How does Traffic Cop impact site speed and user experience?

This post was most recently updated on October 31st, 2022

The Media Rating Council (MRC) classifies invalid traffic into two types: General invalid traffic (GIVT) and Sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT). GIVT is the “good bot,” which refers to industry known crawlers or spiders that scan the page and is not meant to mimic human behavior. Not all GIVT is good and can be good or bad. The key is their simplicity, which makes it easy to detect them. Good bots are simple because they are not trying to hide.

SIVT, on the other hand, is the “bad bot” that’s intended to fraud, mimics human behavior, and is hard to detect and identify.

It takes the most advanced and sophisticated technology to sniff out fraud. This is what makes Traffic Cop the most reliable tool to safeguard your hard-earned money.

See below actual clawback data showing how Traffic Cop was able to save one of our biggest publisher partner’s Google ad revenues when they signed up in September 2019:

Learn more about how to protect your Google account from invalid traffic and clawbacks on PubGuru University.

Traffic Cop doesn’t block traffic. It blocks ads.

The fact that Traffic Cop only blocks ads from loading until a suspicious user solves the captcha is one of the reasons why this tool lightens the load of a site while protecting your ad revenues. Instead of further adding load to the site, lessens it. Traffic Cop will stop your ads from serving to a suspicious user until they prove otherwise.

For a user to continue using the site as normal and get rid of the captcha popup, there’s only one way to do that – solve it and proceed.

Here’s a comparison for a site before and after Traffic Cop was deployed, tested on Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse:

List of IP addresses updated daily

Traffic Cop is backed by the most extensive database of internationally blacklisted IP addresses. There’s zero chance these cybercriminals can escape the exceptional screening process that Traffic Cop is programmed to perform. Not to mention, advanced machine learning with sophisticated fingerprinting algorithms used to identify and block ad fraud.

No effect on SEO ranking

Here are a few things that could negatively impact your SEO ranking: poor site speed, broken links, and images, bad redirects, getting lots of low quality traffic. Traffic Cop, from the hundreds of sites it’s been running on, not a single one had issues with SEO after it was deployed. It might even have had a positive effect on rankings because of the improved quality of traffic on sites.

Traffic Cop can identify “good” bots too. Crawler bots necessary for SEO are therefore not blocked at all.

Choose between Google reCaptcha or Traffic Cop captcha.

Publishers have the flexibility to choose whether to use Google’s reCaptcha or Traffic Cop captcha for suspicious users. You have most likely encountered Google ReCaptcha before – those that ask you to click on boxes with trees or type in the alphanumeric characters you see. Traffic Cop is different – it can ask to solve a basic formula (that even a 5-yr old can answer), which is a simpler version and better for user experience.

There are 4 possible scenarios

Step 1: True negative

Human traffic browsing the site is identified to be genuinely human.

• Happens 99.9% of the time on sites with clean traffic.
• Ads load as normal.
• Browsing experience as usual.
• The user won’t even notice Traffic Cop running in the background.

Step 2: True positive

Bot traffic is identified as bot.

• Ads are blocked from loading.
• Bots can’t click or generate ad impressions.
• Captcha popup is served.

Step 3: False negative

Genuine traffic is accidentally identified as bot.

• The chance of this happening is 0.01-0.02% (1 or 2 for every 100,000).
• Ads are blocked, the captcha is served.
• Ads are served once captcha is solved.
• Ad Engineering and Data Science teams are constantly improving the tech to get this to 0%.

Step 4: False positive

Bot traffic is accidentally identified as human.

• The chance of this happening is 0.01-0.02% (1 or 2 for every 100,000).
• Ad Engineering and Data Science teams are continually improving the tech to get this to 0%.

Conclusion

As you can see, Traffic Cop neither hurts SEO rankings or user experience. Have you been suffering from invalid traffic clawbacks? Stop risking your ad accounts with Traffic Cop! Sign up today!

Kean Graham

Kean Graham is the CEO and founder of MonetizeMore & a pioneer in the Adtech Industry. He is the resident expert in Ad Optimization, covering areas like Adsense Optimization,GAM Management, and third-party ad network partnerships. Kean believes in the supremacy of direct publisher deals and holistic optimization as keys to effective and consistent ad revenue increases.