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Competitor Spamming Tracker Links to Mess Up Optimization (21)

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I'm having a weird and very aggravating problem. In the past week almost every day I'm waking up to $100-$500 of spend in Voluum, adding some unwanted red to my campaigns. This is bot traffic run through my tracking links, but doesn't come from the traffic source, as I have no cost or clicks there. While it doesn't cost any money, all this extra junk data completely ruins the stats and makes it unusable. Whoever is doing it has been populating all the dynamic parameters in the URL (cost, zone/source IDs, activity level/age etc), which makes it ruin my Voluum data even more.

What seems to be happening is a competitor is grabbing my campaign URLs through spy tools, then running this bot traffic in the hopes I'm using an integrated optimization tool like Automizer to trick it into thinking the campaigns are losing a ton of money and drop bids or pause.

It's now happened on 4 campaigns on 2 traffic sources, so adding new campaign links doesn't help for more than a day or two. It's also 100% intentional, as in one case they messed up their bot and sent the source ID parameters of the wrong traffic network.

I don't see any way to delete or hide this data in Voluum, and haven't heard back from their support yet.

I guess I can take it as a compliment that someone considers my campaigns such a threat that they need to play dirty tricks like this, but it really sucks as I'm not exactly an expert yet, and its hard enough trying to get things profitable with good data, having that taken away from me makes things even harder at a time when I'm trying to learn how to run successful campaigns still.

Has anyone experienced similar? Did you find a solution if so?

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A few questions to understand better:
- are you running redirect or redirectless?
- if redirect, does the bot hit the link from the ads to the landing, or the click link to the offer
- can you identify a pattern in your Voluum Traffic Log? Like same IP, same UserAgent, same geo (not the geo filled in the URL, but the geo determined by Voluum)

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These are running with redirect; the bots hit the link through the ad redirect URL (which they're grabbing off probably Adplexity or Anstrex).
There is a pattern, somewhat. The IPs and user agents vary, but the Geos are always split between USA, Sweden, and Spain, and they all come in at the same CPC (per country). They vary up the Zone/Source/Site/Placement IDs however, using real ones from those ad networks (Pushground and Propeller), which makes it all mingled within my stats.

I can isolate my real data from the fake, for the most part, but it takes a ton of custom drilldown reports and exporting to CSV, editing etc.

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I would use Voluum rules to redirect traffic to a smartlink.

With the base plan, you can Exclude all geos detected by Voluum that do not correspond to the geo parameter from the traffic source.

If you have a profit plan, they have a lot more variables that you can use to make rules. You could create a rule for each country associated with the variable that contains the cost, and redirect all placements that have the cost you identified. You may redirect some valid traffic to a smart link, but at least the rest of the data will be clean.


Or you could run redirectless (available in the base plan), which makes it harder to mess up, because the bot needs to run javascript to trigger the pixel.

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Thanks, I'll have a look at redirect rules. That would still leave things at the campaign level having incorrect stats though, only at the offer/lander level they'd be correct. My fear is, that since this is being done maliciously, that whoever is doing it might change up the bot countries if I add a smartlink, as it seems pretty clear that it's a targeted attack to mess my campaigns up.

I'll look into seeing if redirectless will work, for some of it I'm direct linking though, which rules that out sadly.

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I'm afraid that since the bots are coming to the tracking redirect url, only Voluum can do something about it. If I understand it right, the bots don't reach your lander or anything else that you control, right? Or? I'm not sure I fully understand.

I had a similar problem, some BOTs were hitting my "offer urls" so the affiliate network saw a big amount of bot clicks under my account and started to complain... they were able to block part of it on their end, but eventually it stopped so I wasn't looking into any other ways to handle it.

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You've got it exactly right. Right on queue after I posted this the offer rep gave me a 'soft warning' about too many clicks vs conversions.

Voluum's support said they cant hide anything and basically told me to UA/IP filter things, which won't really work as the IPs and Agents vary a lot... I did get a suggestion I will try however and figured I'd share in case it is helpful. I was told run 2 campaigns, one with costs set to $0, and put a cloak/redirect link in front that sends all abnormal browser agents to the cloned campaign, to filter out the bots, and on that campaign send the ones who are truly bots to someplace else so they can never reach the offer page.

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Yes, that's not perfect, but that will help.
Another option is to define a custom var in the url at the traffic source level, something that looks legit, like creativeid, and put a fixed value. If he is missing that, or making it rotates, you can filter out. When he catches it, you can just change to a new value, and exclude traffic with the older value, so that he will have to change it.

At some point, if you make it more complicated for the guy, he will just stop bothering. It is a trade off between time spent on developing campaigns, and time wasted messing with others' campaigns.

At least for the ones you have a lander, it will work. And it is harder to call the direct pixel directly without javascript.

For direct linking, you could have a blank page in between, just to load Voluum pixel before redirecting, but that is more complex to put in place.

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Sushi had a very similar issue about a year ago. Only difference was it was with camps on ad maven iirc. Someone was spamming his tracker with bullshit in almost the same way. I believe the only way he got around it was by identifying the IP addresses/range and blocking them in the tracker (and on the traffic source, just in case).

If they’re all coming from US/SE/XX you can use Voluum’s rules to filter all geos out that aren’t your target to a smartlink as said above (unless you’re actually running your offer in those geos, this is a good idea anyway).

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Yup, this is a good solution too, add a token to the campaign url and create a rule for clicks that come without it and send them elsewhere. Once you replace the link at the traffic source, you will be able to filter the crap out imediately until the guy makes the change on their end.

Great thinking Jeremie!

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Good idea, I will try that


This started right as I started to go after some volume and bigger geos for this offer, so I suspect its some kind of right of passage by someone who wants to deter competition. Definitely makes it harder right at the key moment of optimization though

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I had a similar situation once where my tracker was flooded with such traffic.

Then I received a complaint from my hosting for spam.

In the end one of my campaign links was posted to guestbooks and got caught in a honeypot/spamtrap.

The links got removed then and the spam stopped.

What you could do is to check for other patterns apart from IP/UA and redirect the spam traffic then based on these patterns.

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I did that, and in fact managed to redirect all the browser agents used because I managed to see a pattern after a while, so I send that traffic all to a micro penis support group yesterday. As a result, he's changed up his browser agents today and sent even more bot traffic than even using a different method than before. For whatever reason, this guy seems determined not to stop. I have a feeling it's one of the blackhat cloaking affiliates in this vertical/traffic type.

Are there any different trackers you guys would recommend instead of Voluum? I'm very new at this, and not being able to reliably use my tracker for campaign optimization is making things impossible for me.

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Ahaha. Funny but not the best move. Now he takes it personally...

You should have sent it to a copy of the same campaign so that he might not have seen the difference, as suggested by Voluum.

You can change the tracker domain.

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Could try Binom in combination with their magicchecker integration.
It has its price but then he can try beat those guys while you go back focusing on making money.

Keep in mind your fanboy is probably reading this thread and following your every step.

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Thanks, I was looking at Binom, and someone else had suggested MagicChecker as well. I'm considering it, but Im still relatively new at this so I'm a little reluctant to swap trackers right as I finally have gotten comfortable with Voluum.

I also share that suspicion that the guy might be on this forum, as the bot patterns suddenly changed the day after I made this thread. I won't share the actions I have/will take anymore in case they are watching, but I very much appreciate all the help everyone has given here.

On that note, in case anyone does read this and is thinking that bot spamming someone else's campaigns is a good idea, please know that while this is frustrating, it's only served to convince me that a campaign that was losing money and I was 50/50 on whether to continue, I am now certain has potential, as nobody would go to all this trouble to mess with my campaigns if it wasn't a threat to a profitable campaign of their own. Also, while the bots may be anonymous, the world isnt all that big, simple process of elimination with the vertical and traffic sources narrows down to 5-6 people who could potentially be behind it, several of whom are cloaking to do some shady stuff, who would be by far the most likely culprits.

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Did you also check for referrer and stuff of the spam traffic so that you maybe can trace it back a bit?

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this method is the best one, what you do is every single day you can change the tracking URL paremeters to a random string on the traffic source, and then have it also update the rules in your tracker... you can do this using API

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Until he catches that as well. Then he’ll put one step in front of his bot script and instead of hitting the tracking link direct, he’ll hit it through the traffic source. That’s exactly what happened to us in the past and why I recommend not wasting time and immediately go for an unbreakable solution.

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What would be an unbreakable solution?

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What I referenced in the post above: magicchecker or basically any other traffic filter worth its money. Directly integrated with your tracker so you can easily drill into fake vs. real traffic.

When we don’t outsource this problem to someone else, you quickly slide into an ego trip battle, as this thread shows. Redirecting to a micropenis site is pretty hilarious, but as you pointed out, not very smart.

I made a similar mistake in the past. Before I knew it I had my own bot army shooting back at the guy who was doing the same to us. Until you realize you came here to make money instead of playing fake traffic war games.

As the OP rightfully pointed out, besides signaling to your competitor that the traffic is worth bidding on, you really don’t achieve much at all.

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