The Good, The Bad And The Bot

Back in the early 90’s, the first chat bots appeared. With the Internet invading more and more virtual space, bots have technically evolved and started to be in demand almost everywhere. Today, they account for more than 50% of all traffic.

Not to get into much detail, bots can be roughly divided into good and bad ones.

Under the first category we have all the bots that make our life more easy and joyful.

For example, media bots that collect and store current news, weather forecasts, exchange rates and pretty much anything that might be of interest to the user. The most famous ones in this category are Siri and Alexa. Or copyright bots — as the title implies, they can identify illegally used content that matches the content the author owns (although sometimes they are quite clumsy in performing the task).

In general, these days you can find bots all over the Internet: they play online games, edit articles on Wikipedia, watch videos on YouTube, help to buy/sell products, etc.

But there’s always a reverse of the medal. At the same time, there are bots involved in DDoS-attacks, spreading spam and things of a kind.

Sooner or later, all advertisers face fraud. Typically, this is due to the fact that webmasters either initially attract bots to their page or use bots for click fraud. In addition, there are no regulations for the quality of traffic on the Internet, so when buying it directly you have to rely on the honesty of the site’s owner.

Fortunately, despite the fact that many bots have learned to simulate user’s behavior on the websites, it is still quite easy to detect fraud.

First, metrics can be of great help here. The more information you have about an ad campaign, the easier it is to detect suspicious activity. Second, pay attention to the average CTR and the number of leads. It is hard to imagine that with high-quality traffic there won’t be a single lead per 1000 clicks.

Although there is no way to protect yourself completely from bot traffic, selecting a quality traffic source and using statistics tracker will allow you to avoid a certain part of money waste.

In MediaVenus we personally check the quality of registered sites and provide ready-made whitelists. Moreover, our wide range of settings for advertising campaigns will help you to reach the target audience :)