What to tell Aggregator about bots traffic?

[dennisgorelik]

In previous posts I explained How bots traffic affects advertising and How to detect bot traffic?

Now we are ready to discuss what to communicate about bots traffic to our advertisers.

Not charging our direct customers (advertisers) for useless bots traffic -- is a reasonable choice if we care about long-term relationships with our customers.
But what to do when things are getting a little bit outside of my direct control?

"Aggregator" case
Let's consider a practical example.
One of our advertisers is a job aggregator.
Let's call that advertiser "Aggregator".
Aggregator gets (aggregates) jobs from other job boards. These job boards are Aggregator's clients that advertise jobs on that Aggregator.
Aggregator advertises these aggregated jobs on multiple publishers' websites.
PostJobFree is one of many publishers that Aggregator uses.
The aggregator may charge advertisers 0.24/click and then pay publishers 0.20/click (20% margin).

So if publisher's traffic is inflated with bot clicks, then in the short-term, Aggregator may financially benefit from that bots traffic.
In the long-term, that useless bots traffic is likely to destroy Aggregator's relationships with advertisers.
So we may expect that reasonable Aggregator would want to promptly identify and discount useless bots traffic.
In real life, business decisions turn out to be a little bit different.

Aggregator's team focuses on making money and tries to eliminate distractions that slow down money making.
So Aggregator's team ignores my subtle hints (I hint that it may be useful to discuss some techniques about how to identify bots traffic).

I think that Aggregator's team may even get a little bit annoyed by my attempt to talk about bots traffic, because the more Aggregator talks about bots traffic - the harder it is to claim that Aggregator knows nothing about that bots traffic.
On another hand, Aggregator may like charging advertisers for all traffic (real users + useless bots), but pay us only for real users traffic (because we do not count bots traffic in our invoices).

I try to not push too hard with my warnings about bots traffic.

What to communicate?
I consider these 3 approaches of communicating bots traffic issue to Aggregator - reasonably practical:
Approach #1: "Keep it quiet"
Silently discount bots traffic and tell nothing about bots traffic to Aggregator [unless Aggregator team asks about bots traffic themselves].
Ignore differences between PostJobFree clicks counts vs [inflated] Aggregator's clicks counts.

Approach #2: "Balanced"
Discount bots traffic and briefly mention to Aggregator that we discounted bots traffic.
Do not try to explain further without explicit interest from Aggregator.
(I currently follow that "balanced" approach).

Approach #3: "Full disclosure"
Be very direct with Aggregator and clearly explain all the dangers of bots traffic and how charging for useless bots traffic may negatively impact long-term relationships between Aggregator and their advertisers.
Explain even if Aggregator does not ask about bots traffic.

What do you recommend to communicate to Aggregator about bots traffic issue?

Comments

[snowps]

I believe that this kind of problem (defining rules for bot traffic identification and rejecting) must be covered by detailed contract between the aggregator and the job board. If not, there is no real way to force the aggregator to invest in any sort of technology for discarding bot traffic, reducing overall income. ANA (Association of National Advertisers) creates yearly bot fraud reports, problem is huge and heavily discussed, but all that buzz is permanently ignored by most of big ad market players.

[dennisgorelik]

This "... issue plaguing the advertising industry" article is already 6 years old (2015).

Do you think that advertising industry still did not fix it?

[snowps]

I'm pretty sure that there is no hope that ad bosses will eventually and honestly turn the tables and begin to spent (and lose) money to block all fraud queries instead of silently collecting bot traffic bucks, but creating righteous buzz as a distraction is a common ad practice. :) There is a interesting stuff here: ANA creates a sort of certification program and claims that since then bot fraud has significantly going down, but this is a party stats, only for club members, - real life situation is far less promising.

[dennisgorelik]

Advertisers that are able to identify bot traffic (and exclude it) - should have competitive advantage over advertisers that are not able to detect bots, right?

[snowps]

I don't think that "should have advantages" is the correct thesis here, I believe advertisers should only give an option to filtering bot traffic and clients can choose what they really need - cheaper contract without filtering or more pricey with filtering.