How do detect fake traffic???

Hello,

Does anyone knows how to detect fake traffic?You know when you buy those packages of "unique visitors" from traffic selling websites,how can you be sure it's real people coming to your website??? I recently came across a lot of "fake traffic generator" scripts on hotsrcipt.com,and im starting to believe that none of those unique visitors are real!!!!!!And some people even use them to increase there page impressions for the ads to pay more.....

Thanks,

 

If the fake traffic is from robots, put an image on your website that runs a script counting the number of times it is loaded, then compare the numbers of purchased visitors to times the image is loaded.

It won't be 100% accurate as some browsers may cache the image and some may not even load images at all, but if you've bought 5000 visitors and the image has been loaded 100 times or less, you can be pretty certain something is wrong.

 

I would say that 95% of traffic that you get from companies that sell you traffic are fake!
The first criteria you use to detect the fake traffic is the IP address!
Second look at the user agents used!
Good luck

 

Thank you for you help.The user agent idea is a good one I think.I will be checking if those visitors are coming with browsers or if they are robots...

 

Not 95% is fake but 100% in my opinion! Don't use!

 

Try to load a cookie onto the visitor's computer... if the cookie is refused, it's probably a robot.

 

Most of the traffic sites will come from the same referrer, people browsing your automatically via software from the company. You know the ones that pay people pennies an hour to site there and let their program run on the person's computer while it automatically refreshes and loads new websites to generate hits.

The only traffic worth paying for is PPC.

 

Some people use to run spywhere networks and generate
traffic for you.

 

Dont use the cookies approach... the best approach is the IP based tests and a special function that tests for how repetitive requests come in from the same IP..

I have dotnet code that detects such intrusions and directs the logged in user to a special spammers page

 

Thanks for the tips

 

I agree, those paid to click sites are most often sending fake traffic to your site and they take your money and all you get is fake visitors to your site.

 

I agree with most of you... paid click sites are 99% fake traffic

 

Are you seeing a lot of traffic from one specific IP or range of IPs?
Google detect invalid clicks utilizing a three-part system: Filters, Offline analysis and through investigation
And you may check it at this link
Google Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center
http://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/overview.html

 

Look at your site statistics using AwStats it will show you the sources and number of visits from the ip address. And look at the time spent on site, if it's fake traffic the bot almost always leaves the site within > 5 sec.

 

Yea, just check your stats. The most important things to spot fake traffic is: 1) referrers (direct traffic that doesn't convert at all = fake) and 2) lots of traffic from the same IP = fake too 3) Even if it's different IPs, there's a pattern to how they do it (ie only one page accessed, etc).

Never buy "unique traffic" whose source you can't verify.

 

You can use something as simple as AXS (http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/) to track footprints for each IP that visits. You can also use this to track clicks from specific networks. I think you will be shocked to see the crap traffic you get.

 

It is getting very hard to detect fake traffics these days. but i think the best way to make sure you are not getting fake traffic is to buy it from a respected provider.

 

But, what if the "respected provider" gets bot traffic from its publishers???

 

Many reputable providers tend to have some form of detection and filtering for this kind of activity. For example, our clients (our ad server users) have a number of built-in filters to clean-out the obvious fakes: duplicates, repeats, etc. While these filters work well for general traffic, it doesn't stop the persistent fraudster. For that, we have an anti-virus like service that performs a click analysis on every click against a database of +90k definitions (patterns, behaviors, methods, bots). Other reputable networks will use services like Click Forensics to audit traffic.

While there is no way of detecting fraud 100% of the time, you'll find that many of these "nobody, ho-hum, thrown together in a day, typo's from hell" sites that run inexpensive buggy scripts are more interested in getting your money that giving you results. Especially the Pay-to-Click sites, a complete waste of time. Look at your logs to see where the traffic came from and visit those sites. You'll see what partner sites are generating the most clicks and if most or all of the the sites are crappy, you can bet that traffic is of the same quality.

If you suspect the traffic is fake, it likely is. If you have a lot of clicks, yet no conversions on those clicks, get a refund.

Bottom line, review your logs, audit traffic, ask questions. The information exists, or can be easily obtained, for you to determine if traffic is real or not, you just need to know what to look for.

-Bing

 

just add histats.com code and then see the traffic details like country and cookies

I think many bulk traffic provider also use hidden iframe too , which is real traffic but the visitor don't see your site