How it works | Polygraph Click Fraud Detection And Prevention

Why are bots clicking on my ads?

To steal your money.

A very large number of websites are being run by criminals. These websites, like most websites on the internet, use ads to generate revenue. The ads are served from the same ad networks you use to advertise your service or products.

Instead of waiting for humans to click on the ads, the criminals use bots. These bots are sophisticated, they imitate humans, and are difficult to detect. Most of these bots are able to bypass the ad networks' bot detection systems.

Your ads are appearing on these criminals' websites, and they're being clicked on by bots. The ad networks charge you for this, and the criminals get paid a commission - roughly 60% of the money.

Click fraud steals at least $100 billion from advertisers every year.

To cheat KPIs.

There are unscrupulous media agencies who manage the ad spends of large advertisers. These agencies may be listed companies with stellar reputations, but their business model is a scam.

After receiving their clients' marketing budgets, they set up pay-per-click ads on legitimate ad networks. Everything appears normal.

Behind the scenes, the media agencies transfer some, or all, of their clients' money to shell companies, and use bots to click on the ads. The fake clicks simulate real visitors, allowing the media agencies to hit their traffic KPIs.

Some of these media agencies even use third party bot detection services, selected for their outdated technology such as IP address blocking, which is easily bypassed by modern bots. This helps maintain the media agencies' air of integrity, while ripping off their clients.

Humans or bots?

Polygraph uses an objective system to differentiate between humans and bots. Instead of scoring the visitors or looking for suspicious signals, Polygraph detects the tricks and technologies used by bots to simulate humans. This includes detecting their browser tampering, automation signals, execution flaws, and even the bot frameworks being used.

When a bot is detected, we disable it so it cannot interact with your website. That means no more fake leads, add to carts, mailing list signups, and fake accounts.

Polygraph's bot detection system has been independently verified as being 99.99% accurate, however in the very rare cases we accidentally block humans instead of bots, a Polygraph captcha can be solved which instantly unblocks the visitor. The captcha is simple for humans, but almost impossible for bots.

Train the ad networks to send you humans.

When humans or bots click on your ads and come to your website, they may perform actions such as submitting leads or adding items to shopping carts. These actions send signals back to the ad networks, who then show your ads to "people" who look like the visitors who interacted with your website.

Since click fraud bots are programmed to submit fake leads, add items to shopping carts, sign up to mailing lists, and create accounts, their signals train the ad networks to show your ads to bots.

Polygraph prevents bots from interacting with your website, so only human signals make their way back to the ad networks. This trains the ad networks to stop sending you bots, and instead send you high quality human traffic.