What is non-human online traffic?

Simply put, any traffic to a website where a human is not involved is known as non-human online traffic, sometimes this is also referred to as Invalid Traffic (GIVT – General Invalid Traffic or SIVT – Sophisticated Invalid Traffic).
This traffic is generally generated by software applications that run automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet, they are known as bots and, like a lot of things in life, there are good and bad ones.

Good bots (or GIVT) are created to visit ads, apps, and websites for genuine and sincere reasons including automatically scraping, finding and gathering information, indexing pages, scanning and crawling, testing website speed and useability, etc. 

Bad bots (or SIVT)  interact with your ads, applications, and websites mimicking human behavior which makes them hard to spot and prevent.
These bots are created for all kinds of atrocious intentions and purposes and allow competitors, bot operators, fraudsters, attackers, and resentful customers to do activities such as scraping, spamming, hacking, generating massive amounts of ad impressions, harvesting personal and financial data, posting comments, and of course clicking your ad until the budget is completely spent. 

Bad bots come in many forms and shapes, such as view bots (known as ad fraud), traffic bots, impersonators, spammers and if you are reading this you know who else belongs to this criminal family, yes, you got it right, the Click bots. 

Click bots specifically target Pay-Per-Click Ads (PPC) on both websites and search engines. When an advertiser notices a drastic raise in clicks but not in sales, the likelihood they have been attacked by a Click Bot is strong.
Moreover there is an entire nefarious industry that exploits the use of click bots and generates massive fraudulent profits from 3rd party networks.
How? When the bot simulates real clicks on an ad placed on a website, the user receives some ad revenue percentage from the network. Multiply this by a lot of clicks the more money the website owner will get from the network. The victim here is the advertiser who will see lots of clicks but no conversions. 

PPC Shield’s dedicated team of software engineers built the most powerful click-ad protection system in the industry. We protect your Google Ads from being attacked and protect your budget so it’s spent on increasing your ROI and not on fraudulent scams.