Using bot protection tools will help prioritise the human visitors clicking on your ads and visiting your website. 

Removing bots from your digital marketing campaigns isn’t an easy task, but there are tools which can be deployed which will improve your Cost Per Human Visitor (CPHV). 

While this is one of the hardest metrics to isolate and quantify, bot protection suites in combination with other cybersecurity methods, will help keep the non-human visitors – both malicious and otherwise – from your digital marketing campaigns and your analytics. 

In turn, these lead to an increase in genuine visitors, the ones who have the ability to not only click on an advert, but to follow through with an enquiry or purchase of your products or services. 

Measuring metrics is complicated 

As anyone working in digital marketing knows, metrics are a tricky thing to measure for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the social media platforms aren’t necessarily as transparent as they should be. 

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is currently facing a class action lawsuit in the US over claims it fraudulently inflated its “potential reach” to advertisers and received billions of dollars it wasn’t entitled to. 

And Google was recently in hot water over its YouTube advertising with an article in the Wall Street Journal claiming around 80% of Google’s video-ad placements on third-party sites violated promised standards. The company denies the research is accurate. 

With all this confusion over metrics, it’s not hard to understand why advertisers might feel wary about committing their money to advertising on social media platforms. 

Bots can account for a substantial portion of all traffic from paid digital ads (PPC and promoted social posts), often up to 30% and, in some cases, in excess of 60%.  

When this is combined with wasted ad spend from fake clicks or interactions by bots, the scale of the effect on ROAS is clear and Juniper Research is predicting nearly $1b will be lost to ad fraud by the end of 2024. 

What can we do to prioritise human visitors? 

There are a number of methods to identify bot clicks, some are easier than others and most start with Google Analytics.  Checking Google Analytics on a regular basis makes it easier to spot irregularities which may be down to bot clicks.  

Monitoring the average number of page views, average session time, and the source of the referrer traffic makes it easier to spot bot visitors which don’t follow the same patterns. 

The true measure of success of any ad campaign is the number of humans driven to a website in order to engage with either a product or a purchase. 

Veracity CEO Nigel Bridges (pictured above) said: “We have found that, as an industry, we are fixated by CPM, number of impressions, etc. These are not great measures due to the size of the bot fraud and distance from the end business metrics (how much did I actually sell…?).  

“This is why we (Veracity) focus on the number of humans/bots that end up on a website, as this is the actual point of business impact. Our aim is to drive the number of human website visitors up by driving the number of bot website visitors down for the available budget.” 

Bot protection tools help protect your business

Using bot protection suites like Veracity Trust Network’s Web Threat Protection and Ad Fraud Prevention (AFP) also means you can start to reduce the number of non-human visitors in your network, whether that’s via digital marketing or through direct traffic to your website. 

Bot-inflated numbers might impress potential clients, but they’re not actually going to help your business grow and they certainly won’t help you to understand why your campaigns are working or how much your CPHV is. 

You need to have accurate data to start benchmarking from and Veracity’s Ad Fraud Prevention’s patented, AI-powered solution blocks fake traffic, increases conversions and produces data you can actually trust. 

Through the use of adaptive bot blocking intelligence, AFP identifies whether that session is a valid user, or a malicious bot, and takes steps to remove the non-human visitors via a number of methods. 

If a bot is identified, it’s automatically excluded, meaning any further advertising will never be presented to it again, helping reduce the number of fake visitors coming through a digital ad campaign on all the major social media networks. 

Nigel added: “The increase in bots is, unfortunately, a sad reflection of the world that we live in, which is why our bot protection suite’s Machine Learning (ML) algorithms will increase in effectiveness over time, but we can never reduce the bot percentage ‘clicking through’ on any advertising campaign or website down to zero.” 

The main purpose of Veracity’s AFP is to drive more human visitors through for the ad spend – increasing the efficiency of the advertising campaigns themselves. 

For one client, genuine human visitors were increased by 59% while another saw invalid traffic reduced from 45% to 7%, both demonstrating the effectiveness of improvement which can be obtained. 

Our technology began as a tool to intelligently detect click fraud and save money for businesses using online advertising.  

Once it became clear that our AI-powered detection engine could do even more and protect people from legitimately dangerous bot attacks and compromised data, we expanded its reach and developed Web Threat Protection. 

Web Threat Protection and Ad Fraud Prevention integrate seamlessly with your security stack. By combining both products, you can rest assured your marketing, and your website are protected from malicious bots. 

Start protecting your business with a free 14-day traffic audit. 

12th Sep 2024