Bot traffic detection for media buyers

Spend rarely goes bad evenly. On native, push and pop networks your budget is spread across thousands of zones, sites and widgets, often resold through feeds you never see, and bot traffic concentrates in a few of them. Search and social leak differently, through partner inventory and extended placements rather than open zones.

The network reports all of it as one campaign line. A healthy CTR and a poor conversion rate can both be true at once, because a handful of placements send visits nobody was behind while the rest of the campaign works. Pausing the campaign throws out the good placements with the bad ones, and guessing from CTR cuts the wrong ones.

1. Tag the URL. Add the network’s own tokens for zone, site, publisher, widget and campaign to your landing-page URL. The tracking-token directory lists them per network, in each network’s own macro syntax.
2. Add one script. It loads asynchronously on the landing page and adds nothing to the click path.
3. Let visits come in. Every paid visit is judged Valid or Invalid, with its evidence, and attributed to the source that sent it.
4. Read the Cut list. Sources ranked worst-first by their share of Invalid visits, with evidence in your dashboard for each row.
5. Cut in the network. Export the IDs and paste them into the network’s block list. Where each network lets you block, and by what unit.

Cutting is half the job. The other half is knowing which placements deserve more budget. Sort the same report the other way and the sources with the cleanest visits rise to the top: the zones worth whitelisting, bidding up or moving into a campaign of their own.

If you send conversions to ValidVisit by server-side postback, the conversions report shows which ones came from Invalid visits. That matters whenever a network optimizes on your conversion signal: a sub-source firing conversions from visits nobody was behind looks like a winner to the algorithm, and to you.

“Something feels off” doesn’t get a credit. A list of zone IDs, visit counts and verdicts gets a conversation, and on networks whose terms allow it, a credit request. Policies and deadlines differ widely: what each network’s own terms say about refunds.

ValidVisit never writes to your ad accounts. It measures and hands you the list; the exclusion, the bid change and the refund request stay yours. Why we detect without blocking.