BOT FRAUD - What to Do Before You Spend $1000 a Day On Native Ads

[joeybabbs]

In this post I want to share a method I recently started implementing on all of my native ad campaigns in 2018.

I run a lot of native ads to CPA offers using advertorials mostly. In one of my previous posts on here I shared some insights on my $400,000 spend in 2017....but a lot has changed since 2017.

Many might not know this but Native Ads are like the WILD WEST for bot fraud.

I am confident that I probably give fraudsters about 20% of my spend if not more. But I am still making money from Native Ads which is why I still invest there.

If I had to guess I would say 90% of people first starting out on Native Ads will fail miserably.

The reason - they aren't aware of how bots can eat away your budget without you even knowing. Bots are very sophisticated today, but at the same time they can be caught.

There are also tools now that help you to automate some of the things I am going to explain below, but for the most part I make profits without using automated software programs....it just takes a little more work.

So on that note let me walk through a few simple things to do first before you start running $XXXX a day spend on native ads like Taboola.com, Revcontent.com, MGID.com, Yahoo Gemini ETC....

Step 1 - Get Yourself an ad rep on the native ad network you plan to spend on. You don't have to be a big spender to get a rep. They know what's working they know the crap placements and the good placements. Talk to them and make sure they know the niche you want to target. Request from them a blacklist for whatever network you are on. If they are good they will provide this to you. If any ad rep tells you to just go Run of the Network (RON) with no guidance then you know they are full of $@% and they just want you to spend. It's easy to spend $100 a minute on some of these networks if you have your settings to go RON.

Step 2 - Do some spying and find out if the stuff you want to run is actually making any dent in the native ad network you want to run on. If you see others running ads in this niche for 15-30 days then it's a good sign,

If you are promoting something off the grid then you just gotta jump in and work with your account rep for some insight on the target audience you want to focus on. You also have to do your own due diligence and research your target audience etc... (hopefully the ad reps have some knowledge on what placements fit with your audience and aren't just trying to get you to spend)

Step 3 - Make sure you can track every single piece of data you can before you turn on your campaign - this is where you are going to have to ensure you have the ability to drill down reporting. Strive Tracker is what I use, but Voluum and other mainstream trackers will do fine too. Eventually you have to be able to kill placements (or as some networks call them "widgets").

Start with with a Blacklist campaign which is basically a campaign where you will be blacklisting bad widgets. Then once you have enough data you will start to move all your winning widgets or placements to a new Whitelist campaign which is basically just a duplicated campaign for just the winners at which point you can place higher bids and winner better placements and ultimately scale faster.

4. You will always keep your blacklist campaign running, but you must set up a bot trap on your landing page for this.

EASY BOT TRAP SETUP

This trick wont catch every bot but in my experience it catches about 10 bots in every $200 spend.

Many bots are programmed to click on the ad link (so the bot maker gets paid) but also many will click on a link on the landing page so that it appears as a real person to both the native ad network and the person buying traffic from them.

So a simple way to catch a bot is to set up links on your page that no real person would click, but only a bot would.

For me I usually just make the "Advertorial" word at the top of the page the link that is my bot trap. So in Strive I set up a "multi offer" landing page and for the word "advertorial" I make sure that it is linking to "Offer 2" or I name it BOT TRAP (which in effect is still the actual offer I am promoting but its labelled as BOT TRAP in Strive reports).

Now in my reporting I will be able to drill down and sort by "Widget ID" that clicked ""BOT TRAP".

Then I will blacklist those widgets from my campaign. EVERY SINGLE DAY there are at least 5 - 10 new bots that I block because they clicked the word Advertorial.

Now, If anyone clicks on the link "Advertorial" I will assume they are bots. To me this means they are a bot, or the FTC lol. Either way they need to be blocked.

So this is just one trick I use to filter out the crap placements. There is definitely a ton more to do when running native ads but hopefully this helps some of you and I would love to discuss more if anyone has comments......

 

[ruslan_kordik]

I've spent $2K on Contenad and got 5 conversions back only for Skin niche. I had 2 steps of bot protection and despite that 99% of bots were coming in, look at this CTR on my cloaked landers, partial rate on the offers lander was lower than 1%. Around 500 clicks to the Jumbleberry offers and very poor results.

Oh yeah, I was using your method as well, placed another URL in the top of lander to track bots. But almost all of them are bots.

 

[joeybabbs]

I've spent $2K on Contenad and got 5 conversions back only for Skin niche. I had 2 steps of bot protection and despite that 99% of bots were coming in, look at this CTR on my cloaked landers, partial rate on the offers lander was lower than 1%. Around 500 clicks to the Jumbleberry offers and very poor results.

Oh yeah, I was using your method as well, placed another URL in the top of lander to track bots. But almost all of them are bots.

WTF that's horrible...did you reach out to the content.ad support and ask them what the heck is up? I would almost demand a refund on that.,

 

[mick_shah]

Currently using this on my mgid campaign; place them all over the page with it being almost invisible to people to click on. I'll let you know how it goes - thanks!

 

[ricardo_figueroa]

How are your doing with your ads now, Mick?

 

[regina02]

Hi, is this bot fraud perpetrated on other traffic sources like Facebook, bing, etc as well, or is it peculiar to only native ads?

 

[joeybabbs]

I definitely wont claim to be an expert in this but from what I can tell it is more frequent in traffic that is purchased from "publishers" not directly from the source. For example Google search your ads are directly on google...but google display ads are on "publisher" sites who get paid from adsense. The publishers get incentive to get more clicks on those ads therefore fraud seems more rampant....this is also the case for native ad networks where it is all publisher ads...and they don't have the sophistication in many cases that Google does. Facebook also has native ads now. So the short answer - is it is everywhere.

 

[regina02]

I definitely wont claim to be an expert in this but from what I can tell it is more frequent in traffic that is purchased from "publishers" not directly from the source. For example Google search your ads are directly on google...but google display ads are on "publisher" sites who get paid from adsense. The publishers get incentive to get more clicks on those ads therefore fraud seems more rampant....this is also the case for native ad networks where it is all publisher ads...and they don't have the sophistication in many cases that Google does. Facebook also has native ads now. So the short answer - is it is everywhere.

OK, thanks.

 

[tberner49]

Thank you Joeybabbs it made sense to me what you said. Peace

 

[crazybeast]

Hi Joe, do you still use bot traps?

 

[joeybabbs]

Hi Joe, do you still use bot traps?

Yes - I do have them implemented and they still work to identify bots that click through. It is not 100% foolproof but it's one small tool in the fight against bots.