- Joined
- May 2, 2018
- Messages
- 4,913
Most trackers now show some kind of bot % in their reports. Skro has Bot Visits, MaxConv has Suspicious %, and BeMob has a whole set of Suspicious columns you can buy as add-ons.
And I always use Adscore on my campaigns, so I kept seeing two different bot numbers for the same traffic. One from the tracker, and one from Adscore. And they almost never match.
So which one should you trust?
The problem with testing this on real traffic is that you never know what the truth is. If a tracker says 5% bots and Adscore says 30%, who's right? You can't tell, because you don't know which visitors were actually bots.
So I did it the other way around. I built the bots myself. That way I knew exactly what every single visit was, and I could see which tool caught it and which one didn't.
And I always use Adscore on my campaigns, so I kept seeing two different bot numbers for the same traffic. One from the tracker, and one from Adscore. And they almost never match.
So which one should you trust?
The problem with testing this on real traffic is that you never know what the truth is. If a tracker says 5% bots and Adscore says 30%, who's right? You can't tell, because you don't know which visitors were actually bots.
So I did it the other way around. I built the bots myself. That way I knew exactly what every single visit was, and I could see which tool caught it and which one didn't.
My results
- Trackers tested: BeMob, Skro, MaxConv (my existing accounts, default settings)
- Anti-fraud: Adscore (JavaScript tag on the landing page)
- Bots sent through trackers: 1,500 (500 per tracker, from the US and Indonesia)
- Bot types: 5, from a simple script up to a "stealth"
