Use: Effectively identifying fraudulent traffic, isolating it from the performing sources, and preventing it from reaching landing pages in real-time.
The Feature: Fraudulent Traffic Redirect
The result: 28.38% C2L Decrease
Saved Amount: $27,892/ two months
When it comes to advertising, the most important thing is to have accurate statistics from the tests that you run. Otherwise, you can’t properly optimize your campaigns and end up losing clients, time, and money on bad traffic sources.
In the email marketing industry, there are certain factors that you need to thoroughly analyze, such as: deliverability, open rate, click rate, and so on. And the same goes for SMS campaigns.
You need the data to understand if the people at the other end of the email or text are interested, when they’re most active, or what triggers them. Getting false information means that your campaign can completely go in the gutter, and your valuable clients along with them.
But all these problems could be a matter of the past if you’d keep fake traffic away from your campaigns. And that is exactly what we’ll learn about today, by checking the experience one of our clients had. Spoiler alert: they also tell us how they effectively redirected bot traffic for good with our help.
Continue reading to find out more and see how one of our clients did it.
Our client was getting suspicious traffic reports
A successful marketing agency, with clients from all over the world needed help in identifying the source of some unusual results. The targets were two of their main traffic generation means, email and SMS campaigns.
To best track their performance they were dividing the clicks by the number of conversions (C2L). And since that number was too high for their expectations, they were suspecting some kind of fraudulent activity. However, their in-house fraud detection software was giving them some very small numbers of bot traffic.
Here are their results for the month of June, before they started using Adex:
As you can see from the numbers above, our client’s built-in fraud tracking software was picking up roughly 3.90% bot traffic for the mailing campaign, and 1.42% for the SMS campaign. Clearly, that was not much of a cause for concern, but it also was something you would want to ignore.
Having a cost of roughly $2,500 for both campaigns, that would’ve definitely triggered his clients. Luckily he found it in time, and didn’t charge his clients pointlessly.
However, when he ran a traffic check with our software he found a rather different, more gloomy situation. He got a lot more alerts than what he was expecting.
Based on our findings the client had paid for 213,090 bot clicks for the Mailing campaign, and 199,640 clicks with the SMS campaign, in June. This explained his cause of concern.
A strong defense is the best offense: Traffic Redirect
Having passed through this unpleasant experience, the client was set to never having to deal with bot infected traffic again. So in addition to using our software to clean his traffic, he also wanted a more permanent solution that would help him keep bad traffic away from his system and his client’s campaigns.
That was when we suggested using our Fraudulent Traffic Redirect solution. Our software makes sure to scan the traffic and automatically redirect to another page any users that would trigger the system for fraudulent activity.
With this system, our client ends up with clean and accurate statistics, while his client’s campaigns are optimized based on actual data. In addition, he doesn’t need to close performing campaigns, when he can’t identify the source of the fake clicks. Read more about the Adex Bot Traffic Redirect.
Detecting and Redirecting Fraud Traffic in the Mailing Campaigns with Adex
The main campaigns that he was conducting for his clients were through emails, and they were recording a pretty impressive number of clicks. However, their click to conversion rate (C2L) was still higher than usual – 16.
And that’s when our client knew it was time to turn to Adex for help with their suspicious traffic.
In fact, when we checked the issue, we discovered that a lot more of their traffic was generated by bots. Understanding that they would’ve lost a lot more had we stopped the campaigns, we just removed all the bot infected slices.
Doing so we managed to decrease their C2L. Now that he was away from fraudulent ad traffic, he could finally start gathering some valuable, real-traffic data, and continue to improve his relationship with his clients. Here is what he had to say about our success.
“Here are all the original stats from July only for the mailing project. Below, you can see our C2L if you remove from our clicks the BOTS CLICKS. It was reduced by more than 19.35%. Without Adex we would’ve stopped campaigns where the C2L was not as bad as we thought”.
In the table above, you can see his results for the month of July. We picked up and redirected 5 times more bot traffic compared to what their in-built fraud traffic detecting software found in June. Given that the traffic volumes were similar to those for the month of July, we can safely assume that so was their fake traffic.
In conclusion, if the client would’ve stopped the campaigns, he would’ve lost 948,150 clicks and 67,725 conversions, which brought him and his clients a very good income. Alternatively, if he would’ve continued with his build-in fraudulent traffic software, he would’ve charged his clients approximately $9,126 for bot clicks.
How Adex Identified and Redirected Fraud Traffic in the SMS Campaigns
Aside from email campaigns, this advertiser was also sending text messages for his clients. Yet, the SMS campaigns were also registering some strange C2L numbers. In fact, with these campaigns the situation was a lot worse, having a click to conversion ratio of 69 for the month of June.
Our client was charging a lot for clicks that did not finalize in conversions. So, clearly he ran our analysis on the traffic and we managed to discover that a lot of their activity was in fact generated by bots.
Below you can see the numbers that our client collected for his SMS campaign, during the months of July and August. His C2L for July would’ve been 46.3, but thanks to our technology he managed to contain it to little over 31.
“The same with the SMS project, here the C2L is reduced by 32.39% which is a huge amount.”
In fact, the bot traffic which we picked up for July is 18 times higher than what their in-built fraud traffic system was getting.
And here you can see his results for the month of August. The C2L decreased by over 33.39%, meaning that he saved his clients from paying huge amounts for fake clicks.
As you can see we were redirecting 20 times more bot traffic than what the client got for the month of June with this built-in solution.
Keep in mind that had he not used Adex, this client would’ve stopped the SMS campaigns that helped him generate 35,690 conversions, and 1,628,989 clicks for his clients during these two months.
Since we took the same measure of removing the infected slices and allowing the advertiser to continue making profit with his campaigns, we gave him a solid, proactive crisis management strategy.
What can you learn from this
Identifying bot traffic before they can harm your credibility is essential. But not having to deal with fake statistics and being able to create effective campaigns is even better. This client learned the hard way what fraud traffic means for ongoing campaigns.
Remember: The Adex effective fraud activity detecting and redirecting software can keep bots from infecting your campaign data.
Our in-depth traffic analysis helps us identify and eliminate faulty slices. This way you and your clients can continue running successful campaigns. Together with our traffic redirect algorithm we can ensure that bots will never infect your stats again, and your clients enjoy only the cleanest traffic from you.
Do you think that you’re the victim of bot traffic? Book and Appointment with Adex now, to find out how clean your traffic really is.
