Sourcing and Buying Traffic

Fraud, in any industry or realm, lives in the shadows where there is little to no visibility. In online advertising, this shade is in the traffic supply of websites.

There has been a big spike in discussions around the topic of sourced traffic as a component in the ad-fraud problem plaguing the industry and frustrating people on both the advertiser and vendor sides.

While this term and the concepts around it are fairly simple, it has been misconstrued and muddled up by many press outlets as well as industry leaders. The reason so many people are getting it wrong is because of their lack of direct exposure to how it actually works.

As you can see in the graphic above, there is a fairly basic calculation involved when sourcing traffic by or on behalf of a publisher: Figuring out what cost-per-click allows them to break-even will forecast their profit margins by either reducing the cost-per-click or generating an increased CPM from ads.

The goal of this paper is to outline exactly how traffic is sourced, from the time of conceiving the idea, all the way to actually buying the hits to the webpage of your choice.

MOTIVES:So you want to buy hits to a site? There are three primary reasons that someone begins down this path:A. To boost traffic to a site from which they generate ad-revenue via programmatic channels.B. To artificially fluff the number of visitors to a site for analytics reports purposes.C. Sending traffic to someone else's page in order to skew their analytics and disrupt their

operations by adding noise to the signal.

The most common reason that "traffic" is purchased currently is for reason A. Websites that have have access to programmatic ad exchanges, whether through direct accounts or via a third-party ad-partner, will buy a quantity of traffic based on how many impressions they can sell in the exchanges. Theoretically, the higher the quality of traffic they bring to their page, the more advertiser campaigns will continue to want to buy their ad-slots. Again, in theory, the higher the quality of the traffic, the higher the CPM's and fill rates will be.

There are many roles at "publisher" companies that have a title relating to "Traffic Acquisition." It is a very curious topic to see what exactly these jobs entail and what methods they go about to acquire this traffic, and then also which of those practices they would be willing to discuss publicly. Here are a few screenshots of people with “Traffic Acquisition” in their job titles on LinkedIn. These are only 7 random ones from the first few pages, but the search for that term in LinkedIn returns 8,389 results. This is easily something that you can go check for yourself.

Now what does "quality" really mean when it comes to this sourced traffic? One thing that I can guarantee without fail is that the overwhelming majority of traffic that one purchases from a vendor is robotic, and therefore fraudulent. The quality aspect is in reference to how the profiles of these "users" fits with what advertisers are looking for.

• Have they also visited popular publications like WashingtonPost or FoxNews or NyTimes? • Have they visited Amazon to browse products like running shoes or a blender or a dining set? • Do they pass third-party filters for fraud-detection?

Capable traffic vendors will sell clicks that allow us to go down the list and say: Check, Check, and Check.

That is the interesting aspect of sourced traffic, that even though it is not human most of the time, it generally passes major filters as appearing human, or at least not being flagged as a bot. This nuance is important but will be dug into detail in another paper.

Please see these very easy to find examples of traffic vendors. You can even go to a search engine and look up “Buy Human Traffic” and find some yourself if you are curious.https://www.trafficpartner.com/en/https://ultimatewebtraffic.com/ http://www.supremetrafficbot.com/ https://easyvisitors.com/

I went with one I found through BlackHatWorld.com

Here are a few images that show the process of me buying “pre-filtered” traffic for a test. The supplier even tells me that since they don’t have a direct Moat account, they will double filter with DoubleVerify and IntegralAdScience to ensure that the traffic passes Moat. We negotiate a rate of $0.005 per click and then I send a $500 deposit via PayPal to the directed email address. It is as simple as that to get started. Please take into account that there is little suspicion or discretion when doing these traffic buys. I am openly against ad-fraud and a public advocate against these traffic practices; something the suppliers are either too ignorant to look up or veryquick to ignore.

Below are the images of the ads that I was told were being placed on my behalf on their user network. Does any of this look like something that would generate 5,000 clicks each per day? And that too for $0.005 per click?

The next reason, B, that someone would be buying web traffic is let's say for an e-commerce site or just a content page not focused on ad-revenue, page owners are incentivized to boost the number of people appearing to visit their site. This can be used to not only show high numbers for public metrics like Alexa or Quantcast, but can also be used in preparation for future advertising opportunities separate from programmatic channels, such as a homepage banner or a sponsored content piece that requires a certain level of engagement.

Now the last reason, C, is probably the most devious and confusing of the three. Here is an example of where it has been used recently:Initiation: http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2017/02/09/fake-newsflow-are-the-ny-times-guardian-and-wapo-buying-clicks-china-jumps-from-trickle-to-half-of-all-traffic-in-two-months/

Result: http://blog.alexa.com/alexa-global-traffic-metrics-update/

Since there is no programmatic ad-revenue to be made for those sites from Chinese traffic, it does not make sense for these publishers to pay for the visits nor to incur the server load from hosting those visits on their site. While it looks malicious and gives us reason to be skeptical, it's important to note that these visits registered only on Alexa and not on a platform like SimilarWeb that relies on web behavior from malware on 100 Million machines globally. Traffic that will register on Alexa is widely available and only requires a quick Google search to find several potential vendors. I hope this has cleared some of the confusion or misconceptions surrounding the idea of sourced web traffic. Our collective knowledge is the only thing that will improve our industry and alleviate the negative impact of issues like fraud from advertising. My goal from the beginning has been to help make sure that advertising is Effective, Accountable, and Understood; a true understanding of where websites get traffic which then translates to impressions for advertiser campaigns will help make sure all three of those goals are achieved.