How to avoid invalid traffic in advertising?

Recently, developers have frequently been banned due to invalid traffic in the advertising monetization group. At the same time, if Google cannot judge the quality of traffic, it will not fill the ad traffic. Today, I will mainly take the time to understand and analyze the invalid traffic of ads and how advertisers can avoid invalid traffic.

In the Internet era where traffic is king, the extremely low volume of early Internet purchases brought rapid development to early Internet entrepreneurs. With the advent of the traffic era, advertisers and developers have encountered problems with fake traffic.

01 Definition of invalid traffic

"Invalid traffic", also known as "fake traffic" or ad fraud, refers to any impression or click that artificially increases an advertiser's costs or a publisher's revenue.

In the first half of 2018, the average invalid traffic accounted for 28.9%

Data source: White Paper on Invalid Traffic of Digital Advertising in China Market

The number of “regular invalid traffic” that can be completely avoided
Only 2.1%

Data source: White Paper on Invalid Traffic of Digital Advertising in China Market

We look at the current traffic market situation through two data.

28.9% – This is the proportion of “invalid traffic” in digital advertising in the first half of 2018 (no updated data found yet), which is equivalent to nearly one-third of digital advertising costs being wasted.

The invalid traffic that can be avoided only accounts for 2.1, which means that it is basically impossible to avoid the problem of invalid traffic through conventional means. So how can developers avoid such problems?

There are even malicious clicks from competitors.

02 Invalid traffic and irregular operations

The first is to use non-human traffic (robots and crawlers, etc.) to use IP to repeatedly brush the volume, machine intelligence cheating, traffic hijacking, etc. For example, many small advertising platforms use certain methods to use code to call click events, thereby simulating the operation of human clicks on advertisements.

It can even simulate different IPs and repeatedly increase the traffic by changing different IPs, spending all the advertiser’s revenue, but not bringing in real conversions, resulting in losses for the advertiser.

The picture shows the search display

Do not imitate unconventional operations. The main thing is to prevent the water army from destroying the company.

Another way is to use human methods, including cheating by real water armies.

Generally, water armies are hired automatically by companies that need good-looking data through unconventional means, or advertising platforms hire water armies to cheat in ad clicks and earn revenue from advertisers.

Image source: Baidu Water Army related search

Image source and chat records related to the water army

In addition to the regular task download water army, by doing task benefits, download clicks, watching incentive videos, etc., the task is completed and the platform advertising income is generated. You can even set rules, control the click rate in the background, etc., to evade platform detection...

The nature of this is very bad, so we won’t discuss it in depth for now.

Do not imitate unconventional operations. The main thing is to prevent the water army from destroying the company.

The following is the definition of invalid traffic by the Pangolin Advertising Platform.

Image source: Pangolin Platform website

You need to understand the specific rules of the advertising platform in a targeted manner to avoid being blocked by the advertising platform later, especially Google. If you are blocked due to violations, the income for the two-month period will be wasted.

The advent of the Internet era has brought about a large number of bubble economies. More and more developers are taking advantage of users, using various false and illegal operations to earn income and achieve profit. In the long run, companies that simply rely on taking advantage of users to make quick money will sooner or later be restricted and stagnant in development.

03 There are traces of invalid traffic

Advertising CTR monitoring

Using virtual clicks or simulated clicks usually results in abnormally high click rates or large click fluctuation ratios.

Each platform will monitor the click-through rate

For example, Admob generally considers it normal if the number of ad clicks is less than 3, and a higher number will result in account suspension.

Therefore, it is necessary to judge the traffic flow according to the advertising CTR in time and deal with abnormalities in time

IP Monitoring

If you find that a few IPs generate a large number of clicks or impressions, it usually causes too much IP concentration.

You can compare the number of clicks on ads (Ad_Click) and the number of clicks on unique users (Ad_Click_Dl).

However, if you want to know which specific IP caused the display, and if there is suspicion of traffic brushing due to too high clicks, you need to upload the device code together with the number of clicks. After getting the user device code, you can sort it. If there are abnormal clicks or displays, you need to add an interface in the background to block this device code

–This solution comes from the company's development brother's suggestion

Abnormal/regular distribution of ad access time

Any abnormal click pattern, such as the regular intervals between consecutive clicks/exposures, may be a false click of invalid traffic.

Abnormal retention curve

The retention curve of invalid traffic from machine or human brushing will generally drop sharply, especially when human brushing tasks are completed and rewards are received, they will immediately uninstall. This is why some points walls have added next-day, two-day, and seven-day tasks to improve retention.

Abnormal conversion rate

Conversion rates are often too high or too low and no longer fluctuate within normal ranges.

Exposure and click IP/region/device concentration.

User behavior depth conversion and visit duration.

Malicious click activity by competitors.

…

And so on, there are other invalid traffic characteristics. Of course, any measures can be circumvented through manual means.

04 How to avoid invalid traffic

As an advertiser, you can take effective measures to solve this problem.

On the one hand, advertisements are delivered through large advertising platforms, which guarantee and automatically detect traffic quality, such as the overseas Google platform, and a series of measures are taken to help advertisers avoid invalid traffic.

Detect user behavior through code at any time, reduce repeated clicks and control the number of advertisements.

On the other hand, through detection such as conversion, if you find that the click rate is too high, the conversion rate is low or the retention rate is low, you can change to other delivery channels (excluding other problems).

Or it could be invalid traffic that is marked, such as blocking IP areas.

…

In the process of invalid traffic analysis, we found many gray areas of the Internet. There are policies from above and countermeasures from below. There are different countermeasures and solutions for each form. The development of the Internet is based on the demand for a huge traffic pool, but this huge traffic pool is not an inevitable requirement for the crazy invalid traffic. The level of business values ​​of an enterprise can be seen.

Author: Product work thinking

WeChat Official Account: Product Work Thinking