Cozy Partners are manipulating my stats

[didobg]

As I have tried to contact Cozy Partners several times through their contact form, email address and Skype, but without any success now I had to write here, because the situation is really ugly. I was investigating their click stats last weeks and months as I noticed something weird. Now I have the prove that they are manipulating my stats and it is not weird anymore why they are not answering my messages since more than a month.

Firstly, you know in the bingo niche you get better conversion, but see what is showing my lifetime statistic (I'm advertising them since 2-3 months on a small website without many visitors):



It's really impossible to have 1404 clicks without any registrations as at Cozy Partners they are offering free no deposit money, so I can agree if they didn't deposit, but that they didn't register to get the free money? Lol, it smells a lot.

Then I will show you here 1 of the Cozy brands stats for October:



It's really impossible to have so many clicks as Google Analytics is showing a lot less visitors.

There is an option that it could be a bot or someone wants to fake my small website, but I'm not a big shark in the market and that makes no sense, but then why Cozy Partners are not answering my messages since more than a month? Everything is a lot disturbing as I have same problems with some other brands too, but I will write a separate thread for them.

[universal4]

Google analytics will not show the bot clicks like MANY affiliate programs do, so be sure to account for that.

This is esppecially true of links which do not have the no-follow and always remember that MANY bots do not adhere to robots.tx files or to the no-follow directive. These situations alone can skew stats considerably.

Also, even after taking links down for programs or groups, many affiliates will often see clicks for long periods of time afterward from pages indexed previously tat reside in cache for long periods of time.

Rick
Universal4

[TheGooner]

Thanks for posting the original discussion point - it is useful to see the numbers and raise the question.

I agree with Universal about the bots creating clicks. On the big click number days you have some sort of looping bot - but even the small days may be automated scripts searching all links for content or email addresses.

WE currently have over 300 entries in our sites .htaccess blocking a range of ip address of now host and servers running these bots. These have all been captured through careful monitoring of clicks and random multiple clicks (eg 10+ within 3 seconds) and capturing IP data and then backtracking to confirm origin and the server/host to be blocked.

Based on our traffic I estimate that around 50% of all raw page impression traffic is bots .
How many bots / hosts are you blocking right now? None?

Google Analytics is smart enough to detect bots to and filter them out - but the page impressions and clicks still happen - and affiliate programs are not very sophisticated in counting clicks.

Then I think that you have far less human traffic than you think - and possibly much of the traffic you do have will be low rent scrapers/ hack-boys.

What are other affiliates monitoring?
Share what you've seen - and how you combat the bots / fake traffic syndrome?