The impact of invalid traffic on your marketing

At some point, you have probably wondered why your ad campaigns cost a lot of money and bring a lot of clicks, but real customers still stay away. One of the problems could be invalid traffic (IVT) to your marketing campaigns. Invalid traffic comes about in very different ways, and each has a different impact on your marketing.

What is invalid traffic (IVT)?

Invalid traffic is a term used to describe any form of non-human traffic. While most people consider only malicious bots as invalid traffic, there are also examples of non-malicious traffic that fall into the invalid traffic category, such as competitors, click farms, crawlers, and so on.

As a general rule of thumb, invalid traffic cannot convert and become a legitimate customer of your business.

We can break down the damage done by invalid traffic into 3 pillars:

• Ad Spend Waste
• Polluted Analytics
• Polluted Funnel

Fake Clicks

The biggest concern with invalid traffic for your marketing campaigns is fake clicks. Not only does it cost you money, but it also leads to skewed remarketing lists, polluted analytics, and can even mess up your opt-in rates. The goal of fraudsters who use bots to click ads is to move money from your budget into their pockets.

It is estimated that 17% of all ad clicks are fake, and the entire digital advertising industry will lose $23 billion in the U.S. and $68 billion globally by 2022 (Juniper Research).

Fake remarketing

Bot developers are smart people. To make their bots look and act like a human and have a “browsing history”, they want their bots to collect cookies and remarketing pixels from a variety of different websites and e-commerce stores. Simply put, bots pretend to shop online. They visit various (e-commerce) websites, add high-value items to their shopping carts to be seen as potentially valuable customers, and are therefore also tagged for remarketing. The more “browsing history” a bot has, the more it looks like a real human.

The consequences for you as an advertiser are bots in your remarketing lists and high cost-per-clicks (CPCs) due to the fake clicks mentioned above.

Skewed audiences

As a marketer, you work with target audiences in one way or another. This may be a campaign that promotes your product to a specific demographic, or a campaign that promotes your service to a specific geographic location. You want to have target audiences for your marketing efforts, to make the most of them and reduce scatter. What you may not know is that your audience is most likely already polluted with bots.

Similar to how bots mimic a “browsing history”, they also pretend to be a real person by sending various signals – including geographic location and demographic data. As a result, your campaign gets contaminated by them without your knowledge. The problem gets worse when you create similar audiences based on an already polluted audience – you will only attract more bad visitors who have absolutely no intention of converting. If you do not clean up your audiences first, you will repeat the same problem over and over again.

Inaccurate optimization

Advertising platforms try to optimize your ad campaigns with their algorithms based on various KPIs like click-through rate or form submissions. Every time a user with certain characteristics clicks on your ad, the algorithm tries to show your ad to similar users to optimize the delivery of your ads. The big problem with this is that bots click on ads much more often than humans, so ad delivery optimization gets skewed. The more bots click on your ads, the more bots will see your ad.

The same goes for optimizing the sources that your ad is clicked on most often. If algorithms see higher click-through rates on website A compared to website B, they will increase bids or budget allocation to website A instead of website B. What the algorithms can’t see and take into account is that most clicks on website A come from bots. So, the algorithm allocates a larger portion of your budget to fraudsters running website A. This can even go so far that your ads are seen for the most part by bots and not by real people.