Fraud & invalid traffic · also called Incentivized traffic, Rewarded traffic, Incent traffic
Incentivised traffic
Incentivised traffic is visitors who came because they were rewarded with points, cash or perks, not because they cared about the page or its ads.
Reward apps, "get paid to" sites and some games give users points or small payments for visiting pages, running searches or completing offers. The users are real. Their interest is not: they are there for the reward.
Some ad formats allow rewards openly, such as rewarded video in mobile games. Search feeds do not. Google's AFS policies forbid compensating users for viewing ads or performing searches, the AdSense Program policies bar paid-to-click sources, and the MRC standards list incentivised manipulation under SIVT.
In arbitrage the problem usually enters through a reseller. The arbitrageur buys "premium mobile traffic" at a low CPC, and it turns out to be users of a rewards app. The dashboard looks wonderful at first, with high Lander CTR and many ad clicks. Then advertisers see no sales, smart pricing cuts the RPC, and a clawback or a warning follows.
Red flags are engagement that is too good, very short visits to the advertiser's site, and visitors whose previous page was an offer wall. The defence is traffic source approval and honest declaration of sources.
Think of it like this
It is paying students to attend a sales seminar. The hall is full and everyone signs the register, but nobody came to buy.
Related terms
Incentivised click
An incentivised click is a click or search someone makes because they were offered a reward, not because they wanted what the ad sells.
Click farm
A click farm is a group of low-paid workers, or racks of real phones, used to click ads and perform searches by hand so the activity looks human.
Traffic source approval
Traffic source approval is a feed provider's sign-off that a particular place you buy visitors from is allowed to send traffic to its search feed.
SIVT (sophisticated invalid traffic)
SIVT is invalid traffic designed to look like real people, which can only be found with advanced analysis that compares many signals at once.
Smart pricing
Smart pricing is Google's system for automatically lowering what an advertiser pays for a click on a partner site when that click is less likely to lead to a sale.
Sources: Google AdSense Help: AdSense for Search (AFS) policies, Google AdSense Help: AdSense Program policies, MRC Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Standards Addendum (June 2020 update)