Success Story
wetter.com, a leading weather information platform, aimed to gain deeper insights into their website traffic. In collaboration with fraud0, wetter.com discovered that 97.5% of their visitors were humans, with 73.88% being highly engaged—a sign of premium quality. During this process, they successfully identified malicious crawlers, reducing bot traffic to just 2.5% of total visitors, a notably low percentage compared to industry standards. Moreover, test campaigns demonstrate that advertising with premium publishers like wetter.com is 51% more cost-effective.
2.5%
Bot Traffic
74%
Engaged Humans
51%
More Cost-Effective
“Advertisers and premium publishers are both being robbed. We have to join forces to fight fraudsters.”
Marius Neumann
CEO at wetter.com
The Challenge
wetter.com, as a premium publisher, upholds high standards, prioritizing brand safety, fighting ad fraud, high viewability and addressability, engaging context with quality editorial content, and green media practices via supply path optimization.
With its substantial traffic volume of about 25 million MAU and 2.5 billion visits per year, wetter.com is committed to maintaining the highest quality inventory. In their ongoing effort to enhance inventory standards, wetter.com sought a solution to accurately distinguish between bot and human traffic and measure the engagement levels of their human visitors.
The Solution
wetter.com implemented fraud0’s onsite technology to detect invalid traffic, initially identifying 5.9% bot traffic. Mid-month spikes were traced to a fake Google bot. This bot didn't impact advertisers as it never loaded ad slots, but it did impact the publisher's high-quality, valuable content. In May, bot traffic was reduced to just 2.5%.
Additionally, 78% of wetter.com users are highly engaged, spending at least 10 seconds on a page or visiting multiple pages. This high engagement rate reflects the effectiveness of advertisers' campaigns and proves that wetter.com has high-quality traffic with engaged users and low invalid traffic.
Advertisers and Premium Publishers Must Unite to Optimize Towards Humans
The analysis demonstrated that wetter.com attracts high-quality traffic. An additional campaign test aimed to prove that this traffic becomes even more cost-efficient for advertisers in the long run.
While CPM still often garners the most attention, evaluating traffic quality provides a more accurate perspective. The calculation below shows that when focusing only on CPM, premium publishers like wetter.com seem costlier compared to those in open auctions.
However, when considering the engagement level of users directed to the website, the true value emerges. Ads with a premium publisher like wetter.com are ultimately 51% more cost-effective, attracting highly engaged users who are more likely to convert into buying customers.
Across all our clients, we observe significant IVT in the programmatic space, so we advise focusing on premium publishers. This approach optimizes ad spend towards genuine human engagement.
Media Spend Comparison for One Campaign
