10 Signs Ad Marketing Campaign is Being Targeted by Bot Attacks

Ad marketing has become one of the most crucial factors and the soul of a digital business that drives growth, traffic, revenue and engagement. With marketing there also comes certain malicious activities that affect every factor in a possible way. Bad bots give a significant amount of threat for the success in any campaign. Bots are certain automated programs that mimic the behaviour of humans and infiltrate our website completely which also manipulates the engagement of ads. It’s very important to acknowledge the alarming sign that can adversely affect your marketing efforts. 

Bots almost cover 30% of the traffic that is coming on the internet. Therefore, their presence cannot be countered inevitably. When the bots target the website they compromise the integrity, authenticity and every other analytics that also undermines your ROI. Let’s look at certain signs that tell us that your ad campaign is targeted. 

Detecting Bot Attacks: 10 Signs Your Ad Campaign is Targeted

1. Unusually High Click-through Rates (CTR)

If you are facing a sudden increase in the CTR without any engagement metrics and conversion rise, it is surely the indication of the bots click. These kinds of bots inflate The metrics artificially but do not deliver genuine interaction. 

2. Abrupt/Quick Changes in Traffic Patterns

It is not a green flag, if you are facing traffic Spikes suddenly from the activity that is caused by bot. Increased traffic is also positive but when but only when it is coming from a certain kind of marketing or organically. Therefore, it is important to analyse where this unusual pattern is coming from as it might be a bot attack. 

3. Strange User Behavior

Usually the bot follows a regular and repetitive pattern when it comes to their interaction as it imitates the behaviour of humans. Therefore, identifying repetitive sequences of clicks or views that do not match the behaviour of the user or your visitor can also help in spotting the bot attacks activity. 

4. High Bounce Rates

Try to analyse and monitor the bounce rate and the locations from which it is coming geographically. The bot targets a certain region as well that leads to an abnormal increase of bounce rate. Therefore, these kinds of regulations must be pointed out towards bor activity that focuses on the specific area rather than genuine user engagement. 

5. Inflated Impressions

If there is sudden inflation in the rate of impression then there can be an unexpected attack of the bot as the drops in the rate of conversion or any abnormal change that happens during the session will surely impact the credibility of the campaign metrics. 

6. Click Fraud Warnings from Ad Networks

If you are receiving a click fraud warning from the ad network then it is a clear signal that you are facing a bot attack. Therefore, if you suffer from any suspicious sources that are not your usual pattern then you should definitely look out. If there is a genuine engagement with the website that turns out good but whenever it is an engagement given by bot it often generates clicks without any subsequent interaction. 

It is very crucial to investigate the ad network issues which is the click fraud warning and its underlying causes to prevent your website from any kind of malicious attack. 

7. Unexplained Budget Depletion

If there is an unexplained budget depletion in the ad marketing campaign it is a sign that the website is targeted by the bot attack. If you are facing a rapid expenditure with the minimal result then there might be a chance that there is a sudden spike in the click volume and this abnormal click distribution can be a hint of a high click fraud rate. If there is a consistent budget depletion or your facing irregularity in the performance metrics then you should definitely collaborate with the ad platforms like magic bid which can help you mitigate the impact of any kind of bot attack. 

8. Suspicious IP Addresses

If there is an unusual geographical origin or a significant post of click or the interaction with the ads originating from the region where your target audience is not concentrated from then there are high chances that you are facing a Bot attack. Therefore, monitoring the IP address that is associated with your interaction and following the pattern will help you detect the bots primarily. 

9. Unusual Geographic Patterns

If you are facing an anomaly in the Geographic distribution of the traffic that can be a disproportionate number of clicks from the region with the low internet penetration, it is surely an indication of the bot activity. 

10. Lack of Engagement on Landing Pages

If you’re facing lack of engagement on the landing page despite receiving clicks then you need to indicate that the marketing technique is being targeted by the bot attacks. There are certain signs that you need to watch out for such as high bounce rate, low page depth, short session duration, unusual traffic pattern and no conversion event. Monitoring the engagement metrics of the landing page for identification of the genuine interaction will help you detect and prevent yourself from such kind of attacks. 

Conclusion 

It is very important to protect your ad marketing campaign from any kind of bot attacks as it is very important for the long run and maximization of return of your site. Therefore, by perfectly analyzing these 10 signs and taking the perfect counter measure to protect them is foremost. Ensuring the efficacy and authenticity of the advertising effort in the digital realm is crucial. 

It is not as easy to deal with the bad bots as it is a long process that requires a constant upgradation and a perfect measurement of analytics. Therefore, by partnering with the magicbid, to get good support that will reduce your challenges. 

Where To Place Your Ads? Best Ad Placement with MagicBid.ai

There has been a considerable increase in the digital ecosystem therefore the publishers are clearly finding a new way for maximising the revenue for their website. There has been a variety of revenue models available but magicbid_ai plays a vital role in achieving what the publisher really wants. 

MagicTag by MagicBid offers an impressive ad placement that helps in boosting the revenue. It not only gives the growth but also addresses the issue of the invalid deduction that is caused by the bot. 

What is Ad Placement?

When a single ad unit or a group of ad units has a designated area on the publisher website where they can place their advertisement, that whole setup will be called as an ad placement. 

Google ad placement can be automatically created by the publisher who uses the Google ad and additionally they also get the benefit for defining the placement criteria as per their desire.  The format of the ad and the size of the ad plays a larger role in engaging the user with an ad and it’s the responsibility of the publisher to analyse the user data while placing the ads for ensuring the engagement at a higher rate. 

Why is Ad Placement Important?

The ad placement turns out to be very important if you are into the creation of an online ad campaign. It does not really affect how great the ad is, if no one pays attention. Therefore, the click through rate (CTR) suffers and the opportunity of revenue seems to be lost very easily. 

The ad placement needs to be best; it also depends on the size of the ad and the type of the audio chosen for the attraction of your visitor. 

Factors to Consider When Optimizing Ad Placements

There are certain factors that need to be certainly kept in mind while you are on a way to optimise your ad placement. Once you are done with your tricks and strategy you can proceed to the next level and here are some important consideration where you need to pay your attention on: 

• Ad Position
• Ad Format
• Ad Relevance
• Ad Frequency

6 Best Ad Placement Optimization Techniques

1. Consider User Experience

User experience consideration is very important while you are placing an ad on the website. As per a recent study, if there is a delay faced by a website while loading. It will affect the user in a negative way and will lead to customer dissatisfaction. Therefore, even a 1 to 2 second delay with an unfamiliar site will give you a bad impression. 

User engage in a more good way if there is no distraction faced by them. Therefore, there should always be places where they cannot be mistaken easily and not seen as the website content or design layout. The relevance of the placement of ad should also be kept in mind as the ads which are placed should be as per the data and the behavioural experiences of the user should be kept in mind. 

2. Use Multi-sized Ad Placements

If you will use a multi size ad placement on the website it clearly will help the publisher to improve the ad revenue as there will be a wider range of ad size which considerably will increase the likelihood of the click and the placement of ad. 

3. Use Lazy Loading

Optimization of the website performance is very important therefore it’s better to use the lazy loading technique which will load the content only when it is needed. This technique will prove beneficial for the website that has a variety of video ads and images which significantly helps to improve the load time and give a good user experience. 

4. Place Ads in Strategic Locations

Placement of ads on a strategic location also drive’s growth on your website building. In the success of your advertising campaign it also helps the publisher to boost the odds of grabbing the interest of the viewers. 

Let’s look at the most effective placement of ads: 

Between Paragraphs: In the placement of the ad within the paragraph of the content captures the interest of the readers. 

Sticky Units: these kind of ads are present on the screen and as the user scroll down and up as they approach in an effective way navigating the website.

Above and Below images: if you will position the ad below or above the image it captures the user’s attention in a very strategic way. 

5. Test Different Ad Placements

Tera different kinds of ad placement that have their own strengths and weaknesses. The testing of A/B can be compared to the placement and the format to see which can generate the most revenue. 

6. Consider Mobile Optimization

Mobile devices will be becoming popular and have an important part of the landscape of online advertising. 5 G has become readily available. The usage of mobile phones has considerably increased base almost 51% made up the ad spending. There has been a considerable increase in the usage of mobile phones and the publishers are also able to optimise the ads for the devices. 

Serving mobile friendly ads size is also one way through which the ad placement Optimisation can be done for achieving the bigger objective. 

3 Best Website Ad Placement Strategies for Publishers

1. Balancing Customer Experience

It’s very crucial to maximise your revenue by finding a perfect balance of your site and considering the performance and units with the User experience. If you want to provide the best possible user experience you should be loyal to your user base and increase the number of traffic that is coming on to your site. 

The ads  which are performing well may get the more intrusive placement that will harm the user. The engagement of the poor website can also alter the search ranking; it may give the bounce rate at a higher level which can eventually decrease and generate less revenue. 

2. Analysis of User Behavior

It is highly recommended to see the user intent on your site. As the user are going to browse through a long form of content. If you look that at the journey of the user to your site and what you can expect my engaging from it,  you will help yourself in becoming better with the placement of the ad. 

Therefore the user intent must seen with the very core as it helps you to analyse an implement the ad format making the best choice possible. 

3. Look at the Site Data

You should definitely look at the site data to choose the right placement for your ad that will be best guided through the research or inventory performance. There are many ways and tools that can be provided which eventually will help you to make the best decision. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics give you an in-depth analysis about the interaction of the site with the traffic that is coming. It also helps to know which content is performing well on the landing page and what can be avoided for getting the best organic search or the direct traffic. 

Heat and Click Maps

Products like MagicBid provide the website owner with the data of the user interaction they also highlight where the user spends most of their time. It helps in understanding that what kind of content your visitor is attracting most with. 

A/B Testing

This testing for the ad.placement gives you the best user experience of the website. Google clearly helps in the Optimisation and allows you to send the traffic to a link which is very specific for seeing the number of different pages. 

How can MagicTag help Maximise Revenue with ad Placements?

Magictag is one such powerful weapon of the magic Shield which offers a powerful way to combat the Click spam and it clearly allows the app owners and the website owners to detect and block the unwanted traffic in the real time. The sources of the click spam can also be identified by this which will ensure the website analytics and reflect genuine user behaviour and improve the overall performance and the User experience of your website. 

MagicShield MagicTag offers a new ad format with the defence system against the invalid visitor and there has been a considerable surge of revenue for about 200 persons and the team of experts helps in identifying the ad placement which is very impressive the ecpm has clearly doubled with this advertising model.

 What is Bot Traffic? How to Detect and Prevent?

Do you know! what is bot traffic? It is a non- human generated traffic that are specifically sent by the robots to the apps and the website. These kinds of traffic are programmed to perform various kinds of tasks like monitoring the website performance, introducing web pages on the search engine or be it the engagement in the other malicious activity. Talking about the latest statistics the overall growth of traffic as compared to 2018 is 24% and there are several tips to detect and prevent it. 

For the bot traffic detection there are various tools that might mitigate such as behavioural analysis, traffic analysis tools, rate limiting, bot detection services, captcha and other bot Management Solutions. Magic bid helps in the detection of bot networks that generate click impressions from non-human sources. 

What is Bot Traffic?

It is a non-human traffic that is generated by the robots to the app and websites. This kind of traffic usually come up with a negative association. 

The Good Bot Traffic:

• The good bot scans the content of your website. It is usually the webcrawler which is also known as the Google bot. 
• The search engine bot allows the indexing of the content on your website. 

The Bad Bot Traffic:

• These kinds of bots are provided when spammy content pops up using some malicious link. 
• These affect the site and make it accessible to the user. 
• These are the click bots that takes the click on the ads. 

How to Detect Bot Traffic

By the help of Google Analytics or any other analytics tool you can clearly analyse the traffic coming to your website and If in case the site is experiencing a bot traffic the report will clearly show about it. 

The Easiest Way: How to Filter and detect Bot Traffic on Google Analytics

It is very crucial to filter the bot traffic as it helps to improve the accuracy of the website and also enhances the automated visit. Let us look at the setup data that shows how to identify and filter bot traffic on Google Analytics: 

1. Log In to your Google Analytics account
2. Select the section ‘Acquisition’ then go to ‘All traffic’ and then choose channels. 
3. Filter out the traffic then. Scroll it down and look for the channels from where the traffic either direct,  referral or organic comes from. 
4. If there is an unexpected increase in traffic you can surely get a look of it. 
5. Click on every channel and see the URL source from where the traffic is coming from. 

Therefore, this traffic can be one of the many ways to understand if your site is actually affected by the bot and if yes from what source these traffic are coming. 

How to Remove Bot Traffic from Google Analytics?

It sounds crucial to remove bot traffic from your website but you shouldn’t think that removing bot traffic will shift you in a safe zone from the effect of any kind of invalid traffic. Let us learn the removal of bot traffic from Google Analytics, first login to the Google Analytics account, and from the admin section click on view settings. The magic shield by magic tag comes as a powerful solution for the app owner to easily detect and block unwanted traffic. 

Find out the boat filtering and then tick it. By pressing save you will be able to keep the boat traffic out of your Google analytic report. 

3 Tips to Avoid Bot Traffic

• Use reCaptcha: This function acts as a Firewall for the protection of your bot attack. It is an advanced technology that filters the bot traffic like any other. 

• robots.txt file: This helps in blocking the traffic related to bot as it crawls through the site. The overloading of traffic can be avoided through this as it clearly segregates between the good bots, spam ones and the search engine bot. 

• Use Bot Mitigation: This bot mitigation solution is used by many companies. It is a machine learning process spread across the internet that understands the traffic source and differentiate between the several bots. 

Conclusion

In case if your site experiences an anomalous bot traffic, make sure that you have done the job of investigating and understanding what bot traffic actually looks like and from where the source is. The fraudulent activity can also be avoided and also make sure that it should not be performed in future. MagicShield not only investigates the ad fraud it also detects the source of the traffic but also enables a strong supply chain protecting it from the bot and the low quality traffic.