Some invalid traffic will visit all online publications, regardless of their size and niche. While not all bots are malicious, unauthorised traffic can harm a website’s reputation and result in suspension from Google, Amazon, and other partners. All publishers that want to make money from ad clickingon their websites face the danger of invalid traffic. The article explores invalid ad traffic’s various forms that cause publisher countermeasures.  Maximise advertiser returns on investment and safeguards against fraud.

What are the indicators of invalid traffic?

IVT typically exhibits these five symptoms:

• Increased bounce rate
• Little dwell time
• Several clicks coming from the same IP address
• Low conversion rates and unexpected traffic spike
• Recurring patterns of traffic peaks

You should monitor the frequency and execute routine ad clicking checks even if these symptoms themselves; don’t usually indicate IVT. Use ad fraud detection and prevention tools if you notice a combination of these signals and are worried, or get in touch with your monetisation provider.

How come there is Invalid Traffic?

IVT lowers the value of impressions in addition to having an impact on publisher revenue. Let’s examine the top five reasons why your website first receives erroneous visitors.

Spams

It is nothing more than phoney user registrations and comments, neither of which are the publication nor other readers. Spam increases bandwidth usage and overburdens website servers. Additionally, data theft from feeds, live chats, and comments results from this, harming brand identification.

Audience Extension

Your website may become vulnerable to bot activity that brings in fraudulent visitors if you use audience extension services like Outbrain, Taboola, etc.

Scrapers

As was stated in the introduction, publishers who post valuable information on their websites are more likely to come under attack from bots and content scrapers. The bots also post fraudulent links that reduce user engagement and misrepresent site analytics. As a result, the website becomes slower and less user-friendly.

Custom programs/botnets

The website visitors have cookies, and with their assistance, just advertising shown to those visitors. Fraudsters use programmed bots to gather cookies from websites with high-value content to steal cookies from useful websites and fraudulently inflate the worth of their ad impressions.

Attacks

The bots designed to assault the payment systems, and as a result, publishers incur fees and penalties on their credit cards. It can occasionally result in the merchant account being closed. Additionally, gift cards, discounts, and vouchers attack bots, which makes customers less trusting.

IVT preventative measures

Recognise your website visitors and traffic

The first and most crucial step in preventing IVT is to monitor suspicious traffic patterns. You could wish to remove ad codes from channels and geos with high-risk traffic based on what you observe. Bot blocking from Cloudflare is accessible to smaller publishers. Larger publishers might want to test an ad fraud specialist vendor like IAS or Pixelate.

On your website, avoid clicking adverts.

Sounds obvious it’s still important to mention. Self-click detection and elimination techniques are available from some ad providers accomplishing run the risk of suspending accounts. If you must click your site for testing purposes or because you are curious about the destination URL, do so in a controlled setting using Google Publisher Console.