Beware of bots

[Jamal Aggoun - PAPER SHIP Initiation Find all posts View Profile Close Jamal Aggoun - PAPER SHIP]

Hey there fellow hustlers,

When I launched my first single releasecampaign, my costs were incredibly low and I was getting tons of conversions from Egypt that were not resulting into streams at all. Think 600 page views and 300 conversions for like 20 Spotify streams if not less.

I suppose those were bots and the problem went away went turning the Detailed Targeting Expansion and/or removing the problematic countries.

Although my campaign kept running after I fixed the issue, half of my conversions still most likely came from bots. I am really not confident retargeting these audiences from my next campaign now.

Has anyone had similar issues ?

[georgik Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close georgik]

I have never had issues like this when it comes to conversions! Could you please tell us which countries you think had bots?

[Jamal Aggoun - PAPER SHIP Initiation Find all posts View Profile Close Jamal Aggoun - PAPER SHIP]

It seems it was mostly coming from Egypt. I know almost every body excludes India already. I'd prefer not to have to exclude too many countries but I don't want to take risks either. It seems the Detailed Expansion Targeting is what's causing these issues. If I'm not mistaken it can take your ads outside of Facebook or Instagram and place it on other websites where advertisers could be using bots to cheat the algorithm and generate revenue for themselves.

I remember Andrew advising to turn off Detailed Targeting Expansion but I don't know if he said exactly why. If anyone has more details about that option / any experience to share with potential bots and how to avoid them it would be appreciated.

[jerrypettit Member Find all posts View Profile Close jerrypettit]

I avoid The Philippines now for the same reason.

[Justin Initiation Find all posts View Profile Close Justin]

I'm getting almost all of my visitors from Turkey. Somehow that seems odd. Has anyone experienced this too?

[AndrewSouthworth Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close AndrewSouthworth]

This is what I had happen with Audience Network, which is why I don't include them anymore. I've had some consultations where people have had issues though even without using audience network, and my advice for that is basically do what you did - look at your breakdowns and find any outlier countries / placements and remove them to see if it fixes the issue.

Most people seem to not have this issue, but it seems to be happening every so often. Make sure you always watch your data to ensure streams are coming in, marketing changes SO fast.

[joh Initiation Find all posts View Profile Close joh]

I excluded Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Philippines, Tunisia and Algeria. I am not putting a lot of money on my campaign, so I assumed that these countries gave me most exposure for least amount of money. The problem was they didn't generate any streams.