How bots are draining your advertising budget and no one raises concern.

How bots are draining your advertising budget and no one raises concern.

We all know that there are bots out there, but we never really think about how they could be draining out advertising budgets through fraudulent clicks or fake traffic numbers.  There is always someone out there that seems like the crazy person who says "They are selling fake traffic!" and they're talking about a big platform like Adwords or Facebook, but I'm not convinced that these big platforms would do that.  Now, if you see something online where someone is talking about how a smaller platform is falsifying clicks and inflating their numbers, they're probably correct because the more clicks and traffic sent to a website means the more money they make.

I've run into a few platforms that send me "quality traffic" but my analytics doesn't line up with the clicks I'm getting, which makes me think their numbers are inflated to keep me there and always purchasing more ads.

Many platforms run bots and claim it's real traffic
There are a bunch of ad networks out there that have bots for crawling purposes, but do we really know if those bots are also being counted as visitors or clicks?  We don't, but these big companies are saying we aren't being charged for them, and we are supposed to just trust them I guess lol.

An advertising platform doesn't go from 0 to 1,000,000 users overnight unless they're linked through a bigger corporation like Google or Facebook.  So all of these smaller networks people talk about can't actually be telling the whole truth about what they're doing.  They might have 100,000+ members, but only 3,000 of those members are active, and you sign up thinking you're going to have a ton of traffic but it turns out to be bot traffic, wasting your money.

BuySellAds has been said to inflate their numbers
I have a few ads on a subscription basis through BSA, and I do see inflated numbers, because I'm not getting 100 to 500 clicks a day from my ads like they say lol   My analytics say I am getting around 2,500 clicks a month through my ads there, but my BSA dashboard claims I'm getting much more than that, around 4,500 clicks a month.

This shows me that they have something wrong with their tracking, or somehow I'm getting 2,000 clicks that instantly lose connection before my Analytics can track them lol.

No one raises much concern
One of the main problems with this is that no one really raises a concern because they're afraid of being banned on the platforms they talk about.  Yes, my clicks aren't accurate on BSA, likely to keep me subscribed, but I still pay for my ads because I'm profitable from them.  I don't understand why I'm losing all those clicks, and I'll openly tell people about it, but I'm not really afraid about losing my accounts there since it's not the end of my career if I do

Besides, I can just contact those websites directly and pay them their full asking price for an ad spot instead of them getting 80% of the transaction

Understand your client acquisition costs
Even though you might be getting increased numbers through your ads, which are not actually accurate, you need to know the price of your client acquisitions.  If it takes you $10 to bring a new client on, then a $100 ad on BSA needs to bring in 10 clients a month to help you break even.  This is why I don't track my clicks on there as much as I track my conversions because my profits are whats keeping me buying the ads, not the number of clicks.

I can get 1,000,000 clicks on an ad, but if I'm not getting any sales from it, do you think I'll keep that ad around?  NOPE! 


In conclusion
Big ad platforms like Facebook and AdWords don't really falsify their traffic numbers, mainly because they don't need to please you in order for you to be successful, so I don't worry about them too much.  The smaller ones like BSA and others definitely do boost their numbers to keep you interested and spending more, and that's why you need to track your ads and make sure you know what is converting and what isn't.  Delete the ad spots that don't convert and keep the ones that are profitable.  Do this over and over and you will see yourself profitable even though your ad dashboards have increased numbers


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Tommy Carey