How to Run Successful Ad Campaigns - by Detecting Bad Bot Traffic

Malicious bots are a major problem in today’s digital advertising industry. According to this years’ Distil Research Lab’s Bad Bot Report, 20% of Web Traffic is generated by bad bots. 

Taking a proactive approach to protect your product is the only way to safeguard your ad budget and make sure your campaign’s data is unpolluted by non-human behavior.

What’s the difference? 

Good bots are generally developed by trustworthy companies and are helpful because they allow your website to correctly be indexed and found by Google bots, Yandex bots or Bing bots, for example. Then there are social network bots from Facebook or Pinterest. All these companies provide analytics that can be used to optimally manage their traffic to reach your goals. 

Bad bots are developed by fraud organizations and cybercriminals and their sole purpose is to take advantage of your website, app or API’s weaknesses. Bad bots are highly sophisticated software that can imitate human-like behavior and subscribe to your service creating millions of fake leads, clicking on your ads, raising your ad spend or abandoning thousands of shopping carts saturating your system and distorting your analytics beyond comprehension. 

How do you stop bad bots? 

A solid bot management solution makes extensive use of machine learning to accurately distinguish between human visitors, good bots, and bad bots. 

All ad managers should consult with third-party software providers to determine how their campaigns’ traffic is being affected by bad bot activity. Opticks is a solution that will help you mitigate this problem by allowing you to track and block bad bots. 

Using machine learning models to learn to predict what normal human behavior and activity looks like on your products and sites, and how bots behave differently—even when they are highly sophisticated and can simulate humans is the only diligent course of action. By identifying fraudulent activity in your ad campaigns and website through data analysis, you can make sure your campaigns are being optimized properly, allocating your budget to channels that really work for you, not only that seem to work.