Invalid traffic (IVT) is a problem for most online businesses. IVTs in particular can cost businesses a lot of money by serving ads to bots. This was considered a huge scam that cost advertisers a lot of money.

Some bots can be malicious and designed to steal your information by creating fake content or impersonating legitimate websites. Protify flags bots entering the site and blocks them from the redirect list, preventing additional funds from being used to redirect these bots. But why not block all bots from seeing the ad in the first place?

‍Alternatives to blocking bots: bot mitigation techniques

Caching

Websites sometimes use a system called caching to make websites run faster. Instead of reloading the page every time someone requests it, the server "caches" the latest version of the website to send data back to the viewer faster. Websites do this by having bots run scripts to cache websites. If your site is cached, bots may come to your site and "see" a version without ads. When this happens, potential customers may miss important parts of the ad or not see them at all. Then add this ad-free page to the cache. Even without ads, any subsequent human visitors will see the site.

‍JavaScript

Bots that are not malicious will identify themselves to a website. Sites running ads (particularly programmatic ads) generally run on JavaScript, which recognizes this identifier. Any impressions or clicks made by these known bots are already excluded by the JavaScript code and should not produce costs for the advertiser.

Only malicious bots that don't recognize themselves incur costs. These bots often mimic human behavior and are known as complex invalid traffic (SIVT). Most ad blockers can't tell the difference between a SIVT and a human, which means these bots can continue to consume your budget without resistance.

When you run ads that don't use JavaScript, you need to decide whether you want bots to see them. While Protify is capable of differentiating between good bots and bad bots, not knowing that these bots are viewing your ads may mean that you continue to advertise on sites that are mostly bot traffic. This may lead to reputation issues and other problems. You can, however, exclude previously-known bots from future campaigns. This gives you the assurance that you are blocking known bots and helps you weed out sites that serve you bad traffic.

‍Known Sources

One way to block malicious traffic without affecting valid users is to simply block traffic from certain fraudulent sources from seeing your ad. However, these lists are constantly changing (as scammers are constantly adapting), so you may end up blocking bad traffic and letting even worse traffic through. Also, many ad platforms have limits on how many traffic sources you can block. These lists must be constantly updated, but will not be fully effective.

Google Ads has low-level click forensics built into the platform, and they won't charge you for invalid clicks they detect. Note that they don't look at every potential data point, and they don't capture everything. However, Protify's listing is based on data from specific users detected as scams, rather than blocking entire traffic sources.

‍IP Rotation

If you notice that a bot keeps visiting your website and causing problems, such as offensive comments or trying to gain unauthorized access, you can block this IP address from accessing your website in the future.

Likewise, some malicious bots have the ability to change attributes at will to break through your defenses. While a specific IP address may be a known source of fraud, a bot may traverse multiple IP addresses when attempting to display a given ad. They can also change browser strings and other identifying information in an attempt to serve ads. Even if 80% of attempts are blocked, each bot may receive a certain amount of ads. You're still losing money to the bot, and you have no way of knowing if fraud has occurred because the interaction just shows up as normal traffic in your analytics.

‍Tracking

This brings us to our last point - information can be valuable. By tracking IVT rather than blocking it, Protify is able to score specific campaigns and individual users to show where invalid traffic is coming from and when it reaches your site. Protify can even link fraudulent orders to the specific activity they came from. Businesses get the tools they need to optimize ad campaigns and reach human users without adding extra hassle.

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