Bot and Invalid Traffic Filtering: Why and How
What IVT is, how bots and datacenters distort your stats and eat your budget, and which signals separate real traffic from junk.
Invalid traffic (IVT) is clicks and visits that do not come from real, interested people: search and AI crawlers, scanners, bots, datacenter traffic, VPNs and proxies. It never converts, yet it lands in your reports — and you end up making decisions on distorted numbers.
How it hurts
Bots inflate clicks and depress CR, making CPA and ROI look worse (or better) than they really are. Optimizing on that data steers budget in the wrong direction. On top of that, junk traffic pollutes attribution and corrupts the signals you send back to the ad platforms.
Which signals to filter on
User-Agent flags signatures of crawlers, headless browsers and scanners. ASN identifies datacenter and hosting ranges (AWS, Google Cloud, OVH, Hetzner) via databases like MaxMind. VPNs and proxies run on datacenter networks with almost no real buyers. Reverse DNS confirms the genuine Googlebot and exposes spoofed user-agents.
It is essential that the databases stay updated: ranges and signatures change constantly, and a static filter starts letting junk through over time.
The result
When only real traffic remains in your reports, the metrics become honest: true CPA, ROI and CR, correct attribution, and conversions that are not diluted by bots. You scale on data, not on noise.
Related reading
ClickConv — трекер, клоака и конверсии Google Ads в одной платформе.
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