To help us help you, our development team uses this chart of how lead generation efforts are designed to flow. You’ll likely recognize some or all of the things you do – ads, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, microsites, all the way down to conversions and your ability to reach out. If the person follows the whole path and doesn’t contact you, you flag them for retargeting the it all starts over again.

Of course, you use a network of independent websites that connect to you using referrers, cookies and fingerprinting. This also enables affiliate payments to be made to the right partner and so on.

In a perfect world, this collaboration works well. But in the world we live in, trust can be misplaced. Security is better. You need to know when a potential customer of flesh and blood may be fake. A large percentage of the leads you think you generated might be bots!

Bots use all sorts of techniques to mask their true identity, their real location and some even use artificially generated human behavior. This is designed to cheat the compensation system and benefit their owners financially.

In our next post, we’ll get into how bots commit fraud in general before we talk about each of their specific tricks up their sleeves.