One of the biggest threats to digital marketers is the prevalence of invalid traffic. It affects the credibility of your business, reduces the value of genuine impressions, increases bandwidth, and causes overload on your servers. It can even lead to data theft. It also ruins your brand identity. If you’re not aware of invalid traffic, you may be wasting resources by using audience extension services to increase traffic to your site.
A high bounce rate is another sign of invalid traffic. Even worse, it may indicate a poorly optimized ad. While traffic spikes can occur naturally during the course of a campaign, they are indicative of invalid traffic. If you notice a constant surge of traffic, and no additional conversions, you might be dealing with invalid traffic.
Believe it or not, IPQualityScore can help you get rid of fake traffic and click fraud. This is because IPQS filters bots and non-human traffic in real time, thereby preventing SPAM, click fraud and fraudulent orders. You can benefit from IPQualityScore, regardless of your size and industry.
What is IVT or Invalid Traffic?
Invalid Traffic is nonhuman activity that is not related to human beings. It can be the result of automated tools or robots or even fake human users. It can also be a result of advertising botnets. All of these activities reduce the return on advertising spend and detract from revenue targets. Juniper Research estimates that ad fraud will cost advertisers $100 billion by 2023.
First of all, you need to understand the nature of invalid traffic. It can be confused with an authentic audience. Data center traffic, in particular, is often unrelated to the audience of a website. To counter this, publishers should use tools to identify data-center IP addresses. These third-party tools can also help them identify particular IPs or domains that may be causing invalid traffic. In case your website is getting high amounts of IVT, try experimenting with several paid media sources.
Google Adsense and IVT
Unrealistic results are a common symptom of invalid traffic. A high bounce rate, a consistent spike in traffic, and no additional ad revenues can be a sign of invalid traffic. If you’ve been experiencing a high bounce rate or inconsistent traffic spikes, you may want to reconsider your campaigns and/or your campaign timing.
The first step in determining if you’re suffering from invalid traffic is to analyze your website’s traffic profiles. Your website’s traffic profile can help you identify a high-risk segment of invalid traffic. The higher the percentage of invalid traffic, the higher the chances you’ll see ad fraud. It’s important to check all aspects of your website’s traffic profile for suspicious traffic patterns.
Type of Invalid Traffic or IVT
Invalid Traffic can be categorized into 2 types, namely, General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT).
General Invalid Traffic (GIVT)
The term “General Invalid Traffic” refers to traffic sent by machines, bots, or crawlers without a human intent. These types of traffic are harmless and have limited impact on websites, but can alter measurement analytics. If your website suddenly experiences a sudden spike in traffic, it might be caused by GIVT. It’s not impossible to filter out GIVT, though. There are several methods to do so, including using lists, standardized parameter checks, or a combination of both.
General invalid traffic is the least harmful type of invalid traffic. It does not generate fraudulent revenue and is typically generated by benign sources. The sources that generate this type of traffic include antivirus software crawlers, measurement bots, and analytics crawlers. These methods do not require malicious intent, but they can create a false impression of legitimacy. However, if a website is properly monitored for GIVT, it can be identified and filtered out in real-time.
If you notice any unusual behaviors, chances are your website is receiving invalid traffic. You may want to hire a third-party ad fraud solution like IPQS to check your traffic.
Statistics show that approximately 10% of all web traffic is invalid. To avoid falling into this trap, check your Google Analytics regularly and exclude any suspicious traffic.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) is a malignant type of traffic that is created by malicious media operators to steal advertising costs from legitimate media and increase their rewards. SIVT uses various tactics to trick advertising platforms and increase their profits, including Hidden Ads, which appear as legitimate advertisements but steal advertising revenue.
Subsequently, sophisticated invalid traffic is harder to detect than GIVT. This type of traffic requires sophisticated analytics and human involvement to identify. Its most common forms include: hijacked devices, injected ads without user consent or payment, emulators, and malware. It can also appear as mobile traffic, confusing advertisers. As a result, it’s essential to understand how SIVT works and how to detect it.
Creative hijacking is another method used by fraudsters. In this case, ad calls and tags are copied, without the advertiser’s or publisher’s knowledge. Moreover, creative hijacking occurs in untrustworthy environments. Data center traffic, on the other hand, is a highly sophisticated form of invalid traffic, requiring sophisticated analytics and multi-point coordination. While avoiding SIVT, publishers should still be cautious when dealing with these fraudulent practices.
General invalid traffic can be identified by routine checks, lists of crawlers or spiders, and other methods. More sophisticated invalid traffic, or SIVT, requires advanced analytics and a large amount of human intervention to identify. General invalid traffic includes bots that look like real visitors, adware, fraudulent incentivized promotion, and malicious proxy traffic. Sophisticated invalid traffic, on the other hand, involves human and non-human traffic that is not relevant to a business’s goals.
While GIVT is more visible and generally represents fraudulent activity, sophisticated invalid traffic is more difficult to identify, and it almost always involves the use of proxy traffic, bots, and fraudulent browsers. It is often associated with large spikes of traffic, and can be confused with positive growth.
Because of the complexity of fraud techniques, SIVT detection is a vital part of digital ad fraud protection. General IVT detection methods are only effective for detecting basic botnet activity and traffic patterns. However, sophisticated invalid traffic requires more sophisticated methods, such as OS fingerprinting, dynamic honeypots, and network behavior analysis.
IPQualityScore Solution for IVT
An IPQualityScore solution for invalid traffic aims to protect your website from the countless fraudulent clicks and impressions from botnets, proxies, and other fraudulent users. IPQS uses a unique combination of fraud checkers to determine the true origin of a visitor’s IP address. IPQS is a simple to use and cost-effective solution that works in real time.
Why is it important to use IVT solutions?
If your site receives large amounts of invalid traffic, you may be looking for a solution to address this problem. This solution can help you reduce instances of fraud, chargebacks, and duplicate accounts. It can also increase sales and eliminate duped users.
Invalid traffic is a growing problem for publishers. Publishers are at risk of getting their Google AdSense account disabled if they receive large amounts of invalid traffic. There is little or no warning from Google prior to disabling a publisher account. Also, Google’s policies on invalid traffic are vague. If your IPQualityScore is lower than the industry standard, you are in danger of losing your AdSense account.
How to prevent AdSense ban via IPQualityScore solution?
First of all, make sure to avoid invalid traffic. You must not click your own ads, encourage bots to click your ads, or buy traffic from low quality sources. These methods may lead to your AdSense account being banned. After you have identified the invalid traffic source, you can take necessary steps to prevent this from happening.
Once you have identified the sources of invalid traffic, you can try appealing for a reinstatement. When doing so, be sure to mention that you took the necessary measures to prevent bot clicks. Google wants to know that you have taken measures to prevent bot clicks. If your appeal is not successful, you can send it directly to Google. In this way, you can be sure that you will get your account back.
A backend API call is the most efficient way to avoid invalid traffic. Usually, this API call returns a response within a few hundred milliseconds, which does not affect user experience. For added protection, you can also deploy JavaScript traffic filters. While some bots disable JavaScript to avoid reputation checks, JavaScript traffic filters protect your ads from IVT advertising fraud. In this way, you can prevent AdSense invalid traffic.
Invalid traffic can strain your relationship with advertisers. You should do everything you can to prevent invalid traffic and fake clicks from ruining your ad account. And IPQS can protect you from the ad spy tools and competitors with just a few clicks.
Why does IPQualityScore work?
Using an IP quality score to assess a website’s traffic is one of the best ways to combat fraud, click fraud, and SPAM. IP quality score reviews IP address details and other data. These data include connection type, ISP, organization, and fraud and abuse history. You can filter out non-human traffic with IPQS’s real-time filters. This makes IP quality score the perfect tool for any site, regardless of size or industry.
IPQualityScore’s suite of fraud prevention tools prevents fraudulent activities and bad actors by automating quality control. IP reputation data blocks cyber threats, protects your website from duplicate accounts, and prevents chargebacks. Ultimately, IP quality score improves your reputation in the eyes of customers, boosting sales and preventing fraudulent activity. It’s time to invest in a high-quality IP reputation score system that will improve your business and make your customers happy.
IPQualityScore has developed anti-fraud solutions and tools to protect ecommerce websites and organizations from fraudsters. The software uses device fingerprinting, email address verification, and other forensic factors to score visitors and block them. It then automatically blacklists high-risk users and prevents them from buying anything. The IPQS Proxy Detection tool offers detailed reporting to help you understand your visitor’s identity and weed out fake accounts.
Bottom Line
Invalid traffic can be the number one killer of your ad campaign. Click fraud, fake account, SPAM, fraudulent orders, and more can all be caused by non-human traffic. IPQS filters non-human traffic in real-time, ensuring that your website is free of bots and other harmful traffic. IPQualityScore is an excellent solution for any website, no matter what size it is!