Glossary

Bot traffic

Bot traffic is non-human activity in your campaign stats: crawlers, scrapers, click farms, and fraud scripts generating impressions, clicks, or fake conversions. Some of it is benign (search engine and preview bots), some of it is adversarial — designed to drain budgets or fake performance.

How it distorts numbers

Bots click but do not buy, so they inflate clicks and CPC spend while diluting CR and EPC — a placement flooded with bots looks like "cheap traffic that does not convert". Inverted fraud exists too: scripted form fills that inflate conversions and then collapse the approval rate when the advertiser reviews them.

Defenses

The practical toolkit: filter known crawlers by user agent, watch for impossible patterns (zero-second click-to-conversion times, one IP producing hundreds of clicks, datacenter IP ranges), compare traffic-source numbers against your own tracker, and cut placements whose sub-ID slices show bot signatures. Advertisers run the same analysis from their side — which is why traffic quality disputes are settled with click logs, not screenshots.

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