Some Weird Kind of Arbitrage? Or Click Fraud? Or What? (Weird stats)

xmcp123

xmcp123

Well-known member
Sep 20, 2007
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www.slightlyshadyseo.com
Ok. So I just woke up to check my stats on a campaign, and I was a bit surprised. This landing page wasn't doing jack shit for revenue yesterday(low LP CTR), and generally has a pretty low LP CTR.
But this morning, I see a new domain my ad is showing up on. No sales have resulted yet, but the CTR coming from this completely unrelated domain is insane.
I can tell from the referrers they're running PPC campaigns from MIVA and AdOn.

On a fresh LP that so far has had a low LP CTR(I know I know, it's a work in progress), this is what the CTR coming off this domain looks like.

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So none of these people are ordering(yet). The domain it's all coming from has nothing to do with the offer I'm promoting.

So what do you think is going on?
Should I let the traffic roll or reign it back?

Quite honestly I just don't think the LP is this good, and don't understand why it would spike in LP CTR consistently for just one domain. Part of me feels like they're bots.
 


Maybe click fraud. But if you're getting clicks and some time goes by and you have no conversions, it's garbage traffic anyway and you should just pause it.

If this JUST started and you've only spent $10-50, I'd let it roll a bit longer.
 
I'd say get enough data, see what (if) you're earning, go from there. Guessing whether or not its bot traffic (or some portion is) won't change whatever its current value to you actually is. If you are testing a placement, you gotta complete the test, whatever that means to you. Later if the traffic source sucks overall, you can say hey I think your traffic is fradulent, here's why, I want a refund.

When I had insane click fraud from facebook I just bid according to true epc, and most of my campaigns were still profitable albeit with much less volume.
 
I had the same thing happen to a tune of ~$1000 from Yahoo.

Average CTR on the page was ~30% - they dialed in the bot at 85% - after $1000 not a SINGLE sale while average from those clicking through was in the teens.

IP blocks very similar- 100% click fraud in my case and Yahoo reimburced.
 
It's probably your standard arbi campaign + they send random bots or click frauders to pad the stats with CTOs so you'll wait longer before blocking them. It's a pretty smart plan but from screenshot, it looks like they're overdoing it a bit too much.
 
click fraud.

the two mentioned ad sources are loaded with it, as is pretty much all third tier ppc traffic...however there is some decent traffic in these sources its just harder to find & isolate
 
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