Digital ad campaigns cost companies millions per month to ensure their ads are viewed online by as many people as possible. But what if these views were not in fact real people? What if your company was unknowingly wasting money on useless views? Bot traffic is on the rise, and the deceitful result they provide to marketing managers is wreaking havoc on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns worldwide.
Fraudulent bot activity is a nefarious activity that publishers or hackers conduct to extract more money from advertisers. Bot traffic will have a massive impact on your digital ad campaigns. In this article, we will look at the impact bot traffic will have on your digital ad campaign, how to tell if you have increased bot traffic on your campaign and what you can do to curb its effects.
What Is Bot Traffic?
According to the latest statistics, bots account for approximately 45% of all web traffic. This statistic incorporates bots with both positive and negative purposes. In this article, we’re going to be focusing on bad bot traffic. These bots mimic human traffic on a website to trick businesses into believing their ads are being viewed more frequently.
Bots can be far more malicious than crawlers, such as those used to steal data and conduct DDoS attacks. However, these crawling bots cause significant issues to advertisers due to their ability to disrupt site analytics and produce click fraud. The presence of bot traffic is a calamitous indicator of wasted costs for advertisers running a campaign based on traffic generated or impressions.
Symptoms of Bot Traffic
So how can digital markers identify bot traffic? Capable web engineers should be able to identify bot traffic from an audit of network requests to their websites. Integrating web analytics tools such as Google Analytics will make it easier to uncover harmful bot traffic. Some of the most common symptoms of bot traffic are:
1. Abnormally High Pageviews
When a site experiences an abrupt, unprecedented or unpredicted spike in page views, this is a tell-tale sign of bot traffic on the site.
2. Increased Bounce Rate
A bounce rate isolates the exact number of users that arrive at a single page on a website before leaving without clicking anything on the page. A high bounce rate can be caused by bots being directed toward a single page.
3. Irregular Session Durations
Session duration is the amount of time a user spends on a website. This metric should remain relatively steady, and if this number rapidly drops or shrinks, this can be a sign of the effects of bots. An increase in session duration is often an indicator of a bot browsing the site at a deliberately slow rate. Whereas a sharp decrease is a sign the bots are moving through pages at a much faster pace than a human user.
4. Increase in Traffic from a Suspicious Location
A sudden spike in users from one particular region, particularly a region whose language is different to that of the website, is another indicator of bot traffic.
5. High Click Rates with Low Conversions
A sharp increase in clicks that are not matched by a relative increase in conversions can signify a bot problem with transactional-based ads.
Effects of Bots on your Advertising Campaign
Advertising today is data-driven, and if misinformation is fed to marketers, it will negatively impact strategy and lead to worthless expenditure. Metrics influence all business decisions; these are a few ways that bot traffic can mislead the assessments for your digital marketing campaign:
1. Increased PPC Costs
When harmful bots crawl pages, they click each ad it encounters. Each click generates more revenue for the ad publisher and increases advertising costs. Some bots will randomly change the time they spend on a page and can fill out basic forms to look less mechanical and become harder to spot. Many of the clicks these bots create are worthless leads.
2. Distorted Customer Lifetime Value Measurement
The Customer Lifetime Value indicates the value a customer brings to your business. It is a vital metric for understanding how the company will balance its spending on advertising to best achieve the return from a customer. If the impressions are from bots, there is no way to work this out, as there will never be a spend.
3. False Analytics
For analytics to be useful to a marketer, they require a human audience. Humans have a unique demographic profile that advertisers can utilise to best tailor website content. However, bots are not capable of providing such information and will affect the idea you have about your audience.
4. Unbalanced Reporting Data
Marketing agents use reports to understand which of their campaigns have been getting the most clicks and attention. If this is human traffic, the marketer can adapt the content to meet the search and interest data of the user. The insights generated from bot clicks and impressions will drive this reporting into the realm of the unusable.
How to Eliminate Bots in Digital Ad Campaigns
Any marketer still reading will by now have a good idea about the negative impact Bot traffic has on your campaigns. But how can they be stopped? Thankfully, advertising managers can do a few things to avoid wasting their budget on useless ads.
1. Switch to Results-based Payment
Some advertisers will base the amount they pay to ad publishers related to the converted number of sales the ads generate. Doing so will need a process that indicates that the ad generated the lead from a specific source, such as a promo code.
2. Monitor Campaign Traffic Closely
Keeping a close eye on analytics related to your campaign will help alert you to bot activity. Should any of the previously mentioned symptoms of bot traffic begin to occur, you can take down the campaign early to avoid the impact of fraudulent traffic.
3. Vet Publishers and Affiliates
The importance of verifying online advertising partners is important. Ensure the publishers have a confirmed history of servicing leads and results, not solely heightened impressions.
Wrapping Up
So, now you know just how harmful bot traffic can be to your digital ad campaign. Bot traffic will lead to your business wasting money on fraudulent ad clicks that will not generate any revenue. Coupled with skewed metrics that will be disastrous for your business, it is essential to know how to identify bot traffic and protect your campaign from it as best you can.
