Published on January 26th, 2020 | by Sunit Nandi

Avoid bot traffic in your campaigns

This is one of the problems that as an affiliate you are going to have to deal with daily bot traffic. Non-human traffic that obviously does not convert with our offers, does not buy products. Eye! If you can register on sites (with false data, which will not convert the owner), you can click on advertising (fraudulent clicks).. and that, we are not interested.

What is bot traffic

Bot traffic is basically non-human traffic , it is a software responsible for performing tasks on the internet, “good” tasks such as scraping data, analyzing traffic, indexing content … etc … or “bad” tasks such as DDOS attacks and the one that most Harm us fraudulent traffic, fake clicks, fake visits, SPAM, etc. If you want to know more about BOT traffic, take a look at Wikipedia.

In fact, traffic bot is so present on the network that even if you don’t believe it, even if you are not affiliated, just a user of the network, you have to fight with the bots daily, without realizing it.

Sounds like this kind of CAPTCHA right..? When you register in many services you have to prove that you are human, that is because as I told you there are bots that register on sites, create fake profiles, upload content, comment, leave links, etc., etc. …

What I am sure you do not know is the meaning of the acronym CAPTCHA and before you look it up on Wikipedia I copy it here: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (colloquially known as the reverse Turing test, This test (the Turing test) tries to assess the ability of a machine to behave like a human).

Sure you also sound OtoHits, HitLeap, Jingling .. Software and services with which you can send bot traffic (almost 100%) to your website, obviously this type of traffic does not interest us if we use AdSense (they could ban your account), or some offer of CPA, since they will not convert. But I want you to realize that BOT traffic is something intrinsic to the internet, the network of networks, is made up of machines.

But you can use this traffic for false statistics, “manipulate” positioning or ranking factors in the app store, get social actions in the most popular networks such as Facebook or Twitter, etc.

Bot traffic on the internet

There is no site on the internet that does not have BOT traffic, as I say, bot traffic there is “good” (that does not harm someone) and “bad” (harms some and benefits others), any web in the network that is indexed Google has been visited (and will be more or less frequently) by Googlebot , perhaps the most beloved / hated internet bot because everyone wants to get their attention and index their entire content.

Search bots: Search engine bots track the entire network to index the content, so they have to go through all the websites with a certain frequency, which generates a lot of traffic.

Bots like Googlebot, Yandex Bot, Bingbot, Yahoo Slurp Bot, and Baidu Spider are the best known of this type of bots.

Commercial crawlers: Crawlers, spiders or spiders this type of software travels the network searching for information, as you see two of the most active, Ahrefsbot and Semrushbot are owned by the famous SEO tools, aHrefs and Semrush that need to track the network to find links to pages, indexed keywords , etc.

Feed fetchers: These are responsible for collecting content from network feeds and storing them in .xml files to show the user. In the case of Google Feed fetcher, it collects information and content from RSS or Atom feeds and classifies them to display it through Google Play Newsstand (a news reader), it is independent of Googlebot because unlike this one, Google Feed fetcher does not index the content.

Monitoring bots: Monitoring software, which, as the name implies, is used to monitor. In the case of Uptimebot, it is the bot of the well-known Uptime service, in charge of notifying us if our web page at any time is not active due to a server crash for example.

URL checker: URL checker is a tool used to verify the validity and accessibility of a given website address. It checks for errors and reports whether the URL is live and accessible to users.

As you see on the internet there is a lot of bot traffic (there are studies that indicate that more than 50% of the total traffic), but that traffic does not harm us, we as media buyers are bothered by bot traffic that clicks on our ads on the networks of traffic, that is, we pay for traffic that will not convert us.

Stop bot traffic

In popup traffic you will find that there is a lot of bot traffic, but if you realized it already, you will have to fight with it daily. That is, learn these techniques well because you are going to have to use them in each campaign, because the other option is to lose money by buying BOT traffic, in the long run you will detect it thanks to the tracker but if you launch several campaigns a day you will save a lot if you block traffic Bot from the beginning.

Method 1 – Blacklist

We already talked about blacklists (blacklists / whitelists), these types of lists are vital if you want your earnings in affiliate marketing to increase.

To be good, you have to be methodical, this means that you will not pay twice for the same, if you usually run campaigns in the US, create a blacklist of sites that do not convert (or do not receive clicks, possibly BOT traffic) and update it often, use it as a base to start your campaigns in that GEO, you will have saved enough money by the end of the year.

One tip, before starting to run a campaign, it can be useful to make a small test of $ 10- $ 20 with the lowest bid that the source allows and take out a first blacklist of sites that are probably BOT traffic, then start Run the campaign normally, but reviewing the statistics to eliminate sites that do not convert.

Method 2 – professional services

How to stop bot traffic: In this business a lot of money moves, so there is always a service for every task you need, yes, they are not cheap, but it is an option to take into account but you have minimal knowledge, if you simply do not have time or if you want to give Step up to the level of super affiliates and outsource all the services you need.

Reblaze: Another of the best known tools, a bit more focused on advertisers, detects automated traffic, traffic that uses proxy, manipulation of devices, detection of cookie stuffing, etc … a complete set of tools to keep fraud away. You can request proof of service if you want to see how they work.

Theoptimizer: This interesting service offers us to automate our campaigns 100%, we can create rules so that we do not have to review our tracker reports at all. For example, you create a rule that states that if a website sends more than 100 visits and you don’t get any click automatically the traffic source blocks that site (and you stop paying for it), another rule that is if a website sends more of 300 visits and you do not get any conversion block that site, etc. .. it makes use of the APIs of the services so you will have to give it access to the API of your traffic source and the tracker.

Tags: avoid, bot traffic, campaigns

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.