad-...nt-mainstream/ Good bots and bad bots account for pretty much the same % of all traffic, according to their findings.

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Btw,

One of the other tricks - you can also use window.orientation param to check if it is a bot or not, but this applies only for Mobile traff.

Here is an example of a script to setup it on your landing and sending this data to Binom (with events, so you could see bots % in tracker)

<script>
if (typeof(window.orientation)=="undefined")
{
var o = document.createElement("img");
o.src='http://tracker.net/click.php?event9=0';
}
else
{
var o = document.createElement("img");
o.src='http://tracker.net/click.php?event9=1';
}
</script>

You can check our other scripts here: https://docs.binom.org/events.php

They are a bit modified to work with our tracker, but I guess you can still catch the main idea and apply it in your work

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Wow - great discussion! Thanks for sharing Jack!

Yet another reason for bot traffic that I've heard of: Some affiliates / media buyers, when they've identified good ad placements / publisher sites, would send massive amounts of bot traffic to those sites to deter competition from continuing to buy traffic there - just so they can hog the good traffic (after stopping their stream of bot impressions).

I'm putting this thread in this week's newsletter!



Amy

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I'd say - just start running more traffic. There is no "best" medium, every source have some good placement and some bad placements.You won't be able to cut bad placements without testing!



LeadCloak

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Incapsula is good company, but this is a sample data, so bad bots percentage will be more than good bots. Bot traffic is more than human traffic for sure.



LeadCloak

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