My friends, today we're here to talk about Max clicks and bot traffic. The two go hand in hand because Max clicks usually yields poor performance, cheap clicks, and nothing that converts. Now, back in the olden days in 2009, it did. It actually was semi okay. It was actually semi okay old way through maybe even the early 20s. However, we're noticing now, and anybody that's in PPC is that if you're using Max clicks, get off it immediately. You should be using top performing traffic. So today we're going to talk about why this is. We're going to look at some analysis on some articles. We're going to look at some ways to approach it. And you're going to come out a lot smarter in terms of your PPC per view on why you should be optimizing to conversions from the get go. So the first thing I want to talk about is custom awesome. So custom awesome founded solutions aid. He also founded the co-founded the perpetual traffic podcast with Ralph Burns from tier 11. And John Moran, his fellow co-founder on Solutions Aid, John Moran is the Ironman of the PPC universe. He really is. He's definitely well respected. If any of you do not know who he is, stop the video and go look him up. He's really that good. You'll see him on LinkedIn a lot. He makes a lot of guest appearances on a lot of YouTube videos. And this is from their, from their actual page, if you will, on Solutions Aid, where they say enterprises have reported that up to 70 to 9% of web traffic and clicks are bots. 70 to 90%. Okay, so that's one and that's from Solutions Aid. And this is my personal favorite. These guys, I follow them day and night. Then you have something, you have Cloudflare. Cloudflare is basically a domain protection in terms of filtering out spam traffic to your site. So I use Podbeam a lot. And before I could even log into Podbeam, it's actually filtered by Cloudflare. I'm actually on it every two days or so. I'll get the, it's almost like a capture link. You have to reconfirm who you are. And these people say that 40% of all internet traffic is comprised of bot traffic and a significant proportion of that traffic is malicious bot traffic. That is concerning. (chuckles) And then you have here the tech report. The tech report says that artificial bots oversee 47% of all internet traffic. Roughly only 53% is human traffic. Then you have, right here, you have Forbes. Of all things Forbes, Forbes bots now account for nearly half of all internet traffic globally with so-called bot traffic's responsible for a third. My friends, you have to know that there's good bot traffic or semi-good bot traffic and then there's bad bot traffic. Good bot traffic is from like search. And that's when they crawl through your site and decide who you are in the algorithm. That's how your page appears, right? But there is actually malicious bot traffic which is just spam and that's bot farms or malicious operators who work in something called arbitrage. And I've actually been approached to work on this. This is, if you're a very good buyer, you kind of get approached to do this, especially if you have your own ad accounts that you work from with your clients. And you basically artificially inflate key terms and you kind of analyze a traffic to where the, or you watch the migration of people to go to other keywords and you're actually inflating the price, the cost per click of key terms in the marketplace so that other terms can eventually rise up too, right? Because then the demand goes down because it's too expensive and this one goes up. So that's something called arbitrage. Never get involved with it. Anybody ever says anything like that too in your life, please do not do it. It is, man, once you get knocked for that, like your dog made in the industry, definitely. But what does all this mean? This all means that we can all agree there's a problem. We can all agree we've all seen there's a problem with spam, bottomless clicks, the cost per conversion getting higher, the campaigns are taking longer to warm up. So that automatically tells us there's a problem and it's most likely with a traffic. So that being said, it's roughly 40% is what I'm saying, 35-ish to 50%. And I know it's a 70 there, but I'm actually, there's a reason why I have it there. But I would say 35, 50% is traffic that is spam traffic, right? And then you have to say, well, is that paid search traffic? Is that paid social traffic? Is that PMAC's traffic? What traffic is this? Well, probably a majority of that traffic is programmatic, actually. And if any of you have really done some programmatic work or direct buys work, you understand that a lot of the traffic is BS. It's especially in Prague. There's just, and again, they just have artificial ways to inflate the clicks and all that, you've got all these views and you've got all this traffic on these, oh, wow, all these hand raisers, all this garbage. And that's why there's a lot, there's a lot of spam and programmatic. So much so, I believe there's something called double verify, which verifies all the traffic on your probe. You're able to take that to do the report and you say, hey, yeah, you're saying I spent whatever 50,000 and programmatic, but really double verify saying a third of that is garbage. I deserve a discount. And that's what double verifies us. That's how bad it is. That's how bad it is. And you can use it with direct buys as well. It's actually a huge problem. Now, I think or I believe that's on the high end. That's 50, 70. So when we take the range of the bottom range, I believe it's 35, 50% is spam traffic on paid search, paid social. I'm putting my stake in the ground and saying that now. So what can you do? Well, the first thing you can do is look at how you're setting up these buys in the first place. You know, Google Ads has probably been the most resistance to not using max clicks. And the origin of even this video was someone who said something positive about max clicks. And I was like, are you kidding? Like I'm having terrible type of max clicks right now, ever since Q4 and maybe it was there before. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but I'm seeing it now and it's total garbage. And I'm just at the point where I just avoid max clicks. So much so that I'm just using max conversions from the get go. Why warm yourself up with crap traffic that's not even going to convert? You might as well pay for it, you can pay for it eventually with crossing the line and doing max conversions or conversion value traffic. So you might as well do that from the get go really. I really strongly believe that. And there's a couple of problems here as well that I'm going to go into. But the thing with link clicks and even max clicks is you're paying on the pre-click. You're paying on people who click on the ad before they've even done anything. So if you spend $10,000 or $5,000 on max clicks or meta link clicks, you are paying for people who have no obligation to do anything on when they go down funnel. Now, wouldn't you want to pay for people to actually purchase or do some kind of mid-level engagement? Yes, you would. And that's why I always recommend landing page view for all my med ads. When I see a link click campaign in a buy, unless there's like, for some reason, the pixel is attached and you send blind traffic, you should always be using landing page view as your first option. And the same, if you follow that same analysis, that same thing I'm talking about, it should also be max conversions as well. It really should. You're wasting your time here. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your time with max clicks because you want to use that max conversion traffic to do simple things that will lead to a purchase. You want people to do 30 conversions in 30 days of ATC, IC, and payment method before they do purchase down the road. That will happen. And these will all be primary, by the way. So you turn them off as they reach 30 conversions in 30 days. So once your ATC is 30 conversion in 30 days, turn that off. It's now secondary conversion. IC, same thing, 30 conversions in 30 days, goes right to secondary. Then the same thing for the payment method. Most of the people only use payment method. But so by the end of the journey, all you're using is purchase with conversion value and you're satisfied. And another thing is when the reason why, I know max link clicks don't work on meta or max class don't work on Google is because of meta. Because when you run link, especially link click campaigns, look at all the spam you're getting. Now you're getting a lot of spam regardless lately. And it's sickening how much meta is traffic, is complete spam. Because you're getting spam messaging and saying, oh yeah, your account's been compromised. Or, hey, you need to resubmit your credit card and all these random bullshit things that click here to, oh my god, this is from, you know, it's all that operators. It's all pot farms, it's all people that see that you're doing a buy. They see it in the ads library and then they're like, okay, let's go see if we can trick them into getting a credit card. That's spot traffic, that's spam, that's complete spam traffic. And then the same thing goes with Google ads, the same thing. I mean, think about it, my friends. When you take the total conversion, you take the total traffic pie in Google and you separate it out between, you know, some key, key premium buyers, right? I wanna say buyers, consumers, right? Think about, they're gonna carve it up that the max conversions and higher will get this part of the pie. All the crap traffic that's questionable is put in max clicks and they'll have somebody pay for it. So, I really see Gone are the days where you use max clicks to warm up a campaign. I really do. I think anybody, and I've recommended it, I've recommended it at the earlier part of this year and nine months ago, almost a year ago, I recommended it. But now, guys, I have, I'm putting my stake in the ground and if you've seen my video on top skills needed for 2025, I even say this too. Skid off of max clicks, it's just garbage. I'm just not a fan. And when you think about it, you're paying for everything pre-click. You wanna pay for everything post-click. You wanna pay for traffic that's gonna eventually convert and that's what that is. Okay, oh, this is cool, I love this graph. So, this shows what I'm talking about. So, this is a client of mine and here we have total users that we sent over, right, through paid and this is, I think, two weeks or a month, I forget, I think it was a month. And then we have total new users. Yeah, this is obviously acquisition, right? And I'm paid search, look at paid search. Now, look at the engaged sessions. The engaged sessions, my friends, are over delivering. That's the only one in this whole stupid thing that is over delivering. Why, because I'm working on it. And I identified not to use max clicks. Get the hell out of there. Everything should be max conversions or higher. And we're gonna be on T-row as soon, actually by the end of the year. And so, what you're seeing here is the engaged sessions, engaged sessions are people who have been on the page for 10 seconds or have gone to another page. So, two plus pages they traveled to, they've gone on your page, done something else and gone to another page within your site, or they've been on the page for 10 seconds. That's qualified as an engaged session. The new people, right? Like, it's almost every single person plus that has like, it's over delivering. Now, if you look at organic social, look at this. Of your organic social, right here, you're seeing 31,000 new users. 27,000 of those are, 28,000 are actually new users. This is total users. 31 is total 27 or 28 is new users. Only 12,000 engaged, right? Like, that's complete garbage. Like, and I know it's organic. I understand it's, you gotta view it in the context of, well, maybe it's, you know, it's a bonus traffic, right? Like, I get that. Maybe they'll convert down the road. And this is a, and this, the average product, order value on here is like easily 1,000 bucks, maybe 800 bucks. It's a car part, a classic car part manufacturer. And even with paid social, look at this. And I'm not doing their paid social, by the way. So you have 5,400 total users, 4,500 new users. Okay, that's pretty strong, but look how many are engaged. 12, 1300, 1300 of the 54, 5,500. My friends, if you do the math, that's only 25%, not maybe a third, less than a third, 30% are actually engaging of your paid media dollars. See what I mean? This is exactly what I, and I know for, and you know what, I now know, I'm pretty sure I looked at the buy, a while ago, this is link clicks. He's using nothing but link clicks. I am using nothing about conversion media and look at the engagement. And trust me, we've actually, this was a fight. You didn't want to do that in the beginning. Same thing, this goes for a meta right here. 100, like if we look at the top, now a lot of these actually are close. And this is, I'm not sure why it's so close. Usually it's not this close. But if you look at the top, right, this is a good example. You have 100 lending page views, right? And this is optimized on landing page views. You have 122 link clicks. So of that, 122 link clicks, only 100 landing page viewed, 20% fell off. That's the logic we're working on. Now it's only 100. I'm not, that's nothing to go nutty about. And a lot of these are close. But what do you do when it's 10,000 and 15,000, right? You paid for 15,000 link clicks and only 10,000 landed. Only a two thirds of them landed, a third didn't land. My friends, you're paying for garbage. You're paying for complete crap. That's where I'm going with this max click stuff. And then here, finally, I wanna talk. I wanna do a quick huddle that on a few points, that conversion traffic is your friend. It really is. Just start off with that from the beginning with Google Ads. Don't play games, just optimize to it accordingly. You know, you can use max clicks for a day or two, but really like you're just wasting time. You're gonna regret it. Just don't do it from the beginning. I really don't understand why you wouldn't. You should optimize to it. And when you say conversions, and that's a problem too, when people, when you say conversions to a client or to a new buyer, they think purchases. Oh yeah, you're optimizing purchases, right? No, no, no, no. Like I said, you're optimizing to ATC, IC, lead form, lead magnet, et cetera to, and ideally it should be the path to conversion to purchase, which is ATC, IC, payment method. But you do, as you do get conversions coming in, right? Especially with ATC, once it gets up 30, 30 days, turn it to secondary. And the same thing, and eventually it'll backtrack all the way to purchases, and that's how you win. Tie back to conversion value. So this is a interesting remark because a lot of people will set the maximum, they'll actually use the same conversion value for purchase in ATC, IC. And then they'll do conversion value buys, and then they'll forget to shirt off the secondary and primary portion of ATC, IC, and payment method. So what happens, what am I saying here? So you have your ATC here, that's, let's just say, figuratively is $100, right? For one purchase, your conversion value for one purchase, $100. You have IC, which is right here, which is 100, one purchase equals $100. And you have purchase, that's one purchase equals $100. But when you're in the system's mind, once it reaches, and they're all set to primary, right? And that's what the dumb Google reps say. So when you do the bottom, right? When ATC comes in, and somebody ATCs, and that's it, and they bounce, they do ATC abandonment, which is at the cart abandonment, the buy thinks it's done a good job. And that's completely wrong. Your ATC should be, my friends. It should be set to, like, one. It should be sent to, like, it should not be using the same conversion value. Because what's happening is, is you're going to feel at the cart abandonment. And you're going to do it without even knowing it. And it's a big problem, so just be aware of that, OK? And/or you should set it to secondary, one or the other. But it should not be on primary and conversion value. Like, that is death. Set it to a dollar, you know, if that's a case. Search terms. You know, look at your back-end data. The problem with search term reporting is people say, oh, yeah, it's not converting, so fuck it, turn it off. No, you should actually look at the scheme of your attribution window. If it's seven days, 28 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, which is the most, you need to analyze what is the conversion window in your buy and make sure those terms are not converting. Because if they're not converting, then you have a reason to turn it off. However, I'm going to say this, and you've got to listen, that the CTR is high and they're not converting. There's an issue. A lot of times, that's because the pre-click, right, the person who read the ad is saying, oh, this is a great ad. This is-- this is-- they have top reviews or whatever. It's like, cheap price, click, OK, cool, I'll click. And then go to the landing page, and it says something like, oh, the quality is great, or it just says something else different, and it's a mismatch. So instead of saying it's a cheap price, and then leading with the cheap price on the landing page, it leads with like, lead price, and then, oh, we're the best. And it's like, well, wait a minute. You said you had the cheapest price. Where's the cheapest price? And that's what happens. So when you have a high CTR, and the landing page isn't right, that's-- and that's something else we're going to talk about, too, is on the third part is when-- actually, we can jump into it now-- is when you have to look for that kind of mismatch in the signal, because a lot of times you have solid ad relevancy, but your landing page experience is completely off, and that's what you need to be looking at. A lot of times I tell people now, I tell a lot of clients to use multiple landing pages. Now, if you have an e-retailer with, man, we have one with 500 SKUs, probably 1,000 SKUs. I'm going to take that back, maybe even the higher than that. And you can't do landing pages on that. But for some clients, you can use multiple landing pages if you have a submit lead form, if you have lead magnets, online courses, et cetera. You can rearrange things. That's when you should be using A/B testing multiple landing pages. It's a little hard to do with e-retailers when you have 1,000 plus stuff, right? Because then it becomes 3,000 or 2,000 different landing pages, and that's just splitting hairs. But you can with submit leads and lead forms, also online courses, et cetera. And-- oh, bounce rates. So look at your bounce rates. We talked about that earlier, right? Your engage viewers versus-- always pull them. People are not engaging. Understand why. Is it the quality of the traffic? Probably is. Or it's the landing page is different. But a lot of times, it's the quality of the traffic. But that's when you analyze your conversion flow and make sure people are-- if the traffic's good, CTR is solid, people are coming, the ATCs are happening, the ICs are happening. But no one's purchasing. Guess what? You have a conversion path journey. That is messed up. Something's wrong. And you have to see where the drop-off is between ATC ICM payment method. Enhanced conversions. Yes, tying it all back together. This is getting a lot better. We're going to do a video on enhanced conversion soon. Specifically, Google released a tool where you can actually check on the site itself through the data layer, I believe. I still do it the old fashioned way, but I probably should do one just to make sure everybody's learning, including me. And my friends, that's really it. Thank you for watching this video. I know it was a little longer than usual. But I really had a lot to say on this. And it's kind of been in the back of my mind. And after I went through that LinkedIn video with that one person, I'm like, now I'm taking a stand on this. I'm just going to throw it at it. Let's just call it what it is. It's crap traffic. It's full of crap traffic. We all agree it's crap traffic. Let's just start mitigating it now. So by the time it's 2025, you have a good solid standing with your clients, and you're automatically getting leads, getting purchases. As always, please follow the conversation on the Medium. We also have an audio podcast where we download a lot of what we say here, and then we float it there. We're on LinkedIn as well. Another thing, I can always got to say this. If you look on the link tree of my channel, you can join my WhatsApp group. I have 47 people in that group right now, and we're growing. So every week, it probably, I'd say, it grows by like five people, so I'm very excited about that. So yeah, we'll see. And it's actually come to the point, too, where I actually ask questions just to make sure it's a real person, and that's just some person that's going to watch. I want people to participate. So anyways, feel free to join the WhatsApp group. Join click on the link tree, and thank you so much. And I really appreciate you listening. Thank you.
