Incentivized traffic

Some traffic comes from people who are paid, in some form, to engage. Reward apps give points for installing another app; games hand out coins for watching an ad; survey sites pay for sign-ups. The people are real, but their motive is the reward, not the product.

Incentivized traffic is not always invalid. Rewarded video ads in games are a legitimate, disclosed format, and advertisers can buy incentivized installs knowingly to boost app-store rankings. The problem is disclosure and measurement. The MRC IVT guidelines treat incentivized manipulation of measurements, such as undisclosed incentivized browsing or clicking that inflates audience counts, as SIVT.

Buyers should require that incentivized inventory is labelled, price it accordingly, and judge it on downstream quality. Signals of undisclosed incentives include low retention, installs with no follow-up events, bursts of traffic from reward-app referrers and users completing only the minimum action needed to earn the reward. Human fraud farms schemes often start as incentive programmes that scale into paid click work.

Think of it like this

It is like handing out free ice cream to anyone who walks into your shop: your footfall goes up, but most of them did not come for your shoes.

An example

A travel app in the Philippines gets 30,000 installs through an offer-wall partner. Day-7 retention is 2% versus 25% for its other channels, because users installed only to earn in-game gems.