Companies dedicate millions of dollars to getting their ads in front of the right audience, but unfortunately, a portion of that money is wasted. According to the 2024 Imperva Threat Research Report, almost 50% of traffic comes from non-human resources, with bad bots comprising nearly one-third of all traffic. This is a growing concern for advertisers, as bot traffic leads to wasted ad budgets and misleading campaign results.
If you are struggling with bot traffic, this guide will discuss how bots affect your campaign and how to identify and block them.
A] Good Traffic Bots v/s Bad Traffic Bots
Not all bots are bad; some are designed to help your site (and the internet) run smoothly. Good bots offer valuable services within the digital ecosystem. Examples of good traffic bots include analytics, aggregation, and copyright bots. They are also classified as general invalid traffic and are relatively easy for ad platforms to detect and block.
Bad bots, on the other hand, are a much bigger problem for marketers and digital advertisers. If left unchecked, bad traffic bots can disrupt sales, waste your ad spend, sell your data, and erode customer trust. For example, ad fraud bots intentionally click paid ads to drain your ad budget. They cost businesses a lot of money on Google alone, disrupting their Google PPC campaigns. Did you know that 22% of all ad spending in 2023 was attributed to fraud; if the trend continues, around $170 billion is estimated to be lost to ad fraud by 2028.
B] How Do Bots Affect Digital Advertising Campaigns?
Bots, like traffic bots and click bots, negatively impact digital ad campaigns for businesses in the following manner –
- While paying for an online ad, the thought is that if people see more of your ads, they’ll most likely click on them, but bots change this dynamic. Traffic brokers offer a massive number of visitors at a much lower cost. The problem is that you’re not buying REAL impressions but paying affiliates and advertising platforms for bogus impressions. Most companies aren’t aware of how insidious the ad fraud practices are and how much money they waste on traffic sourcing.
- Spam bots send unwelcome messages to people, often fraudulently representing a legitimate business. This can be a significant nuisance for potential customers as they associate your brand with spam, which wastes so much of their time. Affiliates that use lists collected by spam bots may register thousands of impressions that will never lead to sales because of poor curation.
- DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks don’t have much to do with advertising campaigns. However, botnets that use a business’s compromised IT assets to carry these attacks can negatively impact brand reputation.
C] How Can You Identify Bot Traffic?
Now that we know how bots affect your ad campaigns, here are some signs to identify bot traffic –
- If your bounce rate is more than 70%, it might indicate bot activity. This is because bots don’t tend to stick around for website browsing.
- Review users’ time on your landing page before returning to the SERP. A low session duration (less than 30 seconds) can indicate bot traffic.
- If your site traffic suddenly spikes without a spike in conversion, it suggests a high volume of bot traffic.
- If you notice repeated suspicious traffic patterns, it may indicate bots.
D] 4 Effective Ways to Block Traffic Bots
Follow these five tips to block traffic bots from affecting your ad campaigns –
1. Understand the Traffic
Familiarize yourself with your standard traffic patterns to identify suspicious activities quickly. Check your analytics to find out which referral sites the traffic comes from, when it usually peaks, and the typical duration of user sessions.
Understanding this data can help you optimize your PPC advertising campaigns. You can then remove traffic generated by irrelevant search terms and adjust campaigns affected by high levels of invalid traffic.
2. Use reCAPTCHA
ReCAPTCHA can protect your sites’ lead forms, contact forms, and other data capture fields. It can also help eliminate many simple or moderately complex bots and prevent them from submitting spam leads.
3. Set Up IP Exclusions
Not displaying ads to specific IP addresses can stop them from sending bots to your site. This isn’t a foolproof blocking method, as some sophisticated bots easily switch between IP addresses. You can set up IP exclusions in Google Ads by navigating to the relevant campaign in your account and going to its additional settings. Then, you can add IP exclusions and paste the address into the box.
4. Implement Meta Anti-Fraud Features
Meta offers various built-in features that help combat bots and limit exposure to click fraud on your Facebook ads campaign. These features include ad filters that allow you to screen out low-quality traffic. Meta also offers geo-targeting options to ensure your ads are shown in areas with genuine engagement. You can also use exclusion lists to block specific demographics, interests, or locations from your ad campaigns.
If you are facing other issues with your FB ad campaigns, here is why your Facebook ads are active but not showing and how to fix them.
Thus, these approaches can help you identify and block bad bots and protect your ad campaigns from invalid traffic. If you need further assistance with bot traffic, you can consult our assistants, who will help you with the ongoing challenges.
