Invalid traffic is a growing concern that is impacting publisher data, measurement analytics, and ad inventory value. Despite this, it’s not always easy for publishers to identify and stop invalid activity. This is why they need to rely on their ad partners and reputable anti-fraud and traffic quality providers for advice and tools.
How does Google prevent invalid traffic?
Publishers often lose more money from invalid traffic than they realize. For example, a click farm scheme may seem like a great idea at first when you’re starting out. However, advertisers quickly catch on to these schemes and will avoid advertising on your site in the long run. This means that you won’t get the ROI that you expect from your website.
Having a strong invalid traffic detection solution can help you to reduce your risk of fraud by filtering out non-human traffic. IAS offers a range of solutions to detect invalid traffic, including IP address blocking, detecting bots and automated behavior, and analyzing user interactions on your site using our traffic quality. This helps to prevent ad fraud and improve your ad revenue.
As a publisher, you should start by identifying suspicious traffic sources on your website and monitoring metrics such as bounce rates, session duration and scroll depth. Sudden increases in these metrics could indicate that your site has been compromised with bot traffic. You can also look for suspicious IP addresses in the packet headers of your web server, which contain information about the browser type and version, OS and metrics.