Publishers affected by Bot.Traffic in Google Analytics

This post was most recently updated on November 7th, 2022

Between 31 January – 3 February 2021, many publishers noticed an influx of spam bot traffic in their Google Analytics accounts. It might have looked something like this:

As you can see from the screenshot above, there was a 5000+ traffic spike on Sunday 31 January 2021 to a page called bottraffic.live. Actually, that page does not exist. When you search bottraffic.live, you’ll be directed to a website that sells traffic. It’s a smart way to gain quick traction and possibly free advertising.

If the traffic sent was with fraudulent intent, nobody knows. However, as any type of fraudulent, spam, bot, or invalid traffic, it can put publishers who monetize traffic with digital advertising at significant risk.

If you use AdSense, Google Ad Exchange, or any other ad network to monetize your ad inventory, protecting your ad network accounts from invalid traffic is critical. If Google deems that your site gets too much invalid traffic, first, you’ll get revenue clawbacks, which means you end up losing ad revenue.

To make matters worse, the ad revenue you lost, you could have earned through legitimate traffic sources. If things turn really bad, which is possible if you don’t take steps to protect yourself properly, you can get banned from Google ad networks like AdSense. Getting your AdSense account back afterward is nearly impossible. Although there might be some workarounds, you will undoubtedly lose a ton of ad revenue and have to jump through many hoops to save your publisher business.

Why don’t you just filter out bot traffic in Google Analytics?

You might read other articles about this bot traffic event and see how they show you to filter out Google Analytics traffic. That might sound great at first until you realize what filtering out traffic really means. It simply means to remove it from your Google Analytics account view.

It doesn’t mean that the bot or fraudulent traffic all of a sudden disappears and that you’re now safe from the effects of invalid traffic.

So many publishers miss this. Invalid traffic is a huge problem for the digital advertising industry. Google and other ad networks have a solid negative stance against it. It makes sense. They need advertisers to run their ad networks. If you keep getting bots that click on your ads and result in no real conversions or leads, why would you advertise with them?

What to do and how to protect yourself from fraudulent traffic?

Now that you understand the bigger picture let me introduce you to Traffic Cop. Traffic Cop is MonetizeMore’s invalid traffic detection and protection solution that’s even won us the Google Innovation award of 2020.

It uses machine learning and fingerprinting algorithms to detect invalid and then prevent it from seeing your ads. What makes our solution so unique and successful is that you stop invalid traffic dead in its tracks from viewing and clicking on your ads. This way, you greatly minimize your risk of receiving revenue clawbacks and prevent your ad accounts from getting banned.

Are you ready to kick invalid traffic to the curb and protect your ad accounts once and for all? Sign up for Traffic Cop 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.