There has been a lot of talk in the media lately about bot traffic (Bot = computer program that automatically processes recurring tasks), incorrectly produced clicks and views and other online marketing scams.
But since there have been opportunities to make money with online marketing and advertising, there have also been resourceful hackers and computer experts who have used these opportunities for themselves.
The news that more than half of internet traffic comes from bots probably had the most headline potential. But you have to be careful here too, because not all bots are evil and bad. Many of the mechanisms that [crawl the web] don’t necessarily want to steal advertising dollars, but actually test things](https://www.axios.com/internet-fake-bots-metrics-media-companies-1033c210-a625-4005-9037-2e508d550bc2.html).
As an online marketer, I have to say that the better you are familiar with the online marketing advertising jungle, the better you can avoid this fake traffic. A good approach is definitely to always have “hard” conversions as a campaign goal and to optimize for them. But more on that later.
Instagram – Fake Followers and purchased interaction
The purchased followers for the influencer accounts on Instagram have been known for a long time. But here too, bots and bot networks are largely active, creating accounts automatically and distributing interactions such as comments and likes “on command”. Here, too, Instagram is always racing, or rather lagging behind, to make life difficult for artificial bot traffic with its algorithms and to differentiate between real and not real.
Just type “buy 10,000 followers” into Google and see what comes up :). Fortunately, tools have already been established that make it easy to expose the bad guys with the followers you have purchased. One of them is Socialblade or Hypeauditor. The problem here is often that the period of analysis is quite limited and it is more difficult to discover whether the influencer had already made a lot of money to buy fans/followers a year ago.
But it can also be trickier. The “engagement groups” in which many people participate are very visible among lifestyle and travel bloggers. This is also easy to google. The principle here is that you are in a Whatsapp / Facebook / Signal, … group and post your respective Instagram posting there and all group participants are encouraged to like and comment. Of course, you also have to invest time here and like and comment on every posting by all other group participants. This creates a lot of engagement and suggests to the advertiser that the lovely influencer is generating full-throttle engagement with every posting. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really do anything for the advertiser, since the same “fans” always interact and don’t spend a millisecond actually looking at the posting of their buddies in the engagement group :)
Getting to the bottom of this is a little more difficult, but here you could simply include a ban on engagement groups in the contract and sue the influencer if he or she has not adhered to the contract.
Branding problem due to views and clicks from bots
The majority of fake traffic focuses on easy-to-achieve goals such as producing views and clicks. For example, to simulate a user who surfs a page and scrolls around a bit and stops at certain points to simulate something like reading behavior and then clicks on an ad or a link.
These websites are often already built by hackers and simply have advertising space installed from various ad providers such as Google Adsense and others. Massive artificial traffic is then fired there and money is earned.
Branding in online marketing has a relatively big problem with fake views and clicks. For branding measures, large advertising banners are often purchased that should be seen as often as possible and possibly also clicked on. As many advertising spaces as possible are also booked programmatically in order to achieve the greatest possible reach with the branding. If an avalanche of fake views rolls onto various websites and banners, the advertising money is really thrown out the window.
This phenomenon and the techniques behind it are beautifully explained in the New York Magazine article from December 24, 2018. Unrestricted reading recommendation.
My opinion on the topic and how you can still do effective online marketing
The simplest solution would always be to set conversion as a goal and optimization measure. Hardly any artificial/simulated user (bot) will complete a purchase where money has to flow, or will not produce a lead by providing contact details and e-mail address.
But that doesn’t always work. Especially when it comes to branding and content consumption, you have to think of other things. One approach here is to look closely at** the length of stay and user behavior of the traffic that you get from an advertising banner or link that you have spent money on. If something doesn’t quite fit here, such as an extremely short dwell time from a certain source, then there is something wrong with the traffic from there. By precisely measuring the length of stay and, for example, clicking on further articles on the site, you can easily filter out fake traffic. Because no bot will jump to a page, stay there longer and then read further articles.
If it’s really about pure banner views and you want to be sure that real people have been reached, you have to force the AdTech companies and media agencies even more to be able to identify users as real users and to improve their tracking mechanisms.
When it comes to choosing the advertising material itself, you can also exclude fake traffic quite well with pure text ads in the search engine.
Google is in the lead here, especially with AdWords (Google Ads), which are only placed on the search engine, it is unlikely that you will get many fake clicks.
Further links to browse:
- Most internet traffic comes from bots
- How much internet traffic is fake
- On the internet nobody knows you’re a bot
- New York Times: Social Media Bots
And another older article that explains exactly how to create websites that send fake traffic to ads -> Forgers use fake web users to steal real ad revenue
