Extra Traffic Could Actually COST A Website Money. Here’s How to Fix It.

Entrepreneurs usually think of more web traffic as a good thing.

Sure, it depends on the context.

Not all traffic converts well, and you could attract tons of visitors and not make a single dime off them.

Even if you've got ads on your blog, you need Buzzfeed levels of traffic these days to make any real money that way.

So not all traffic is alike.

But there's one kind of traffic that's never a good thing.

It's called “bot traffic,” and it's basically fake, for all intents and purposes.

It's a way for shady ad companies and shady publishers to basically cheat you out of ad revenue or conversions.

So when you get tons of impressions but no clicks, no conversions, and nothing but a wasted budget, chances are you were probably hit by bot traffic. (Unless your ads really, really suck.)

In a recent blog post, affiliate marketing expert Charles Ngo explains how to figure out if bot traffic is cheating you out of sales and revenue, and how to deter bots from messing up your click through rates.

1,298 impressions on your landing page…

But 0 people clicked on your CTA?

Wtf?

Surely at least a few people would click. Even people clicking by mistake.

Are you that bad at creating landing pages?

Probably not…

…More likely your site is getting slammed by bot traffic.

What is bot traffic?

Before I explain bot traffic, you need context.

Affiliate marketing is a CONSTANT tug of war.

1. Affiliates want to make as much money as possible from the publisher and traffic source
2. Publishers want to make as much money as possible from the affiliate and the traffic source
3. Paid traffic sources want to make as much money from the publisher and the affiliate

Everyone is trying to make money off each other.

And at some point, one party will try and screw the other over.

Hey, it’s the internet. Everyone knows that sh*t happens online sometimes.

It’s not like anyone’s out there mugging grannies at Whole Foods, but it’s still serious.

We’ve all been ripped off on Ebay/Craigslist before, but bot traffic is where things get a bit more sophisticated.

I wanna show you how to make a ton more money by learning how to detect and get rid of bot traffic from your campaigns.

What happened?

A piece of code loaded your landing page.

Now you have to pay for the bot that looked at your landing page because it’s counted as a visit. A few dollars and cents here and there is bearable, but when 50% of your campaign traffic is bots, you need to do something about it.

How to Detect Bot Traffic?

If you run mobile or native campaigns, you HAVE to know how to detect bot traffic. It’s unlikely you’ll ever get profitable if you don’t.

Large traffic sources try to detect bots from publishers, but it’s you who ends up paying for it, so YOU need to know how to deal with it.

#1 Clickthrough Rates on Placements

[image source: Charles Ngo]

One giveaway is a large number of visitors and zero or very low clickthroughs (check your Voluum stats by placement/siteID to find the ones most likely to be bots).

#2 Creating Bot Traps

[image source: Charles Ngo]

A lot of the bots are really stupid. They click links, and that’s about all. They have some conditional programming, but you can beat it easily.

#3 Redirect The Bots

[image source: Charles Ngo]

Another tip is to redirect from a blank landing page to your real landing page using Javascript.

You can learn more about how to detect and deter bot traffic over at Charles Ngo's blog, including a more detailed walkthrough of each way of detecting whether traffic is coming from real users or bots.