Bot traffic is a major concern among publishers who spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns.
Bots are the main cause that your advertising campaign is not performing as expected.
Bot traffic is simply a non-human visitor to your website to perform repetitive tasks like copying, ad clicking, posting comments, or any activity.
In this article, we will discuss what bots are and how bot traffic impacts your online advertising campaign.
What Are Bots?
Bot traffic or non-human traffic is a type of ad fraud that shows false impressions and even worse, false clicks to increase the result of your online advertising campaign. These are an automated software program built to carry out a specific task by simulating a human’s use of a website and shows that your online advertising campaign is getting impressions.
Bots are automated programs that browse the web for all sorts of different reasons but the most common is for creating search indices and cannot make a purchase or contribute to the company’s revenue.
How Bots Affects Your Advertising Campaign
Increases Ad Frauds
Bots are programmed by unwanted threats to increase the rate of ad frauds and generate revenue. When you pay for an online ad, you assume that your ads are putting it in front of a real human being and you expect a conversion rate. But the scenario is totally different and you think that your advertising is not performing well. In this case, bots are responsible for faking the number of impressions that your advertisement receives, and that is how fraudsters make a lot of money from your campaign by showing different ads in your space.
Rise The PPC Cost Of Your Campaign
A well-designed bot when crossing through a page then it can click on every ad it has and can even randomly vary the amount of time they spend on a page. Bots can even fill out basic forms and become harder to spot and that’s how they increase the revenue for the website that the ad is hosted on and increase your cost for ads by clicking on the various ads to generate fraudulent traffic. Thus, bots bring unusual results for advertising campaigns and raise the PPC cost of your campaign.
Shows Wrong Analytics And Reporting
Analytics and reporting of your online advertising campaign show the performance of your ads. analytics reports from the different websites give you a unique insight about your audiences like- their location, age group, most clicks ads. But bots traffic can lead to fake reporting and analytics of your advertisements. The reports generated from the campaign consist of wrong information and might lead you to make bad choices for future advertisement campaigns.
Bots Send Spam Messages To Your Potential Customers
Sending unwanted messages to uninterested contacts can negatively impact the company’s reputation and decrease the popularity of your brand. Bots can collect the personal information of your potential customers to send them spam messages. These messages can be a major nuisance factor for your potential customers as it wastes so much of their time and provides them with improper information. This can lead to getting flagged as spam in email and block on social media and audiences will be less likely to become customers.
How To Overcome With The Bot Traffic
To overcome the bot traffic, ad links are required to include a ‘rel=”no follow”‘ attribute while creating online ads. This attribute stops the bots from following the ads.
We at WPAdSense handle bot traffic by filtering it out of the statistics and secures your ads from the Email harvesters, spambots, malware, and bots that scan for security. The battle against the bots is an ongoing effort and our systems are continuously working on it and improving.