How to Prevent Bot Traffic to Your Ads on Google, Facebook, and Other Paid Media
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In digital marketing, we carefully plan our campaign budgets and audience targeting, and we meticulously analyze and report on data down to the last conversion, click, and dollar spent. This is why it can be frustrating when “spam” or “bot” traffic finds its way to your ads, landing pages, and forms. When that happens, data gets skewed, money gets wasted, and valuable time gets spent following up on fake leads.
This article will review how to identify and counteract bot traffic in your campaigns.
What is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic refers to non-human activity on a website or non-human clicks on ads in digital marketing campaigns, typically generated by software programs. Some bots, like search engine crawlers, are harmless and even helpful for monitoring your site. However, malicious bots can cause issues such as generating spam content, scraping and duplicating content, submitting false leads, and launching DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks. When these bots interact with your ads, they not only inflate your costs but also skew your performance metrics.
What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Bots?
According to the 2024 Imperva Threat Research report, “almost 50% of internet traffic comes from non-human sources. Bad bots, in particular, now comprise nearly one-third of all traffic.” The report also explains that these bots are becoming more sophisticated and better at mimicking human behavior to avoid detection. So knowing what signs to look for and how to prevent bot activity will only continue to increase in importance.
Signs of Bot Traffic in Your Paid Media Campaigns
The primary warning flags for bot traffic are sudden spikes in metrics like clicks, click-through rates, and conversions. While these increases could be genuinely positive, it’s best to investigate to ensure they are valid. Even if you made a recent change like a sharp budget increase or a large tactical shift that could explain the quick changes in performance, checking to be sure may save you the headache of cleaning up your data later in the case of bot interference.
If you notice irregularities, here are a few signs to look for as signs of spam:
Traffic from odd geographies: If there’s been a spike in activity from regions you’re not actively targeting, this may be indicative of bot activity.
Clicks from secondary networks: Check to see if the increases primarily came from secondary ad networks. Depending on your ad platform it may be called “search partners” or the “audience network”. These can sometimes provide incremental traffic at lower costs, but they can also sometimes let through low-quality and even bot traffic.
Clicks from spammy placements: Review which sites your display, programmatic, or similar ads are being placed, looking for increases in clicks from spammy sites that are not reputable or relevant to your audience or brand.
Data discrepancies: A potential red flag is a significant difference between the number of clicks reported by your ad platform and the number of site visits shown in your analytics tool. While this can sometimes be explained by measurement differences or tracking issues—both of which should be investigated—bot clicks are another possible cause.
Quick use of daily budgets: Monitor the hourly performance of your campaigns closely. A potential indicator of bot traffic is if your campaigns suddenly exhaust their budget in the early hours of the morning, as soon as the new day starts, rather than being spread out throughout the day, particularly during hours when potential customers are more likely to be online.
Fake email addresses in form submissions: Regularly review the email addresses collected from form submissions to spot patterns of nonstandard or suspicious addresses. For B2C businesses, most valid emails will come from common domains like @gmail, @hotmail, or @yahoo. Be cautious of unusual or spammy domains such as @moneysquad, @bangleemail, or @gaga. For B2B, focus on identifying legitimate @[companyname] domains, but spammy domains should still stand out clearly among the valid entries.
How to Combat Paid Media Bot Traffic
Most ad platforms have a built-in first line of defense against bot traffic, and if they notice any coming through, they will refund you for these “invalid clicks”. For example, you can read more about these policies from Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram).
However, if you notice bot traffic coming through despite these safeguards, there are some actions you can take:
Reach out to the ad platform support teams: If you can provide evidence indicating that more invalid clicks occurred than were reimbursed, platforms like Google and Meta may be willing to investigate the issue further.
Exclude irrelevant geographies: Setting exclusions for geographies you’re not targeting, in addition to the active targets for the geographies you are interested in, may help reduce unwanted traffic, from both humans and bots.
Disable secondary networks: If traffic from search partners or expanded audience networks has spiked, disabling these as placements can eliminate the flow of spam clicks.
- Exclude spammy site placements: Create a placement exclusion list and apply it to all your accounts to avoid easy avenues for bot traffic to take over your campaigns using display networks.
- Here are some helpful links on how to get these set up across various platforms:
- Set ad schedules: Reducing or eliminating your campaign’s ability to spend at irrelevant times of the day or week, can help ensure that your budget is only spent when real potential customers are likely to be online.
- Here are some helpful links outlining how to set ad schedules across the various platforms:
Implement CAPTCHA on your site: There are multiple ways to do this, and Google’s free version is called reCAPTCHA. This is a service that detects and prevents bot attacks, spam form submissions, fraudulent transactions, and more. Implementing a service like this can go a long way towards protecting your website from bots. Other bot prevention services are out there too. So do your research to find the one that best fits your needs.
Use form field validation scripts: In some cases, implementing CAPTCHA may not be feasible. In these situations, alternative safeguards like email or phone number validation scripts can be effective. These scripts can block form submissions based on certain conditions, such as detecting known spammy email domains. A good example of this approach can be found in the Unbounce community forum, where a solution was created for their landing pages.
Stop Wasting Money on Bot Traffic in Your Paid Media Campaigns
Bots can come for your campaigns and websites at any time, but now you know how to look out for and prevent them! If you want some hands-on assistance from our analytics or paid media teams, we would be happy to chat with you.
