Landing Page CTR: How to Avoid Bot Clicks that Are Killing Your ROI

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Quality is one of the main concerns when it comes to Pop/Redirect traffic. As we focus on launching and scaling new campaigns we have to continuously deal with Bot clicks that screw our stats and pay good money for. Being an issue usually related to a specific publisher we still have to get traffic from that publisher until it has reached statistical significance or budget spent without generating revenue. Needless to say, but most of us have witnessed lots of placements with a fine tuned mix of bot and human traffic that can still become profitable, a fact that we cannot deny.If that is the case, then why do we have to worry about bot clicks as long as a placement can generate conversions? Well, I guess none of us wants to waste a considerable amount of budget hoping for those bot landing page clicks to convert someday, if ever. So, unless you have invested on creating well tested black lists of publishers that you can exclude since the beginning of every new camp, you'd rather want to avoid or at least identify them.With that being said, by having an optimization process that relies on landing page click-through rate and conversions to filter out poor performing publishers, we would love to at least avoid clicks by the dumbest bots. This applies especially when we are running a low payout offer in a high CPM country where bot clicks become a sensitive matter.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Even though this is a pretty simple trick and for most tech savvy guys it may look a not so valuable solution, numbers tell the opposite.While conducting internal platform testings we decided to test the same landing page on two identical campaigns, but using two different call to action button setups.‍

Campaign A call-to-action button setup: classic html method (see below example).[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text el_class="pre"]<div><a href="http://mycalltoaction.link" class="cta" target="_self";>Order Now</a></div>[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

‍Campaign B call-to-action button setup: JavaScript function call (see below example).[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text el_class="pre"]<div><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="exit_order();PreventExitPop = false" target="_self" class="cta";>Order Now</a></div>..<script type="text/javascript">function exit_order() {window.onbeforeunload=null;window.location = 'http://mycalltoaction.link';}</script>[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Considering that the majority of current IOS and Android devices offer JavaScript support, our call-to-action button functionality was not compromised. Here are the results:[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image="184" img_size="full"][vc_column_text]As you may notice the click-through rate on campaign B is much lower compared to campaign A and to make sure that the results were not just casual, we sent some more traffic to campaign B to see if the click-through rate could increase. While click-through rate remained pretty much the same, we went through our campaign's stats and ran through several tracked details where we also found where the bot clicks were coming from.[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image="190" img_size="full"][vc_column_text]Conclusion, by hiding the call-to-action link behind a JavaScript function we can easily avoid non-java capable bot clicks and keep our stats clean to perform a more reliable optimization on our campaigns. This practice comes in hand even more when driving your optimization process through a automation platform like TheOptimizer Mobile, where by leveraging the benefits of strict auto-optimization rules, you can effortlessly optimize your campaigns based on trusted aggregated data while leaving out of the picture possible human errors.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]