Bot Traffic in Paid Advertising

Bot traffic ranges from legitimate crawlers and monitoring tools to malicious automation. Paid-media analysis needs a way to distinguish machine activity from customer behavior.

Why bots appear

Automated systems crawl pages, preview links, test uptime, scrape content or attempt fraud. Some are benign, while others can consume paid clicks or distort engagement metrics.

Common indicators

Very short sessions, impossible navigation speeds, repeated patterns, known data-center IP ranges and suspicious user agents can be useful signals when combined.

Filtering strategy

Separate suspected automated activity from human traffic rather than simply deleting it from history. Keeping an audit trail makes it easier to evaluate whether a rule is too aggressive.

ClickMagick context

ClickMagick currently lists basic bot filtering on Starter and broader bot and click-fraud protection on Standard and Pro.