In today’s digital marketing landscape, bots impacting your campaigns, website analytics, and overall performance is becoming an enormous issue with all the organizations running any kind of advertising campaign. To put a stop on the ad fraud that is caused by bots, having bot detection tools is vital. After all, how can you put a stop to bots if you can’t detect.
Unfortunately, many firms struggle to detect bot traffic, and the methods they employ are not all created equal. Choosing the right bot detection tool is essential for safeguarding your marketing efforts. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you select the best tool for your needs.
What Is Invalid Traffic and How Does It Relate to Bots?
Bot fraud in digital advertising generally falls in the category of invalid traffic by the marketers no matter good or bad since the bots are not the target audience and cannot be converted into a protentional lead.
Types of Invalid Traffic:
General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) – It is one of the simplest bots that can be detected easily, and a lot of good bots traffic comes under GIVT as they are not meant to fool the bot detection tool. But some fraudsters may also deploy GIVT as they are easy to make and work against some of their targets.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) – SIVT detection is the bots that one should look out for as these are more capable and are often designed to target to bypass cybersecurity and fraud prevention tools. For Example – sophisticated bots might imitate how a human would use a website so it would be difficult to identify between a human and bot. SIVT is common in ad fraud schemes.
How Bots Impact Your Marketing Campaigns
Bots can have a negative impact on your digital marketing campaigns in several ways:
- Wasted ad spend: Bots can boost your impressions and clicks, resulting in ad spend burn. For example, if you bid on a brand term that costs $1 per click and a bot clicks on your ad 1000 times, you would have wasted $1000.
- Inaccurate reporting: These bots can alter your reporting data, making it nearly impossible to track the actual performance of your campaigns. For Example, if a bot is boosting your impressions by 50%, your CTR will appear to be much higher than it is.
- Damage to your brand: So, if your brands are revealed to internet bots, it might damage your brand reputation. For example, if a bot clicks on your ad for a product the customer is not interested in, the user will consider your ad spam.
How to Detect Bots?
Bots often use IP addresses that are associated with known botnets. Here some of the most common methods include
- IP address analysis: Bots often use IP addresses that are associated with known botnets so by analyzing the traffic by these IP addresses you can easily identify the bot traffic.
- Behavioral analysis: Bots frequently engage in unusual behavior, such as rapidly clicking on adverts or viewing several pages in a short amount of time. So, by examining the behavior of your traffic, you may detect bot traffic.
- Traditional Bot detection tools: They can only detect basic bot patterns and don’t have the capability to identify sophisticated bot patterns like click spamming or lead punching.
Limitations in traditional bot detection tools
However, there are some limitations of using traditional bot detection tools. Over time, bot patterns have become increasingly sophisticated, enabling them to mimic human behavior and carry out complex tasks such as completing sign-up forms or generating leads. Traditional bot detection tools often fall short in identifying these advanced bot activities due to their limited capabilities. Some key limitations include:
- Only Impression-level detection: Many tools rely on impression-level analysis, which may not be sufficient to identify advanced bots. This approach often overlooks nuanced behaviors that occur across multiple impressions or sessions.
- Limited to Pre-bid monitoring: Many fraud detectors focus on pre-bid detection because it is easier to conduct checks because they only need to consider two factors: geolocation and browser, and the success rate is only 2%.
Key Features to Look for in a Bot Detection Tool
- Utilization of the Latest Technology: One of the key features to look out for in a bot detection tool is whether it is using the latest technology to detect ad fraud. When looking for a bot detection tool, evaluate their technology. Many traditional ad fraud solutions depend on outdated methods like 1×1 pixel tracking, offering limited visibility. In contrast, to identify sophisticated bot patterns the bot detection must use the latest technology. We use cutting-edge technologies like VAST and JavaScript to assess over 70 parameters of bot traffic for effective identification.
- Deeper and Comprehensive Checks: The bot detection tool will be able to provide deeper insights with a post-bid analysis. With a comprehensive full-funnel check the success rates are boosted by 30%-40%. This approach is reliable and eliminates blind spots in detecting bot activity or ad fraud.
- Omnichannel Coverage: An advanced ad validation solution provides robust protection across multiple platforms, including programmatic advertising, Connected TV (CTV), Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms, and Made for Advertising (MFA) websites. This comprehensive coverage effectively addresses all potential avenues for fraudulent activities.
- Real-Time Insights: The platform detects and assesses fraudulent behavior in real-time, allowing advertisers to take proactive measures to minimize losses and protect their advertising budget.
- 100% Transparency: A critical feature of an advanced fraud detection tool is source-level transparency, this provision of detailed, source-level data enables advertisers to trace fraudulent activities back to their origins, ensuring accountability and enabling more targeted counter measures.
How mFilterIt help to detect sophisticated bots?
mFilterIt is known for its effective bot detection and ad fraud prevention capabilities. Valid8 by mFilterIt offers real-time detection, granular insights, and comprehensive protection across the entire campaign lifecycle. By utilizing machine learning, behavioral, and heuristic checks, it ensures the detection of advanced-level bots leading to fraud-free campaigns, making it ideal for advertisers seeking reliable bot traffic validation.
Conclusion
Bot detecting tools can help to protect your site from frauds, enhance the experience for your users and increase the accuracy of your data. Lack of adequate protection may result into huge losses in terms of finance, data and security to the website owners, and this is where mFilterIt comes in, it offers a robust solution for filtering out bad bots while continuing to serve genuine users on the platforms.
Stay ahead of bot threats and know more contact us.
