How WordSeed protects your campaigns against bots

At WordSeed, our mission is to drive high-quality traffic into all stages of your marketing funnel. We achieve this by connecting you with premium publishers who craft compelling content about your brand and products. Their readers visit your website genuinely interested in what you offer.

Yet, the internet is rife with bots. While exact figures vary, CloudFlare—one of the world’s leading hosting and internet providers—reported that bots accounted for approximately 31% of their network traffic in the past year. At WordSeed, we’ve observed even higher levels of bot traffic, attributing over half of all recorded traffic during the same period to bots. The good news? We shield our advertiser budgets from all of it.

Other networks face similar challenges, with third-party providers offering tools to protect CPC budgets on platforms like Google and Bing. At WordSeed, we take a different approach: we proactively guard your budget against bot traffic without relying on external tools, ensuring maximum value for every campaign you run with us.

How we identify unwanted traffic

We use a variety of systems to determine whether traffic is from bots or not. These include use of both our own proprietary technology, and of third party commercial tools.

Some of these checks are run ‘in real-time’, while others are run retro-actively, after the traffic has been redirected. As a result, if you visit your WordSeed dashboard regularly you will come across instance where clicks that have been recorded a short while ago, will suddenly disappear from your billing, as our retro-active checks have identified that traffic was likely from bots.

Some of the criteria we use to make our determination include:

  • We use cookies and other browser fingerprinting techniques to identify unique devices and users.
  • We use tools to identify the type of end user (e.g. whether it’s a residential or business user), and their internet service provider.
  • We look at traffic patterns: E.g. if an individual device or user records a large number of clicks over a short period of time, this is likely to be unwanted traffic.
  • We look at the source demographics of any given traffic, and compare it your target demography.
  • In some cases we show CAPTCHAs to test whether traffic is bot traffic or not.
  • We use firewalls and other techniques to identify outright malicious traffic, e.g. traffic that’s attempting to perform SQL injection or other malware attacks.
  • Most important of all we perform regular audits – both automated and manual – to review and fine-tune our criteria and signals, to ensure we never fall behind.

What we do with unwanted traffic

Using signals from the tests above, as well as other factors, we then grade traffic into three groups, and take appropriate action of each of these:

  1. Traffic that we are certain is from humans. This is simply processed in the normal way.
  2. Traffic that we think is likely from bots (or otherwise unwanted), but we are not quite sure. We pass this traffic through to your website, but do not charge for it. Whilst doing so means we lose out on potential revenue, we believe this is the best course of action given that there is a chance genuine visitors may be included in this grouping. And, it’s the right thing for any genuine visitors, who would otherwise have a poor experience if we simply blocked them.
  3. Traffic we are certain is from bots, or outright malicious. This traffic is completely blocked by our systems, and never makes it onto your website. We do this both to protect your site from DOS and other malicious traffic.

Further things we can do.

We don’t stop here though: We use the amount of unwanted traffic as one of the signals when optimising your CPC Monthly Awareness Campaign. If you are running a CPC Monthly Awareness Campaign with WordSeed we can pro-actively and automatically identify publishers that are likely to send the highest quality traffic to your site, and use this as one signal to shift budget towards these high performing publishers.

We hope this overview has provided valuable insights into how we identify and address bots and other unwanted traffic, ensuring your WordSeed budget is protected and your website remains secure from harmful activity. Don’t hesitate to contact the team directly if further information is required.

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